I'm reading an excellent book about Detroit, the Tigers and the last season at Michigan and Trumbull.
"The Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark" by Tom Stanton won the Casey Award for best baseball book of the year when it was punlished in 2002.
A journalist and former journalism professor at University of Detroit Mercy (from which four of my family members graduated back when it was just U of D), Stanton received a Michigan Journalism Fellowship.
He grew up on the east side of Detroit, near City Airport, but I don't hold that against him.
Totally agreed. I loved the book. He tells a great story about his idol, Al Kaline, and his Dad, who he thought had an irritating habit of jingling his keys or change in his pocket. That last year he went to spring training, and while standing around the batting cage, heard somebody behind him "playing pocket pool" jingling keys. He turned around ready to snap at the guy, and it was Kaline.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, kids can be cruel. On my last pilgrimage to Tiger Stadium, I took my family, and we walked around the outside, giving a "historical tour" of my youth, where the Norm Cash ball probably landed on the lumber company, etc. As I started to tear up, one of my daughters said, "Dad, get a grip, you're taking this worse than when Grandma died." Ouch.
Thanks for the suggestion for my reading list - I will pick it up.
ReplyDeleteKaline too was my idol. If I ever can figure out this new technology, I will take a picture of my pride and joy. I have an autographed jersey of Al's, and I have surrounded the jersyey with a baseball card from each of his 22 seasons. I had collected the cards for years and I thought it would be fun to display them, instead of having them sit in a box. So when I bought the jersey everything else fell in to place.
In the book Alice Cooper tells how he met all kinds of famous people, including the Beatles, but the only time he was speechless was when he met Al Kaline.
ReplyDeleteI saw Al down here in the fall instructional league. Took his photo but didn't dream of saying anything to him.
The book also tells how on the final Opening Day at Tiger Stadium Todd Jones took the mound wearing Kaline's Wilson A-2000 glove from the 1974 season.
A few other good Tiger books include:
ReplyDelete"No Big Deal" by Mark Fidrych and Tom Clark
"Behind the Mask" by Bill Freehan
"Inside Pitch: Roger Craig's 1984 Tiger Journal"
"Nobody's Perfect" by Denny McLain
"The Tigers of '68: Baseball's Last Real Champions" by George Cantor
I loved this book! He did a great job of capturing the atmosphere and the deep love that people had (and still have) for Tiger Stadium. On the morning of the final game, I arrived at the park super early. Usually the media can't get in until 3-4 hours before the game, but I got there at about 9 a.m. because I wanted to walk around, sit in different seats and think about all of the good memories I've had there -- you know, spend the day with the ol' girl. As I was wandering around, Todd Jones was doing the same thing, and together we decided, 'Hey, let's climb inside the scoreboard.' So like excited little kids who were getting away with something, we went inside the scoreboard and climbed several ladders until we broke the surface. There we were, on top of the stadium in straight away center, and we were speechless. I took a lot of pictures, but my favorite is of Jones just sitting there, staring at the field below, quietly taking it all in. For 10 minutes, neither of us said a word. We didn't have to.
ReplyDelete