I am planted in front of the monitor, listening via the magic of Internet RealAudio to Ernie Harwell and Dan Dickerson calling the final innings of Detroit Tigers baseball at "The Corner." It is the seventh inning, only a few moments left in the long and established history of the haven where I spent so many wonderful afternoons and evenings during my youth and venture into adulthood. I can recall every moment that I spent at Tiger Stadium the past 35 years, every game, every score, every fleeting moment. Few are of such phenomenal, monumental impact that anyone other than myself might even remotely care about them, but I care all too much, with a passion and a desire that has not left me, despite my flight from suburban Detroit to southeast Florida's Treasure Coast less than two months ago.
I remember the first game I saw. It was a family affair, a Saturday afternoon. The family -- dad, mom, Miriam, Charles and myself -- drive to the cathedral at Michigan and Trumbull and stationed ourselves in the lower left-field grandstands. Next to us in the row were our next-door neighbors, the Varterians. We ate hot dogs and peanuts and cotton candy, drank Coke and tried to keep track of all the action in the 1973 Detroit Tigers program my dad had bought for me. I don't have the program, or the pencil which came with it, but I still have the memories.
It is 6:58 p.m. Ernie has just announced what might be his final home run call at Tiger Stadium, a grand slam by catcher Robert Fick. Ernie's voice crackled as he yelled out "LOOOOOOOONG GONE" in a way which is rare even for the veteran broadcaster. I had the pleasure -- honor, really -- to meet Ernie several times in my career as both a broadcaster and a journalist. The first time was in 1986, while interning at WBFH through Central Michigan University, I secured interviews with Ernie and long-time partner Paul Carey at their individual homes. It was, perhaps, the most incredible and exhilarating day of my radio life. Ernie knew, he could sense, the magnitude of the moment for me, and despite getting in following a late-night flight from Chicago the evening before, was awake and alert and professional and courteous and generous with his time. To this day, I don't know if he realizes how incredibly special that moment was. Then again, maybe he does. I spent over an hour at each of their respective homes, followed by attending the Tigers game that evening against Cleveland with Cindy Stevens, a long-time friend I met at CMU. I got to sit in the broadcast booth for one inning with Ernie and Paul, thrilled by the proximity to the field, overwhelmed by the majesty of the moment.
Cindy was with me in the lower bleachers on a cold Saturday morning, October 13, 1984, when Jack Morris pitched a complete game and Alan Trammell smoked a pair of two-run homers to power Detroit past San Diego 4-2 in Game 4 of the 1984 World Series, the nineteenth (!) time I planted myself in Tiger Stadium that season. The next night, I was driving back to CMU and listening to Ernie when Kirk Gibson blasted one of the most famous -- perhaps THE most famous -- home runs in Tiger Stadium history off Goose Gossage to clinch the title.
Trammell occupies a very special part in my Tiger Stadium memoirs. The "greatest shortstop" to ever wear the Olde English D is entrenched in my mind and soul. It isn't just the two autographed posters on my apartment and classroom walls, the autographed program from his final game as a player, the miniature game figures, even the porcelain baseball card. He represented to me, a young Tiger fan growing up cheering the hometown team, everything that was good about Detroit, baseball and athletics in general. He was, and remains to this day, a class act, which seems to be a rarity in this age of escalating salaries and chronic owner-player bitch-session arguments.
I remember several notable home runs Trammell hit. The World Series pair, of course, stand out. But there was his final home run, on Opening Day 1997, against Seattle. And there was the home run off the Yankees' Cecilio Guante in June 1988, a bottom-of-the-ninth, full-count poke into the upper left-field grandstands which carried Detroit to a 7-6 victory -- one of only a handful (around 20) of down-by-three, last-at-bat grand-slams ever to happen in the history of Major League Baseball. Charles and Kevin Loucks and I jumped up and down for what seemed hours after that thrilling victory. Little did we know that Yankees manager Billy Martin would be fired the next day -- for the final time, or that days later, my father would have surgery on what would turn out to be a malignant brain tumor, effectively ending my elongated career as a naive child grasping to hold on to sports as a magical metaphor for perfection via rose-coloured glasses.
But I still have the memories. Fond memories. I was in the bleachers when Jim Walewander hit his first -- perhaps only? -- shot into deep right-center field against those same Yankees. When Sammy Sosa broke Tiger legend Rudy York's record for most homers in a month, I was planted next to Mark Mosesso along the third-base line. I saw Mark Fidrych talk to the ball, John Hiller on the mound after his career was supposedly over because of a massive heart attack, Larry Herndon's solo shot off Toronto's Jimmy Key which was the difference in the finale against the Blue Jays in 1987. Lance Parrish hit a grand salami during a game I attended but never saw. Sheri Stern and I arrived late at the stadium for a 1985 game against Kansas City, just as a monsoon broke out, and after getting soaked in the upper bleachers for well over an hour we decided to leave, assuming it would end up a rain-out. My first true taste of "never assume;" on the Lodge Freeway, we heard Parrish (who was about to bat when the rains came) drill a moonshot with the bases loaded. Sheri laughed at the incredulousness of the situation; I think I looked like death warmed over, my face contorted into nineteen degrees of disgusted muscle spasms. All of these images, etched in my mind.
I spent happy, bliss-filled afternoons in Tiger Stadium. A July 4 double-header against Baltimore with Todd Skelton, his first -- only -- visit to my own version of baseball paradise. Opening Day with Jeff Falcon and Herman DeBarr. Countless dates, countless friends, all with a common bond.
I was there on a Sunday afternoon in July 1997, when Harold "Prince Hal" Newhouser's number was retired by the Detroit Tigers association. Newhouser, my next-door neighbor growing up, about whom I was blessed to have written my first-ever free-lance story (a feature in Baseball Digest) -- bemoaning his as-of-then non-inclusion in the Baseball Hall of Fame, an oversight which has since been corrected). And there I was, having managed to convince the Tigers brass that I had been approved by their PR department prior to the game for a photo pass (I had, but somehow it got lost in the paperwork), standing with my Nikon camera on the grass between home plate and the pitcher's mound, taking in the magical moment of being firmly planted on the very grass which was my own Field of Dreams, watching Harold Newhouser -- the greatest Tigers southpaw ever -- break into a larger-than-the-universe smile when the banner was finally removed from the upper-right field box area where his Number 16 was unveiled, never to be worn again by a member of the Detroit Tigers Baseball Organization.
And now it is over, the men in blue and orange victorious. As they should be. Over for the shrine which has been my symbolic baseball home for as long as I can remember. The names of the Tigers alumni are flowing over the airwaves: Bill Freehan, Steve Kemp, Willie Horton, Ron LeFlore, Dick McAuliffe, Mickey Stanley, Al Kaline, Dan Petry, Jason "Rooftop" Thompson, Darrell Evans, Jim Price, Gates Brown, Chet Lemon, Aurelio Rodriguez, George Kell, Cecil Fielder, Lou Whitaker and Trammell (together!); so many names, so many memories.
Photographs and memories. To steal a line from Jim Croce, "all that I have are these to remember Tiger Stadium." As the lights dim and the last fan drives away, I sit in silent contemplation of the moment, pondering it all. "It's just a building," one might argue. I bet the same argument held the same lack of water for those who saw the Chicago White Sox move out of the old Comiskey Park, or those who hold Fenway Park and Wrigley Field as their own versions of Baseball Camelot. Tiger Stadium is, and never will be, "just" a building. It is a cathedral of dreams and hopes, of rough times and championships. I will always have fond memories of Tiger Stadium; the final out, thirteen-hundred miles away, cannot take that away from me.
