DETROIT -- Prince Fielder was giving the Tigers a preview.
There he was, on a field in Lakeland, Fla., during spring training in 2002, a 17-year-old swatting baseballs over fences with such frequency that his father, Cecil, a slugger for seven seasons with the Tigers in the early 1990s, proclaimed afterward: "I'm giving the Tigers a preview."
But it was Prince hitting those balls and Prince turning those heads, much like he'd been doing throughout his childhood; first on Grosse Pointe, Mich., Little League fields, then at Tiger Stadium, then at Yankees spring training a few years later and then, on that February day in Lakeland, a few months before the plump prodigy would follow his plump parent into the major leagues.
