Outside the Fox Theatre on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, a mother forlornly sits in a lawn chair, her face drawn and tired, her hair unkempt. Her name is Sharon Inge, and she has been sitting here for nine days straight without respite. All to save her son.

“I will sit here until they agree to see me,” she says.

“They,” in this case, are Detroit Tigers General Manager Dave Dombrowski and Manager Alan Trammell, the men who, in Inge’s eyes, are destroying her child.

Unlike the more famous matronly vigil held by the grieving Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas, Sharon Inge’s silent protest isn’t about mortality and war. It’s about a baseball and a bat, and her son Brandon’s sudden inability to bring the two together.

Charles Brandon Inge grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, a medium-sized Southern city famous for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and being the location of the J. Crew catalogue phone banks. It’s a sleepy and conservative town lined with strip malls and gas stations, nestled just south of the Shenandoah Valley and amidst the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s small town America, the sort of place where parents dream of raising children, where people wave to one another as they pass on the street.

It was there that Brandon first began to play baseball, and he soon discovered that he was quite good at it. He received a scholarship to play at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, some three hours away, and was named All-Colonial Athletic Conference soon thereafter as a relief pitcher. After being awarded the conference’s player of the year plaudit in 1998 (he batted .330 and had an ERA of 2.09), Inge was drafted by the Detroit Tigers. He was going to be a major leaguer.

“It was the happiest day of his life,” Mama Sharon remembers. “We just couldn’t believe it. After all he had accomplished at VCU we still didn’t expect anyone to notice. He was just a country boy, and a small one at that.”

Inge moved rapidly through the Tigers minor league system, becoming their starting catcher in 2001 before injuries spoiled his season. Injuries marred his 2002 and 2003 campaigns as well, and it was only in 2004 that he played his first full year in the major leagues — not as a pitcher or even a catcher, but as a third baseman.

“Brandon was never crazy about playing third,” Sharon says. “Pitching and catching are his biggest loves. He and I were both upset with [Manager] Alan [Trammell] for shifting him over, but apparently they got some new catcher or something that year who they thought was better than my boy. Hogwash!”

(That “some new catcher” was future Hall of Famer Ivan Rodriguez.)

This season, Inge has manned the so-called “hot corner” for 115 games, perhaps shedding that injury bug that has hindered his major league career. And so why, you might wonder, is Sharon Inge so upset with the Detroit Tigers?

“Brandon has sucked for four months now, and it’s all Dave Dombrowski and Alan Trammell’s fault.”

In April, Inge hit a sweltering .333 at the dish, and in May, .294. Impressive numbers. But then something happened to the young slugger: June .267, July .200 and so far in August .205, with a .234 on-base percentage. Indeed, Inge has arguably been the worst starting player in all of baseball these past three months, and Sharon Inge says it’s having a toll on her son.

“He won’t speak to me anymore,” she says between sobs. “He’s become a shell of the boy that he once was… This has just shattered his confidence, and even destroyed his personal life. If those front-office bastards had a heart or even knew a damned thing about baseball they would have benched my son months ago.”

Dombrowski and Trammell refused to discuss Sharon Inge, saying only that they “have thought long and hard about her position” but that they “will not kowtow to the demands of extremists.” Sharon finds their refusal maddening. “I want to tell you face to face how it hurts to see my son used this way,” she said in a recent radio interview.

And while her son Brandon has publicly distanced himself from his mother’s efforts (“I just want to play ball,” he told reporters last week), Sharon’s solitary vigil is gaining momentum: relatives of Cincinnati Reds shortstop Felipe Lopez, Minnesota Twins first baseman Justin Morneau, Chicago Cubs outfielder Jeremy Burnitz, San Francisco Giants utility man Pedro Feliz and Washington Nationals outfielder Brad Wilkerson have begun similar protests outside of their children’s respective ballparks.

As Wilkerson’s distraught mother told the Washington Post, “It’s horrifying to see my own son embarrass himself and our entire family with his terrible performance. Someone put him and us out of our misery. It’s the only humane thing to do.”