As fans get ready to celebrate the All-Star game at Yankee Stadium in its final year, the end of a nine-year march to the wrecking ball gets underway in Detroit as the Tiger Stadium succombs to the realities of time and economics. Despite efforts to save the ballpark at Michigan and Trumball, as expected, the historic Michigan landmark is being dismantled.
The place that most exemplifies the summers of my youth is about to evaporate. But, like the former Comiskey Park in Chicago, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds in New York, and other shrines to “America’s past-time”, baseball will go on and new memories will be forged.
Only a couple of you who read this blog might know what the heck I’m writing about and why I’m a bit depressed today. But if you do, or if you’re interested, check out Mitch Albom’s column [1] in the Detroit Free Press. He sums it up, as he often does, nicely.
Tiger Stadium was mine and it was yours and it was anyone’s who lived in this area over the last century. It belonged to your grandfather and your barber and your neighbor’s aunt. It belonged to Cobb and Greenberg and Al Kaline and Kirk Gibson and Sparky Anderson and Frank Navin and the Briggs family and Tom Monaghan and Mike Ilitch.
It belonged to the earth it sat upon.
And soon, that is where it will return.