Carlos Osorio/Associated Press
Comerica Park, which opened in 2000, has been described by critics as a “cookie-cutter.”
Carlos Osorio/Associated Press
The Tigers’ old ballpark hosted games from 1912 until 1999.
Many in Detroit still miss Tiger Stadium.
What’s the source of this dread I’m feeling? It’s not the fact that I
left my Alphabet City apartment in the predawn dark on Tuesday and
pointed the snout of my rust-bucket 1989 Mazda west toward my hometown,
Detroit, 600 miles distant. It’s not even the sheer lunacy of my day’s
itinerary — across the George Washington Bridge and the Garden State,
then over the corduroy hump of Pennsylvania, and finally across that
enormous dinner plate of a battleground state called Ohio. All of this
just to go back home to see my beloved Detroit Tigers take on the
Yankees on Tuesday night in Game 3 of the American League Championship
Series.
(Wait a minute, you’re thinking, a man in the 21st century wants to get
from New York to Detroit to see a baseball game, and he drives? Well,
yes, because I was born and raised in Detroit, and when a Detroit guy
wants to go somewhere, he gets into a car and drives there. It beats
showing up at La Guardia six hours before your scheduled departure and
then being treated like a criminal. I rest my case for keeping my wheels
on the road.)
Most surprising of all, my dread is not coming from a feeling that the
Yankees’ batters are going to wake from their collective coma and start
Ping-Ponging hits all over the park.
No, my dread comes from something much simpler, a question: What if my
very first visit to Comerica Park stinks? What if the successor to Tiger
Stadium is a “cookie cutter,” as I’ve heard it described? What if the
fans are obnoxious? What if the whole experience is just another dreary
episode in The Great Overpriced American Racket of Keeping the People
Entertained?
To fully understand my anxiety, you need to understand that I grew up in
Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s, attending baseball and football games
at a glorious old pile of a stadium that hosted its first game in 1912, a
few weeks after the Titanic sank. It was called Navin Field back then.
When I first visited, it was known as Briggs Stadium, and the name was
changed again in 1961 to Tiger Stadium. It was a great green open-air
room that held about 50,000 fans but somehow felt intimate because
everyone was close to the action. The stadium was enclosed, meaning you
couldn’t see anything but the game that was being played before your
eyes. The world went away for a few hours when you were in that place,
and that was a big part of its magic.
If you loved the Tigers in the years of my youth, it was a given that
you also despised the Yankees. In the first decade of my life, the
Yankees won the American League all but two times — in 1954, when Bob
Feller and the Cleveland Indians awoke, briefly, and in 1959 when the
Chicago White Sox had a rare and uncharacteristic summer of success.
Tiger Stadium played a large part in breeding an undying sense of
loyalty in the team’s fans. Understandably, they howled when ownership
and local politicians started talking about abandoning the old barn at
the corner of Michigan and Trumbull and building a new stadium. A group
called the Tiger Stadium Fan Club came together to fight the demolition.
The stadium was in need of some major work, they agreed, but it was
structurally sound. Coleman Young, the former mayor, disagreed, saying,
“The damned thing is falling down.”
The fan club’s efforts failed. The Tigers moved into Comerica Park in
2000, and for the next nine years, a new group called the Old Tiger
Stadium Conservancy fought to preserve the abandoned ballyard. They met
with failure, too. The wrecking crew went to work in 2009.
The next year, a native Detroiter, a postal worker named Tom Derry, went
to the Corner, as it’s known locally, and was shocked by what he saw.
“It looked awful — it was just weeds,” Derry says. “I called some
friends, and we took our mowers down and went to work. It looks much
better now.”
Derry and Company call themselves the Navin Field Grounds Crew. Theirs
is a curiously Detroit kind of mission: caring for a treasure that was
allowed to vanish. “We’re very passionate about preserving the field and
the history,” Derry says.
My long trip is almost over. As I send these words through the ether to
the sports desk, I’m getting ready to make the right turn at Toledo. My
Mazda, with 215,000 miles and change on the odometer, is running like a
sewing machine. Soon I’ll hit the Michigan state line and I’ll be able
to pick up the pregame sports radio chatter coming down from Detroit.
Maybe I’ll get to spend the rest of this Tuesday with Mitch Albom. Or
maybe not.
Either way, I’ll soon know if my dread about my first visit to Comerica
Park was well founded, or if it was just the silly fretting of a
lifelong Tigers fan. Which is a delicate way of admitting that I’m an
incurable pessimist.
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