Tiger Stadium field, foul poles to be saved

News story

That's cool, something I didn't know.

So, what's really going on with Tiger Stadium?


The reports of Tiger Stadium’s demise are greatly exaggerated. For over a
year The Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy has been quietly working on a plan to preserve the entire playing field and a significant portion of the beloved old ballpark. This is a plan the Detroit City Council approved last summer because we don’t want to build a monument to honor Detroit’s baseball history, we want to keep it.

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Tiger Stadium funds clear hurdle
by The Associated Press - Saturday July 19, 2008, 8:45 AM


DETROIT (AP) -- Wrecking crews began demolishing Tiger Stadium nearly three weeks ago, but a U.S. Senate subcommittee has approved a $4 million earmark to preserve a portion of the historic ballpark.

Sen. Carl Levin's office says the money will redevelop part of the stadium as a park. Levin and Sen. Debbie Stabenow requested the earmark, which the Senate Appropriations Committee approved as part of a $13.5 million funding package the two Michigan Democrats sought for transportation and community development projects across the state.

The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press say the full Senate still must approve the spending bill.

The nonprofit Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy has until Aug. 1 to raise money to save part of the stadium. The playing field will remain intact after demolition is complete.

I still don't like the Democrats spending 4 million in Federal Tax money;

That money could be spent better someplace else

Let Private Money save Tiger Stadium

spend it on stuff like $20K toilets? Given a choice, I think this is the better option!

That is a myth; The Feds never spent 20k on Toilets


Maybe 5K but not 20

They outta send me 5K; I could do a study on how Comerica Park Sucks!

Saturday, July 19, 2008
Jerry Green
Grand Old Lady at The Corner deserved a better farewell song

The tune was maudlin and nostalgic, not one of the favorites warbled by Frank Sinatra, but one of mine. It was called "There Used To Be A Ballpark."

And in my imagination, Sinatra was standing on a street corner above a new hole in the ground and mourning the death of a favorite building.

"There used to be a ball park -- right here," Sinatra sang.

The street corner was not at Michigan and Trumbull, once a favorite location in Detroit, but rather at Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn.

The ballpark was Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. And once upon a time, it was the home park of Duke Snider and Carl Erskine and Pee Wee Reese and Dolf Camilli and Zack Wheat and Dazzy Vance and Roy Campanella and Carl Furillo and Gil Hodges. Frenchy Bordagaray and Van Lingle Mungo and Babe Herman, who once, according to legend, tripled into a double play.

And Ebbets Field was the ballpark of a most courageous man named Jackie Robinson, who endured hell and became major personage in American history.

They were all ballplayers through the years with the Dodgers, before the franchise abandoned Brooklyn and opened shop in Los Angeles 50 years ago. They were ballplayers from my youth and before it.

One of a kind

And with the makeshift Dodgers Sym-phony playing its raucous tunes behind first base and Hilda Chester waving her cowbell, there was never a ballpark quite like it.

"There Used To Be A Ballpark," in Sinatra's voice, burrowed through my head this past week as the pick axes and the wrecker's rusty ball went to work on Tiger Stadium. The objective is to destroy the ancient ballpark, flatten it, open a hole in the ground.

It hurts because it hurts when historic structures are turned into ruins. It hurts when ballparks, so vital in Americana, are leveled.

It hurts especially because, as Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, figured in my lifetime love of baseball. So did the ballpark I first visited when it was called Briggs Stadium. Briggs Stadium/Tiger Stadium became so special because it served as my office for its last 34 years. I covered the Lions there when they won their most recent championship 51 years ago. And the Tigers there during two championship seasons.

I watched Ozzie Virgil go 5-for-5 the night 50 years ago when he became the Tigers' first black player, despite what the self-styled sophisticates might claim now in their attempts to revise history. I saw Denny McLain win his 30th game there 40 years ago.

House of memories

On the first day I ever covered a ballgame I watched the magnificent Al Kaline throw out a runner at home plate at Briggs Stadium and hit the home run that beat the Yankees. The score was 1-0, the game total Kaline.

One Saturday, 49 years ago, I was snapped at by Ty Cobb during an Oldtimers Game. Snapped at as a cub writer while Hank Greenberg smiled and Charlie Gehringer remained calm and placid.

I saw Norm Cash hit baseballs over the right field roof and Harmon Killebrew hit one over the left field stands. And Kirk Gibson strut his stuff in the World Series. And Reggie Jackson strut his stuff with the home run off the rooftop light tower in right in the All-Star Game.

My memory rattles with the vision of Willie Horton's first big league home run, deep into the bleachers in upper left center. And of Willie's throw that caught Lou Brock at the plate and turned the '68 World Series toward the Tigers.

And I thrived on the quaint wisdom of Sparky Anderson, who rescued me with his words on nights inside the old ballpark when I was hard-up for a column.

They are memories for an eternity.

"There used to be a ballpark -- right here."

Tiger Stadium is being smashed to smithereens with hardly a proper sendoff.

Obsolete treasures

America turned misty-eyed as the nation was flooded with nostalgia this past week with the All-Star Game. There have been times that I have been cynical about old Detroit baseball fans and their hanging on in hopes of maintaining Tiger Stadium forever.

But it is quite regrettable as Tiger Stadium is smashed into dust and broken slabs of concrete that the old ballpark did not receive the tribute accorded to Yankee Stadium. That, too, shall be blasted into oblivion. Across the street, a new Yankee Stadium is to be finished before the 2009 season.

Through the decades, I have had the privilege of watching ballgames in some 50 to 55 ballparks -- most beautiful, some ugly. Ballgames in such long-gone fields of dreams from Braves Field in Boston and County Stadium in Milwaukee to Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta with the same franchise playing at home. From Shibe Park in Philadelphia to Griffith Stadium in Washington, to Crosley Field and Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati to Forbes Field and Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh to old Comiskey in Chicago.

All of them turned into dust or mausoleums or shopping centers or apartment buildings. The old-fashioned and the circular and many of the newer retro.

I'm something of a weirdo for ballparks. So fortunately for me ballgames are being played still in Fenway Park, which contributed also to my baseball roots so many years ago, and Wrigley Field. They survive as the traditional old parks, loaded with character and emotion.

But there is emotion, too, for that home of the Dodgers in Brooklyn, site now of the Ebbets Field apartments. And the irreplaceable Briggs Stadium/Tiger Stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, site certainly of some future useless eyesore.

I remain maudlin and nostalgic in this era of wrecking our treasured baseball stadiums because:

"There used to be a ballpark -- right here!"

"There used to be a ballpark -- right here!" - Frank Sinatra

Tiger Stadium should have hosted the All Star Game in 1999

Fenway the 2005 game


And Comerica could have hosted it sometime between 2015-2020

Fuck Selig


And Mafia Mike Ilitch