LAKELAND, Fla. — Last fall, under the drizzly Detroit skies, Willy Finnegan walked the Comerica Park concourse. He wore a white Tigers jersey adorned with the Olde English D. The name on the back said Finnegan. The number? Thirty-eight.
Willy is the father of Kyle Finnegan, the relief pitcher who was a boon for the Tigers bullpen after last season’s trade deadline. The Detroit-born righty then re-signed with the Tigers this winter.
Kyle Finnegan, though, wore No. 64 last season.
The names were the same, but the numbers were different because this is a baseball story, one that involves the good and the bad of the game, fathers and sons, success and failure, labor disputes, second chances, broken dreams, and generational ties.
The jersey Willy wore is an authentic one that was handed out to replacement players in the spring of 1995, when MLB players were still on strike, and owners had devised a shambolic scheme to proceed without them. The men who flocked to spring training sites were called scabs, cast as anti-union phonies. Some were existing or retired players who crossed the picket line and caused a stir.
Many of the men doing the replacing, though, were just normal people chasing a dream.
Sometimes the memories seem fuzzy, but it was real. Once, for all of a few days, Willy Finnegan was on the cusp of playing in a bizarro version of the major leagues. Tigers manager Sparky Anderson, like many others at the time, was so incensed by the replacement-player scheme that he refused to manage the scabs.
In the end, the strike was settled. The real ballplayers came back. The replacements went about their lives — kids, careers and vague senses of order. Their baseball dreams dissolved once more into faint memories.
Thirty years later, the 2025 Detroit Tigers were in desperate need of bullpen help. They traded for Kyle Finnegan, a late-bloomer who had vaulted himself into the Washington Nationals’ closer role.
The night he got the call, Willy dug out his old Tigers jersey. From the back of the closet, memories from 1995 poured out.
He sent his son a picture.
“It was,” Kyle said, “a full-circle type moment.”
In the spring of 1995, Willy Finnegan had perhaps the most peculiar situation in a room full of odd stories.
He was undersized in high school, weighing 126 pounds as a senior. He was a diamond in the rough on a club team at an upstate New York junior college, then turned himself into walk-on at UNLV. Willy still remembers the shock when Rebels coach Fred Dallimore pulled him aside and told him he made the team. Willy was wearing a leather necklace with a shark tooth dangling near his chest.
“Finnegan,” Dallimore told him, “cut those chicken bones off your neck and get a haircut. You made the team.”
Willy finally started growing, and he transformed into an eighth-round pick for the St. Louis Cardinals. The year was 1981. He was a right-handed pitcher with a fiery fastball in the 90s, but he rarely had any idea where the ball was going. He played two seasons in the low minors with a 9.57 ERA. He walked an absurd 10.3 batters per nine innings before the Cardinals released him. Then came a season of independent minor-league ball with the Utica Blue Sox. The Kansas City Royals signed him for what would have been his age-26 season, but they wanted to send him back to A-ball.
Sensing a dead end, Willy walked away.
He started a family and got a job in finance for the PaineWebber investment firm. He worked for a few years in his home state of New York, then got transferred to Detroit. Baseball still tugged at his heart.
“I loved it like I was still 7 years old,” he said.
He started playing in a men’s league, on a team called the Livonia Yankees. He still threw hard. As he grew older, he even developed some semblance of command. Suddenly, Finnegan was striking out policemen and firefighters at rapid rates.
“It wasn’t fair,” Willy said, “but I didn’t care.”
By the time he was in his 30s, he started playing in college summer leagues with kids from Michigan and Michigan State. They called him Pops, and word started to get around about the old guy with the nasty stuff.
One day in the winter, a Tigers scout called Finnegan while he was at his office in Birmingham, north of Detroit. They wanted to meet at a gym and see him throw a bullpen. Finnegan obliged. He couldn’t believe it. He was a father of four young kids and a corporate vice president busy in his career.
“I didn’t even know what the hell was going on,” he said. “I wasn’t following the CBA.”
He soon learned the Tigers were building a team of replacement players. A couple of days after the bullpen, he learned they wanted him to be on it. He told his wife. He called his boss. They both told him: Go for it.
Four days later, with hardly any notice, he was down in Lakeland, Fla., shaking hands with Al Kaline and throwing in a spring training game against the Chicago White Sox. Kaline asked him about stocks and bonds. Willy just wanted to hear stories.
He was 36 at the time, 12 years removed from playing real baseball. He was the old man in camp. His back barked as he began throwing more seriously, but his fastball still had some sizzle. His wife and young kids, including a 3-year-old Kyle, came down to see him. His teammates included 30 other replacement players. There was a high-school teacher named Dave Gumpert and a garbage-truck driver named Bryan Clutterbuck. Most knew the venture would likely dissolve and the real players would return. A love for baseball kept them hungry.
“It’s a candle,” Willy told reporters in 1995. “It just keeps burning and burning.”
As this makeshift spring training neared its end, Willy survived cuts and was set to be on the taxi squad, available to be activated if another player got hurt. He and three other players even arrived to the stadium via yellow taxi as the others took a team photo for what was supposed to be the cover-band version of the ’95 Tigers.
One day before Opening Day, the league’s nasty labor dispute was finally settled. The threat of owners using replacement players was nixed. The likes of Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker and Cecil Fielder moved back into the Tigers’ clubhouse, and the replacement players were out. Before Willy departed, Kaline gave him a few signed baseballs. Willy returned to metro Detroit and kept raising his family, going wherever his real job led. They moved from Detroit to Chicago and finally settled in Houston.
In his office, Willy kept photos and mementos from this strange side quest.
He told his children stories about the dream he never quite fulfilled.
Kyle Finnegan pitched to a 1.50 ERA over 16 games for the Tigers last season. (Imagn Images)
He always said he wouldn’t be the obsessive dad who forced his children into baseball. Whether they were piano players or ballet dancers, he said, he just wanted them to give it their all. His oldest is now an attorney, his youngest a tug-boat captain. But his middle children were fascinated by all those tokens in that office. Photos from Willy’s time in the minors. Mementos of his odd spring training in 1995.
“When I was a kid,” Kyle said, “I didn’t understand the minor leagues or CBA negotiations and things like that. But I had known he got to go to a big-league spring training in some capacity, and it was when he had already been retired for many, many years. It was something cool he always talked about.”
Like his father, Kyle Finnegan was a late-bloomer. He weighed less than 100 pounds entering his sophomore year. At Kingswood High School in Texas, there’s a story they still tell, a lesson for young players and parents unsure of how their child will develop. It was cut day, and coach Kelly Mead weighed his options. In first period, there was a kid he planned to cut. He kept debating. By fifth period, the kid was still cut. By seventh period, knowing the father, knowing the background and seeing the work ethic, he decided to keep him.
That, they said for years at Kingswood banquets, is the Kyle Finnegan story. Eventually, Kyle grew, and it all clicked. He played at Texas State. Got drafted in the sixth round. He played seven years in the Athletics’ farm system. He made it to Triple A in three different seasons but never got the call to the big leagues.
Then he was released and became a minor-league free agent.
At that point, Kyle was 28 years old. He had a daughter, a meager salary and mounting debt. He asked his father what he should do.
Willy told him: “There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t regret walking away from the game because they sent me back to A-ball. I’m very grateful for it because I married your mom. If I didn’t make that decision you might not be here. But you don’t quit until somebody tells you you’re no longer good enough.”
For emphasis, Willy added: Don’t do what I did.
More than a month after Kyle’s time with the A’s ended, with all that uncertainty swirling, the Washington Nationals called and offered him a major-league deal.
“The break of a lifetime,” Willy said.
Finnegan grew into a reliable reliever, then an underrated closer. At an age where his father was pitching in men’s leagues, Finnegan posted a 3.66 ERA and saved 108 games over parts of six seasons with the Nationals. His younger brother, Jack, also played two years in the Brewers’ system.
At last summer’s deadline, the rebuilding Nats traded Finnegan to the Tigers, and Willy ventured back up to Detroit. Kyle got him and a few buddies batting-practice passes. Willy reunited with his old friends from PaineWebber. They stood on the field, told stories and laughed.
Kyle spent time on the injured list with a right adductor strain but otherwise proved to be the best of Detroit’s deadline moves. He posted a 1.50 ERA in 18 innings, giving the Tigers some much-needed help at the end of games. He began throwing his splitter more often, raising his whiff rate and hinting at even more untapped upside.
Finnegan surrendered an earned run in each of his final three postseason appearances, but less than an hour after a heartbreaking loss in the 15-inning ALDS Game 5, he expressed interest in returning to the Tigers and playing again in the city where he was born.
“I can’t say enough about the staff and the players,” Finnegan said then. “Top to bottom, it was a first-class experience. I was really happy to be a small part of it.”
Sure enough, Finnegan re-signed with the Tigers in December on a two-year, $19 million deal. Along with Will Vest and Kenley Jansen, he figures to be part of a three-headed monster helping the Tigers close out games. The team is entering a new season with high expectations, hoping to make a deeper run after two straight ALDS losses.
Before this spring, Kyle had never spent meaningful time as an adult at the Tigers’ Lakeland, Fla., spring training facility. Now he’s walking around, soaking in the surreality. This is the same place his father once played. He thought of the signed Al Kaline balls in his childhood home.
“He taught me everything I know about the game,” Kyle said of his father. “He was my Little League coach, pitching coach. We still talk about things I need to work on. I feel like he knows me better than anybody else. But he’s also very superstitious. If I’m pitching well, I won’t even hear from him for a while.”
In the stands last fall, Willy walked around and sought shelter from the rain, his jersey covered with a blue pullover featuring the Tigers’ alternate logo from the ’90s, the jungle cat crawling through the Olde English D.
A few people stopped him, asking where he got it.
“It’s original,” he said, “from 1995.”
During one of these trips to Detroit, when all his friends were shooting the bull and reminiscing, they were talking about Willy, how hard he threw, how good he was, how close he came.
Down on the field before the game, he stopped them.
“Forget about me,” he said. “This is Kyle’s time.”