All of the old ballparks were more than just stadiums; they became second homes for the fans.

So when baseball closed up shop on Michigan and Trumbull, CBS Sportsline's Scott Miller had an emotional weekend.

“It was hard to beat covering the final weekend of Tiger Stadium,” Miller told Sports Day. “I was thrilled to be there, but it also was very sad. The emotions swept over me, as I sat there. Suddenly, games I attended as a kid with my parents and as a high schooler with my friends and dates came sweeping back to me.”

One can’t blame the Monroe, MI native for feeling like a kid again, since the team from Detroit gave him so many memories.

“I became hooked on both the Tigers and baseball thanks in no small part to Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey on radio, George Kell and Al Kaline on television and Joe Falls in the Detroit newspapers.”

That love for the Tigers also gave the 41 year-old sports columnist his “life’s calling.”

“I decided long ago, like in eighth grade, that writing baseball is what I wanted to do for a living,” Miller said. “From then on, I geared myself to write baseball.”

So, Miller wrote for his high school and college newspapers and after graduating Hillsdale College in 1985, he started covering high school sports for the Los Angeles Times, San Diego edition. He eventually moved up to college and low level pro sports.

“I spent three years as a beat writer covering San Diego State in the early 1990s and covered Marshall Faulk’s breakthrough to stardom on the football field,” he said. “That was exciting to see.”

His passion was still baseball and Miller went on to cover the Padres and California Angels before taking the Minnesota Twins beat with the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Miller covered the Twins for six seasons when in 1999 upstart CBS Sportsline came calling and wanted the writer to become their national baseball columnist. Because the Internet was new, Miller was skeptical, but he decided to give it a shot.

“I had covered the Twins through six dreadful seasons, the stories were the same and I could feel myself getting stagnant,” Miller explained. “I wanted to get to know different people with different organizations, and the Sportsline job was a great way to do it.”

Today, Miller is thriving as an Internet journalist. He has the freedom to cover whatever national story he wants and gets to meet other people who have his passion for the game. But most of all, Miller gets to cover baseball.

“Once the first pitch is thrown and the first inning is underway, baseball is still the best and most interesting game there is,” he said.

There are some downsides to job, such as having to cover the steroid issue to death and other stories that are “the business to throw dirt,” but they are few and far between. And as a national writer, Miller never has anyone he dreads interviewing because he is not around any team long enough to get into a bad relationship with a player.

Well, all except one.

“Over the years, though, the most difficult player for me to interview was Chuck Knoblauch,” Miller said. “He was the kind of guy who would be laying poolside in Hawaii surrounded by drinks and bikinis and yet complain because it was only 74, and the weather forecaster had predicted 76.”

Knoblauch aside, Miller loves his work and wants to continue writing with Sportsline. Heck, with all the great events he has covered, who could blame him?

“Covering Boston’s run through the playoffs and World Series last year was great fun,” he added. “Covering Paul Molitor’s homecoming in Minnesota and his 3,000^th hit in 1997 was great. And any World Series game in Yankee Stadium, playoff games in Wrigley Field in 2003 [was memorable].”

But none of them compared to the final weekend in Detroit in 1999.

Read Scott Miller on cbs.cportsline.com.