Tearing Down More Than Just Concrete

Say goodbye to Seattle’s Kingdome and Houston’s Astrodome in a purge of baseball dungeons. Antiquated County Stadium in Milwaukee is on the way out. The same for the Candlestick-3Com wind tunnel in San Francisco.

Good riddance to them all, but shed a tear for Tiger Stadium.

The ballpark in downtown Detroit stands at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues, where baseball’s been played for more than 100 years. The current stadium opened in 1912 on the same week the Titanic sunk. Ty Cobb was the center fielder and celebrated opening day by stealing home.

The stadium’s name has changed a couple of times and been painted every so often. But the dugouts are as small and the dressing rooms as cramped now as they were in 1912.

On a sunny day, the shadows fall the same way they always did, peeking over the roof and grandstand like a kid squinting through an opening in the fence.

Cobb and Cochrane played there. So did Greenberg and Gehringer. Kaline and Kell, too. All of them are in Cooperstown now, enshrined there after a trip that began at that downtown intersection where a haymarket once stood.

There is history hidden in every crack and crevice of the old place.

This is where Lou Gehrig ended his consecutive game streak at 2,130 games 60 years ago, sitting in a visiting dugout no different today than it was in 1939.

This is where Ted Williams hit a two-out home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the 1941 All-Star game and skipped his way around the bases like a youngster on his way to a candy store.

This is where Denny McLain crafted a 31-win season and Mark Fidrych talked to baseballs and manicured the mound.

This is where Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker spent almost two decades playing shortstop and second base side-by-side.

This is where Reggie Jackson hit an All-Star home run for the ages, a soaring shot that banged into a generator box atop the right field roof.

This is Tiger Stadium.

It awaits the wrecker’s ball now, the inevitable parade of progress that has taken down so many of the grand old parks -- the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, Crosley Field and a host of others.

A mile or so away, construction continues on Comerica Park, a state of the art stadium equipped with all the requisite bells and whistles and, most importantly, layers of luxury boxes, the cash registers of modern baseball.

There are few luxuries in Tiger Stadium, boxes or otherwise. Instead there is history. Walk the corridors and it is everywhere. You can feel it. You can smell it.

For some of those who spent significant time there, the most enduring memory is catching that first glimpse of the place, a look that lasted a lifetime. Lance Parrish, now the third base coach, arrived in 1977 to become Detroit’s catcher.

“We had a day game, my first day there,” he said. “I got out early, when the ushers were cleaning the seats off, and then the people started piling in.

“I remember the smells. Somebody around there was smoking a cigar and I could smell that. And the smell of the grass. And just the smell of the stadium. I’ll never forget that. It’s burned into my mind.”

Kaline was 18 when he got there in 1953, so young that guards didn’t believe he was a player. Once he convinced them, he found himself engulfed by a sea of green, a sight he will never forget.

“When I got into the ballpark, I walked right behind home plate and it was absolutely the most beautiful place I’d ever seen in my life,” he said. “All the seats were dark green. The grass was as green as I had ever seen. Boy, that had a lasting impression on me when I first saw it. It was a lasting memory.”

When Trammell, now the hitting coach, got there in 1977, he remembered thinking at first that the building looked like an old warehouse. Then he got closer. Then he saw the inside, double-decked, closed-in, the roof, the girders. Then he realized that he was a special place, a place with a baseball resume to envy.

Sparky Anderson, who managed the Tigers from 1979 to 1995, remembered his reaction to seeing the ballpark for the first time.

“My all-time favorite memory is the day I came up there,” he said. “I came off the freeway and saw it there, with the light towers and the high walls. That, to me, is what the major leagues is.

“It’s got the angles, it’s got the overhang in right, it’s got everything a ballpark is supposed to have. All these other new things, they put in a little of this and a little of that. But they don’t have the major league touch. That stadium has them all. That was an original.

“Each time a person goes to that stadium, they should treasure it, because they’ll never see this again. They won’t see the girders, the short right field, the way the sun shines in the place, but if they take the time to see it this summer, they’ll remember it.”