Tiger Stadium model

Tiger Stadium lives on - sort of - in fan's lifelike model
He shares detailed model of ballpark with mourning fans
BY BILL McGRAW • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • July 21, 2008

Even as Tiger Stadium disappears, piece by piece, it will live on forever in Mike Guadiana's Lincoln Park basement.

Guadiana, an automotive pattern-maker in real life, is the stadium's Sherlock Holmes and Michelangelo. He has investigated the stadium girder by girder, and his objet d'art is a scale model of the stadium that is stunning in its resemblance to the real McCoy.

He created the model in 1986, but only a few people have seen it over the years. These days, with heavy machinery chewing up the real stadium, Guadiana has been driving the little stadium in the back of his 1993 GMC Yukon to a dusty vacant lot at Trumbull and the Fisher Freeway service drive.

People who gather there to watch the demolition of the real stadium across the street look on the faux stadium with awe.

"Very nice," one fan said last week after staring at it silently for about five minutes.

"Some guys leave work and go to the bar," Guadiana said. "I was sort of an artistic kind of guy."

While he constructed the model in '86, Guadiana based his stadium on the way Tiger Stadium looked in 1972, before a renovation transformed the seats from green wood to blue plastic and made other changes.

His attention to detail is striking: The tarp sits in its place against the wall down the third-base line; the old-school scoreboard shows a "Stroh-It Home" ad and out-of-town scores; the battery-powered lights light up.

"It looks real nice at night," Guadiana said.

Guadiana spoke above the noisy demolition machinery, as a fine mist from the dust-controlling water gun at the stadium drifted into the vacant lot.

Born in Sabinas Hidalgo, Mexico, Guadiana, 50, came to Detroit in 1967 as a child with his family. His father took him to the stadium that year, and Guadiana said he was fascinated with the building and the fans.

"You could fit all my town into it," he said. "I fell in love with the stadium from the get-go."

Guadiana wiped off the seats as an usher in 1975, and spent his spare time studying the park's concourses and exploring its nooks and crannies.

His model is mostly made from balsa wood, with some cardboard. It measures about 2 1/2 feet by 2 feet and weighs between 10 and 20 pounds. He estimates that each 10 feet of the stadium represents 3/8 of an inch on his model.

In designing his ballpark, Guadiana delved into archival material at the Detroit Public Library. He said he discovered the flagpole originally stood on the right-field side of centerfield. He believes it was moved to the left-field side in the late 1930s.

In 1912, when the stadium opened -- as Navin Field -- Guadiana said the first few rows around the infield of the 1972 stadium did not exist, making the dugouts protrude into the sidelines instead of blending into the stands as they did in later decades.

He even appears to have solved a stadium mystery: It involves the centerfield wall.

In the late 1990s, when Tigers officials were designing Comerica Park, they discovered the distance to straightaway center was 425 feet, even though the sign on the wall famously proclaimed 440, deepest in the majors. They couldn't explain the discrepancy.

Guadiana said he discovered there was an original wall that was 440 feet from home plate, but the Tigers replaced it over the years by one that was about 15 feet closer to home plate. But he said he believes they slapped the 440 sign on the new barrier, even though it was closer to home.

"I believe it was put there in 1949," Guadiana said. "I knew all along it was not 440."

It took Guadiana a year and a half to finish his own private Tiger Stadium. Taking it out on the vacant lot is his first attempt at displaying it. He might donate it some day to an institution like the Henry Ford, he said.

One person asked Guadiana if he could do a model of one of Detroit's other legendary abandoned buildings, the Michigan Central Station, which is right down the street from Tiger Stadium.

Said Guadiana: "I don't know. There seems to be more fans for baseball stadiums."

Guadiana with his stadium model


Detailed down to tarps in foul territory

That's pretty cool. The real thing was better though

well, sure! But at this point, all we have are models, video, and memories.

Maybe Not;


Maybe part of the stadium will be saved

We can only hope! It's neat to see this though. Hope he donates it to a museum so many other people can enjoy his work.

Or make a whole bunch of them and sell to the public



Great Keepsake

GS, you'd better get down to City Hall, smack Kwame around, and get the stadium saved!

Money is what is gonna save the stadium; not laying a smackdown on Kwame


Though I am not a huge fan of Federal Money going to earmark saving the Stadium


I don't want to see it all gone