Detroit is the most American of American cities. In its heyday, it drew unto itself by the hundreds of thousands blacks and whites from the South, Jews, and assorted “ethnics” from Europe. A Detroit neighborhood in the fifties was “a microcosm, an urban experience,” Tiger Stadium Fan Club founder Frank Rashid (himself Lebanese) once told me. “We had the influx of blacks. We had a Chinese family, a German family. I can’t imagine a better childhood. Don’t tell me it doesn’t work. It worked. It was great, it was wonderful. What a way to learn from other people and to get a sense of what could and what should be.”
Already then, the yang of industrial triumph carried within itself the yin of its own demise. The city emptied out in the sixties, with white flight accelerating after the 1967 riot. By the time I arrived in 1991, the physical city was in places a burned-out shell of its former self. In a seemingly recovering neighborhood like Corktown, where I lived, you could read the curve of the city’s history: a brick house built at the turn of the century, maintained just to the point of being inhabitable (by the now elderly sister of Ty Cobb’s personal batboy); across the street, what in the 1860s had been a German immigrant’s farmhouse, impressively restored by an affluent stockbroker; down the block, a crack house. On the next block: the charred wreck of a house recently burned by its owner for insurance. Across the street: an empty lot.
Who was to blame for the city’s state was a rhetorical question that hovered in the air amid the dignified half-empty skyscrapers and seeped unspoken into conversations. The battle lines were clear enough: blacks blamed whites; whites blamed blacks. It wasn’t quite as black and white as that, but it was difficult and trying for even well-meaning and intelligent people to cross the line symbolized so starkly by Eight Mile Road.
Like Detroit, baseball is a rich and complex metaphor. “Baseball has had a different and more important role in Detroit than it has in New York or in many other American cities,” asserts Patrick Harrigan, rightly, and it is my privilege to have served my apprenticeship helping Michael Betzold to demonstrate this in Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1991), the history of the site where baseball has been played in Detroit since 1896. At the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues, two of the most telling of American metaphors intersect.
It’s right out there in your face, as always. Nineteen forty-five was “the end of the magic,” Detroit native Don Shapiro told me. “The war was over. Hitler was dead. I was already graduating from dental school. And [Hank] Greenberg came back [from serving in the war] for one last heroic home run, to win the game against the St. Louis Browns on the last day of the season. It was the loss of innocence, there’s no question about it. It was never the same after that.”
Yet for some decades more, as Harrigan puts it, “Continuity and memories combined with postwar prosperity to produce … a sense among Detroiters that Detroit baseball was one of the constancies of life.” The 1968 World Series champions were “a fascinating mix of personalities,” wrote my co-author, Michael Betzold. “The integrated, never-say-die Tigers provided Detroit a badly needed image of achievement and equality. They were a team of strong-willed individuals, each contributing his share to collective success. In a city where people were arming themselves to the teeth, many were fleeing, and social divisions were widening, the Tigers embodied hope and unity. Throughout that turbulent summer, Michigan and Trumbull was a common ground where people set aside their differences, where everything somehow turned out all right in the end.”
Americans want to believe that history is like a Hollywood movie, but by the year of the next Tiger championship, Detroiters at least knew that it is not. The abiding image of the 1984 World Series was of Bubba Helms, a white teenager from suburban Lincoln Park, standing beside a burning police car holding a Tiger pennant. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he later told the Detroit Free Press. “I just got my picture taken.” But the Associated Press photo “got wide usage in Europe and Asia,” as an AP editor observed, and Detroit got a bad rap.
From what, precisely, are we so quick to avert our eyes? That is the demanding question we must ask ourselves when we consider places like Detroit. “In ’84 when the Tigers won,” fan Randy Westbrooks told me, “people made a big deal out of car burnings and stuff that happened downtown, that have happened in other cities since then, but have not been publicized like in Detroit. They’ve never been here, they don’t know what we’re about, and I just think that we’ve become the whipping city of America. People in Detroit don’t do anything any worse than people in other cities.”
In Queen of Diamonds, Mike and I demonstrated amply that Tiger Stadium is structurally sound; that it could be renovated to satisfy management’s demand for luxury boxes and everything else they say they need except team-controlled parking; that posts allow for an unparalleled intimacy and, as former Los Angeles Times architecture critic John Pastier once put it,1 “while Tiger Stadium has 2,500 obstructed-view seats, it also has 49,916 unobstructed view seats” (i.e., more than the total seats at any of the much-vaunted new stadiums in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, et al.); that briefly declining attendance was the fault not of the neighborhood but of Tiger management under owner Tom Monaghan, who bizarrely called Detroit “one of the worst baseball cities in the United States”; that the team’s threat to leave town was hollow; that sports teams and stadiums (even “urban” ones) rarely add much to a city’s economy. Stadiums and accompanying infrastructure (roads, etc.) amount to public subsidies for private, for-profit, generally very profitable businesses. No city with a Third World infant mortality rate can justify razing its own heritage in order to provide such a subsidy. The world being of a piece, the extrapolated implications of such a local truth are radical indeed.
For whom are all those new stadiums built? Certainly not for people like my friend “Baseball John” Miramonti, who used to go to Tiger Stadium so often that he became known as “the guy who sits in the right field bleachers,” and Kirk Gibson gave him a job. “It doesn’t matter what problems you have in your life,” John told me (and he had plenty). “You can come in here for four bucks. All you need is four dollars, and you’ve got yourself a place.”
What’s wrong with pro sports these days is a matter not of innocently misguided policy, nor of aesthetics, nor of indifference, but of right and wrong. The obfuscations of those who believe otherwise boil down to Willie Stark’s explanation in All the King’s Men that “what folks claim is right is always just a couple of jumps short of what they need to do business.”
When Jose Canseco secured a then-record $23.5 million for five years from Oakland in 1990, he told reporters: “It’s not a matter of what I’m worth, but what the market conditions call for.” I asked George F. Will to comment. “This is not a moral question,” he replied. “We shouldn’t moralize this.” Shouldn’t we? Eugene McCarthy, the night I accosted him in the Tiger Stadium bleachers, begged to differ. “It’s like the damn television newscasters,” he said. “Eight million dollars for Dan Rather—what the hell? Any business or institution like baseball or television that exists because of a government monopoly ought to be subject to the salary schedule of the federal government.”
The Detroit Tigers: Club and Community 1945-1995by Patrick Harrigan University of Toronto Press 415 pp.; $65, hardcover; $24.95, paper
>Will raised anew the question of what is or is not a moral question, this time inadvertently, in April 1992 when he wrote a column extolling the alleged virtues of the unnecessary new stadium paid for by the taxpayers of the state of Maryland. Left unsaid in that piece was Will’s own position on the board of directors of the Baltimore Orioles.
Per his wont, Frank Rashid cuts to the chase. “There’s a whole history in this town of not having adequate programs for youth,” he told me. “But we’re building a playground for millionaires, and we’re going to bend over backwards to do it, when Detroit’s kids have so few clean, safe places to play that it’s scandalous. Which is not to say that’s the most important thing that has to be done. The real scandal in this town is the schools.”
Detroit singer Mike Ridley remembers the day he realized “it really wasn’t a baseball issue. It was a social issue. Things like fiscal responsibility and trying to remain true to our heritage. All of a sudden I had passion for a social issue. I hadn’t had it since Vietnam. Why aren’t people considering this a social justice issue?”
If we’re going to call baseball a metaphor, as too many writers have too glibly done, we must follow the metaphor where it leads. What is the significance of the 1994-95 players’ strike—or can we just forget that it ever happened? Are Baltimore’s ludicrously named “Oriole Park at Camden Yards” and Chicago’s “new Comiskey Park” really so wonderfully “modern, yet traditional”?2 If the national pastime ain’t what it used to be, what might that suggest about the nation? Everything, even baseball, has its season; nothing is forever, not even diamonds. It’s little use pretending otherwise.
One thus has little patience anymore for well-meaning, competent books of scholarship written so policymakers can make policy.3 The essential question, on which there never will be universal agreement and which scholarship per se never addresses, is: What does it mean? The answer is personal and a matter of faith. A related question is: Which should we accept as true, what the scribes and Pharisees say happened, or what actually happened?
“The White Sox have produced a Comiskey Park history for this final season,” wrote Douglas Bukowski in 1991, “but it’s hardly worth the effort. Good history depends at least in part on sincerity, which of course is lacking here. The story that’s for sale at concession stands has a happy ending in the form of a new stadium. I prefer my fiction from the library.”
Harrigan’s thorough account of a half-century of Tigers history has virtues but leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, like diet pop. His attention to Queen of Diamonds and to the Tiger Stadium Fan Club signifies a measure of sincerity. The fan club, founded at a Buddy’s Pizza in September 1987 by Frank Rashid, Mike Betzold, and three others (“the Buddy’s Pizza Five”), developed quickly into a highly effective grassroots group combining in its leadership moral and intellectual integrity, stamina, and political acumen. The delay in Tiger Stadium’s demise and the striking amount of local and national publicity given the issue over ten years are in large measure the fan club’s doing.
Harrigan feints occasionally toward critical analysis of vested interests and things left unsaid but always pulls up short. His claim not to have been influenced by his cozy access to longtime Tiger president Jim Campbell is a case of doth protest too much, and his easy piety on racial and “gender” issues is cloyingly beside the point. On the very same page Harrigan both notes rightly that Mayor Coleman Young’s “dream twenty years earlier of the Renaissance Center and big, dramatic projects had not turned the city around” and asserts wishfully that “a tentative agreement for a new stadium in Detroit raised hopes for a revitalized downtown.” How rarely we achieve the courage to abandon ill-founded hope. Bukowski puts it well: “The hope is for alchemy in concrete.”
For those of us who still want to practice human community, what remains is memory. That is in fact all we have; we had better make good use of it. For me a sense of what could and should be is connected, somehow, to what Charlie Moore, Stormin’ Gorman Thomas, Milwaukee County Stadium, and the True Blue Brew Crew meant to me circa 1982.
To Tiger fan Bill Dow, it is Al Kaline. “There was a game against Baltimore in 1968,” he told me, “where there was a runner on third and a really deep fly to right field. The runner tagged and Kaline threw the ball on a line right into [catcher Bill] Freehan’s mitt. No hop or anything. And the runner who was trying to come home stopped dead in his tracks half-way and just slid back into third base. The whole stadium gave Kaline a standing ovation. It gives me chills thinking about it.”
The impending loss of Tiger Stadium forces each of us who strove to save it to face an irreducibly personal question: What to do in the aftermath of a political defeat? The challenge is to persist in insisting on truth without succumbing to bitterness, self-righteousness, or futility. “Protest that endures, I think,” writes Wendell Berry, “is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
Ethan Casey is a journalist based in Bangkok. He is the coauthor, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story, which was reprinted in 1997 with a new preface and postscript by Betzold.
1. In a long, blistering fax to the editors of “the Bible of baseball,” The Sporting News, which he made available to me and which I quote at length in my essay “The Malling of Major League Baseball: The Sporting News and the Media/Corporate Assault on Classic Ballparks,” Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Review, Hot Stove Issue 1992. Pastier’s fax and my essay both were prompted by perhaps the most egregious illustration of the way the sporting press serves the baseball establishment to the detriment of fans and taxpayers. See The Sporting News cover story, issue of August 5, 1991—then see my detailed rebuttal.
2. “Do all those levels of seating terrace back, as [stadium expert] Philip Bess says? Is the stadium seating capacity (43,000) so small because of expected cable and skybox revenue? Will the average fan be priced out of attending a game? There will be only 3,400 bleacher seats, where Comiskey Park offered 21,000 seats in the outfield grandstands. Will the seats switched over to those six levels in ‘the prime seating area’ carry grandstand prices? Oops, the sports ‘journalist’ forgot to ask.” Douglas Bukowski, Baseball Palace of the World: The Last Year of Comiskey Park (1992). My review of Bukowski’s splendid book was published under the title “South-Side Samizdat” in Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Review, Opening Day Issue 1992.
3. Two recent titles in this vein are Home Team: Professional Sports and the American Metropolis, by Michael N. Danielson (Princeton University Press, 1997), and Major League Losers: The Real Cost of Sports and Who’s Paying for It, by Mark S. Rosentraub (BasicBooks, 1997).
Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
