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UPDATED SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1999 TOMORROW IS THE LAST GAME |
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My name is William Laird. I am 75 years old, I live in Dearborn, and I made tools and dies for a
living for forty-one years until I retired in 1989. My grandson Daniel set up this computer for me
in the spring so I could write about the ballpark before they close it. He says to keep the words
big so I can read them. That suits me fine.
I went to my first game at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in the summer of 1934, when I was ten years old, with my father, Arthur Laird. I have been going ever since, give or take a war. Tomorrow, Monday, September 27, the Tigers play the Kansas City Royals in the last game ever at Tiger Stadium. Daniel and I have two seats in the upper deck. After that the Tigers move to the new park downtown and the old place goes dark. So this is my last week of writing about it while it is still a ballpark.
Navin Field opened on April 20, 1912, named for the club's owner, Frank Navin. That was the same day Fenway Park opened in Boston, and neither one got much attention in the papers, because it was the week the Titanic went down. My father was twelve and he was not there, but he saw Ty Cobb play there plenty of times later and never let me forget it. Briggs Stadium is what they called it from 1938, after the new owner, Walter Briggs, built the double decks all the way around and closed it in. I was fourteen and I thought it was the biggest building in the world. They didn't put lights in until 1948. The Tigers were the last team in the American League to play at night. My father said baseball was meant to be played in the sun and the lights were a fad. Tiger Stadium since 1961. Same place. Same seats, mostly. I never called it anything but "the ballpark," and my father never called it anything but Navin Field, right up until he died in 1972.
The upper deck in right field hangs out over the field. About ten feet out past the lower deck. A fly ball the right fielder could have caught can drop into the front row of the upper deck for a home run. Pitchers hated it. I loved it. I caught a foul ball up there in 1956 and gave it to a little girl who was crying because she'd dropped her hot dog. The flagpole is in play. Way out in deep center, on the field itself, not behind the fence. A ball that hits it is still in play. I have seen center fielders run right into the base of it chasing a fly ball. I don't know of another park like that. You are close. The upper deck seats sit right on top of the action, closer to the field than anywhere else I've ever been. You can hear the catcher talk. You can hear the first baseman chewing. The posts. All those steel posts holding up the roof. If you got a seat behind one, you spent the game leaning left and right like a man on a boat. Old-timers called it part of the charm. The ones who said that had good seats.
1934 was my first year and the Tigers won the pennant. That summer I saw Babe Ruth play, in his last year with the Yankees, round as a barrel. That September Hank Greenberg sat out a game on Yom Kippur and the whole city talked about it. The Tigers lost the World Series to the Cardinals in seven games, and the seventh game was at Navin Field, and it got so ugly that the fans in left field threw fruit at Joe Medwick until the Commissioner took him out of the game. I ran home from school and heard the end of it on our Philco, and my mother made me go to school the next day anyway. 1935. The first one. The Tigers beat the Cubs in six games, even after Greenberg broke his wrist in the second game. The sixth game was at Navin Field on Monday, October 7. My father wrote a note to my teacher saying I had a toothache, and we stood in line for bleacher seats. Tied in the ninth. A Cub led off with a triple, and Tommy Bridges got the next three men out and left him standing on third. Then in the bottom of the ninth Mickey Cochrane got on, and Goose Goslin singled to right, and Cochrane came around to score, and the whole place came down. I was eleven. My father picked me up and held me over his head and he was crying, which I had never seen and only saw once more. The toothache was cured. 1945. I was in the Navy, on a destroyer in the Pacific. The war was over by then, but we were still out there waiting to come home. Greenberg was back from the Army that summer and hit a grand slam on the last day of the season to win the pennant. We got the Series on the radio, scratchy and late, the whole mess deck listening, me and two other fellows from Michigan and about forty men from Chicago. The Tigers won in seven. Hal Newhouser won the last game. I didn't hear the end of it from the Chicago boys, mostly because I wouldn't stop talking. 1968. After the riots the summer before, this city needed something, and that team gave it to us. Denny McLain won thirty-one games. The World Series was the Cardinals again, and we were down three games to one. I took a day off from the shop and went to the fifth game, at the ballpark, on Monday, October 7, 1968, with my son Noel, who was sixteen. Thirty-three years to the day after the Goslin game, and it didn't hit me until later. Lou Brock tried to score standing up and Willie Horton threw him out at the plate from left field. Al Kaline got the big hit in the seventh. Mickey Lolich went the whole way. Then they won the sixth game in St. Louis, and on Thursday, October 10, Lolich beat Bob Gibson in the seventh game. It was a day game. We had it on a transistor radio taped to Marty McClintock's lathe at the shop, and when Jim Northrup's triple went over the center fielder's head, every machine in the place stopped and forty men started yelling. The foreman didn't say a word. He was yelling too. 1984. Thirty-five wins and five losses to start the year, and Jack Morris threw a no-hitter the first week. Sparky Anderson managing. They beat San Diego in five games and the last one was at the ballpark on Sunday, October 14, 1984. I was sixty that year and didn't get tickets, so I watched it on TV at Noel's house with my grandson Daniel, who was two and didn't care. Kirk Gibson hit two home runs that day, and the second one went up into the upper deck in right field in the eighth inning. Noel stood on his couch. I had to hold the baby.
In 1934 my father paid about fifty cents apiece for us to sit in the bleachers, and a hot dog was a dime. He took the streetcar down from our house and we walked the rest. He made twenty-two dollars a week at the time, and two games a summer was what he could do. When I was working, in the sixties and seventies, a good reserved seat was a few dollars. I went twenty or thirty times a year. This year I paid more to park than my father paid to get the two of us in for the whole summer of 1934. I don't hold it against anybody. It's just how it is. Daniel got tomorrow's tickets for us and he won't tell me what he paid, and I've decided not to ask.
1. Coming up the ramp from the dark concourse and seeing the grass all at once. Sixty-five years and it gets me every time. 2. The green seats, and the green everywhere. My wife Mary said the place looked like the inside of a pickle jar. She came with me every Sunday for forty-five years anyway. 3. The overhang in right. 4. The flagpole in center. 5. Ernie Harwell on the radio on a summer night, coming out of every porch on the block. 6. The fellows selling peanuts outside on Trumbull, cheaper than inside, and everybody knows it. 7. The way the whole park shakes when the crowd stomps in the upper deck. 8. Sitting in the same section my father sat in, with my grandson sitting where I used to sit. 9. Kaline in right field, which I'll miss even though he retired twenty-five years ago, because I can still see him out there. 10. The corner itself. Michigan and Trumbull. Every Detroiter knows where that is without asking.
The new park downtown, Comerica Park, is supposed to open next April. I've driven by it while they're building it. It's big and it's going to be nice, with a lot of things for kids. I will go. Daniel's already talking about opening day. But I won't pretend it's the same. You can't build sixty-five years. You have to sit through them. Nobody knows yet what happens to the old ballpark. People are talking about saving the field, or part of the stands. I hope they do something. I would hate to drive down Michigan Avenue someday and see a parking lot. Mary passed in 1995, and she'd have laughed at me for making a fuss. But I wanted to get this down while the lights are still on. Tomorrow afternoon Daniel and I will go down early. We'll park where my father used to get off the streetcar and walk the rest, the way he and I did in 1934. We'll go up to the upper deck. I am going to bring my father's old scorecard pencil and keep score of the last game. I'll write it all up this week and put it here, the whole thing, inning by inning. Whatever happens, I'll be there for the last out. That's all I ever wanted. |
Fans through the turnstile since Opening Day, April 1999:    
If you went to Navin Field or Briggs Stadium, write and tell me about your first game. [email protected] William Laird, Dearborn, Michigan Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999 |