Appreciation: Tiger Stadium A Farewell to a Nice Thing About Detroit
By David Whitford

(FORTUNE Magazine) – They're building a plush new ballpark for the Tigers in Detroit, and that's fine. It'll be ready next spring. It won't come cheap ($295 million), but Tigers owner Michael Ilitch and a consortium led by Sumitomo Bank are putting up more than half the total cost, with another big chunk coming from a hotel tax, so at least the fans aren't footing the entire bill for the owners, which is usually the way it works. It will have a dumb name (Comerica Park?) but it will be gorgeous, you can count on that: another retro classic like the ones in Cleveland and Denver and Baltimore, with real grass, an old-timey steel-and-brick facade, comfortable seats, no obstructed views, plenty of bathrooms. And it'll be downtown, where a ballpark belongs, next to another new stadium where the Lions will play football. Which should be a welcome boost for a tired city that even now, in good times, needs all the help it can get.

And if Tiger Stadium has to go, well, that's progress; it's inevitable. It's a big, ugly brute anyway, squatting there on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, wrapped in aluminum siding, surrounded by asphalt, baking in the sun. Tiger Stadium shares an opening day anniversary with Fenway Park (April 20, 1912). It is two years older than Wrigley Field. The city lot it occupies has been the exclusive site of professional baseball in Detroit for more than a century. But despite the long history, plus happy memories of Ty Cobb, Hank Greenberg, and Al Kaline, Tiger Stadium has never been much of a ballyard to make baseball fans go all misty-eyed and dreamy. Few will mourn its passing.

As a onetime sportswriter, I have been to a lot of ballparks, but never this one. I took a cab from the airport, was there when the gates opened at 5:30, made my way up the ramps to the upper deck in right field, crossed a rusty, steel-girdered walkway, and stepped into the most seductive baseball vista I have ever beheld (and I live 20 minutes from Fenway Park): a vast, blue, boxy cavern with a lush green floor, filled to the brim with sunshine and shadows; baseballs arcing through it; a line of colorful pennants flapping on the far rooftop; metal railings thick with generations of orange paint; and a bright yellow foul pole, rearing up right in front of me. "You get happy just going in there," the cab driver had said. In that moment, I knew exactly what she meant.

I sat in the front row of section 373, the first in a line of outfield boxes that actually jut out over the warning track in right--the only perch anywhere, in any sport, that places the spectator inside the action. When Derek Jeter of the visiting Yankees drove a pitch from Brian Moehler into the gap in right center, I had to bend over the railing and look down behind me to see where it bounced.

Late in the game, with the sky fading to indigo and Venus popping into view high above third base, I started circling back toward homeplate, clockwise, pausing to admire the view from section 372 (over the Yankees' bullpen), section 425 (dead even with first base), and finally section 421, right behind the catcher, where I sat down to watch the last half-inning. But not so fast. With two outs and the Tigers losing by one run, Bobby Higginson bravely ran the count to 3-2, then got a pitch he liked and drove it into the upper deck in right (alas, not six feet from where I had been sitting--oh, well). The game went into extra innings.

Baseball has no clock, of course. Once a game begins, no one knows when it will end. Or even if it will end. An infinite baseball game. Could it ever happen? What if it happened tonight? Would that save Tiger Stadium? Just a thought. Chili Davis won it for the Yankees with a single in the tenth.

--David Whitford