In his classic novel Shoeless Joe, W. P. Kinsella recounts a fictional interview he imagines J. D. Salinger giving to “an obscure literary magazine” in which Salinger reveals,

When I was a kid I wanted more than anything else in the world to play at the Polo Grounds. But I’ve seen myself grow too old for that dream – seen the Giants moved across a continent to San Francisco, and finally, they tore down the Polo grounds in 1964.

“…and finally.”Almost a decade too late they tore down Bennett Park, Navin Field, Briggs Stadium, Tiger Stadium. The long goodbye to The Corner where baseball had been continuously played for 104 years. For almost a decade now Tiger Stadium has not known who she was, a torturous nine years for those of us whose memories won’t allow us to forget. If only the end could have been as swift as Ernie Harwell’s call of the final out on that September evening in 1999:

Tigers lead it 8-2. Two down in the ninth inning. Jones is ready. He delivers. Here’s a swing and a miss. The game is over, and Tiger Stadium is no more.

In the spring of 2000 I took my seven year old son to The Corner. I had no plan. For the previous eleven years my family had lived away from Detroit. We were back now and I just wanted to walk around the old ballpark and revisit the stadium where I’m certain as a seven year old boy my father once brought me.

I was surprised to learn when we got to the stadium you could actually still take a tour inside. The Tigers had already moved just a few miles to the east to their state of the art ballpark, which at that very moment was getting ready to open its inaugural season.

I paid the $5.00 admission, and my son and I walked through the entrance gate into baseball’s Twilight Zone.

It had been several years since I had last attended a game here. Fifteen years to be exact. Walking the cracked concrete concourse with its rusty beams and chipped dull grey paint reminded me of my earliest memory as a little boy walking through the Right Field concourse, into the walkway that led to the Right Field seats and, upon seeing that beautiful field for the first time, feeling as if I had gone from a black and white world into Technicolor (just like in Wizard of Oz).

The tour guide took us up to the upper deck along the first base side, where we approached the cat walk leading to the broadcast booth behind home plate. I remembered walking past that catwalk many times as a child and young adult, viewing it with awe and reverence, knowing where it ended. This time I was walking on it with my seven year old son.

We stepped into the cramped quarters where Ernie Harwell, Ray Lane, and Paul Carey called the games I had listened to over my transistor radio as a kid. I imagined Ernie sitting there, wearing his trademark hat with his trademark southern drawl, his voice dancing with the microphone:

“It’s long gone!”

The booth itself was underwhelming. It was that voice that gave it life; that voice from the transistor radio on my father’s dresser wafting on the breeze through my bedroom window that lulled me to sleep on humid summer evenings before any of us had ever heard of “central air.”

From there it was down to the visitor’s clubhouse, where we were met by the ghosts of Gehrig, Ruth, Mantle and DiMaggio – a dream captured by Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe:

I advocate the establishment of shrines in recognition of baseball greats: Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, Mays, DiMaggio, and a few dozen others. Not just at Cooperstown, but at roadside shrines, like the cairns that commemorate cavalry battles, treaty signings, and Indian uprisings. Sites where bleary-eyed travelers could rest for a moment, drink clear water, fill their radiators on broiling afternoons, and study the highlights of their heroes’ careers, recorded in bronze and granite.

That cramped and leaky clubhouse at The Corner played host to all of those boys. Their ghosts still haunted its corners the day my son and I stood silent within its walls as if in a mausoleum. I think if Kinsella could ever stand in that clubhouse he would agree no roadside shrine could commemorate the greats of baseball better than that room.

The last game I ever attended at The Corner was opening day in 1985. The Tigers had defeated the San Diego Padres the fall before to bring a World Series championship back to Detroit for the first time in 16 years. My brothers, brothers-in-law, some of my nephews, and my dad were all supposed to go that day to witness the crowning of the new champs as they lined up to receive their World Series rings, but only my dad and I ended up in the right field seats because…

It was well below freezing at game time. The only place you could get warm was in the men’s room. By the third inning the game had been delayed because of snow. We left.

As far as I know my dad never went back to a game at Tiger Stadium again, not because he didn’t want to, but because, like the stadium and J. D. Salinger, he was old. Dad’s life in Detroit began as a transplanted Kentuckian after WWII. In the late 1940’s dad and mom made their first home in the Corktown neighborhood that was home to Tiger Stadium, only then it was known as Briggs Stadium. In those days all of the games were played during the day – until 1948 – and dad often told me how he would get off work at Chrysler and get home in time to walk right into Briggs Stadium without a ticket in the late innings and watch the rest of the game. Dad died in 2003 having never attended a game at Comerica Park.

Somehow I’m glad he’s not around to see the old stadium come down. Tomorrow I’ll head to the corner of Michigan and Trumbull while the stands in right field, along the baselines and behind home plate are still intact. And I’ll pay my respects, but not so much to crumbling brick and mortar.

The respect is due to the memory of the men who brought the brick and mortar, grass and dirt, to life; to the men who played here. Men like Al Kaline, whose shadow still lurks in the Right Field corner. And Lou Gehrig, who asked to be kept out of the Yankee lineup at a game at Briggs Stadium on May 2, 1939, thus ending his “Iron Man” streak of 2,130 consecutive games played. 

And not only the men who played here, but the man who more than anyone else brought the stadium to life for millions of Tiger fans – Ernie Harwell. You can tear down walls, but that voice permeates the air at Michigan and Trumbull.

But of all the men who brought the Corner to life, none deserve more respect than my dad, a quiet man who instilled in me the love of the game by loading me and my siblings into the back of that old Chevrolet station wagon on humid Michigan summer nights for the drive to the Corner, and taking me by the hand, leading me to what, for me, will always be the only field of dreams, reminding me that no hot dog tastes as good as one from a steaming portable pot with mustard applied using a tongue depressor.

Tonight, we must say goodbye. Farewell, old friend, Tiger Stadium. We will remember.

– Ernie Harwell, September 28, 1999

Somewhere in the future, circa 2099, I imagine perhaps a great-grandson of mine beginning a blog post…

“…and Comerica Park is no more.”

Something tells me the story told will not be quite the same. Unthinkable to imagine that I have lived through half of professional baseball’s first century. Hard to imagine that baseball’s second century could ever match the glory of its first, all of that glory embedded at The Corner.

Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.

Proverbs 22:28