An Interview with Tom Stanton, Part I

Tom Stanton is the author of several baseball books, including The Final Season, an award-winning account of the last 81 games played at Tiger Stadium. (Click here for my review.) Last week he was generous enough to talk with me for a while about several subjects -- Tiger Stadium, fathers and sons, the financial disparity in the game, Barry Bonds, and Hank Aaron. I've broken our conversation into two parts; this is part one. Enjoy.

BrokenCowboy
First of all, I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your book an awful lot, and the biggest question that I had as I was reading it, and you address this obviously in the book, but can you talk about how you decided to attend all 81 games? And did you know right away that you wanted to turn the experience into a book, or did that kind of occur later in the process?

Tom Stanton
Just before I get into that, just so you’re aware, The Final Season is the first of three baseball books I have, so there have been two others that have come since then, The Road to Cooperstown, and just this last year Hank Aaron and the Home Run that Changed America. But with the Final Season, it was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. I was a baseball-obsessed kid growing up in Detroit, and somehow I got myself on the Detroit Tigers’ mailing list and each winter when I was a boy I’d receive these beautiful brochures talking about full-season ticket packages, and I vowed someday when I was smarter than my father that I would buy one of those packages and go to every home game. Lo and behold the years have a way of rolling past, and we were approaching Tiger Stadium’s final season and I still hadn’t fulfilled that, so I decided to take a year to do that. Yeah, I thought from the outset that I would be doing a book -- at least that’s the alibi I gave family and my wife as I fulfilled this mid-life crisis in my wife’s view, and went to all these games. So that was the ambition, to write a book while satisfying this compelling need to be there in that last year.

BC
One of my favorite aspects of your book is the idea that a place like a ballpark can hold such incredible emotional significance for so many people. What was it like for you to walk into Tiger Stadium on any given day?

TS
In my case, four generations of my family had been going to that ballpark, first when it was Navin Field back in the era of Ty Cobb, then as Briggs Stadium, and then as Tiger Stadium. My grandfather, who had immigrated to America from Poland, learned about the country through baseball. He used to see Sam Crawford and Harry Heilemann and others play. And so whenever I’d walk into Tiger Stadium, you’d feel the ghosts of history kind of swirling around you. You couldn’t go to the place without hearing your uncles tell the stories they had told in your childhood of running up and down the ramps that still existed there, of going to ballgames with their father. The love of the game has been passed down through generations by my family from father to son, and that’s not unique, that happens with lots of people. I think that’s why so many people feel emotional bonds to these green cathedrals.

BC
Yeah, I agree with you completely. There’s something almost tangible that you feel, you know, when you walk into these parks. I agree.

TS
You have your own memories, and then you have kind of your inherited memories, and it’s just a very rich experience. I think people who don’t share that passion for the game, you know, they probably struggle to understand it, but it’s about more than just a place, it’s about so many other things. In my case, as I mentioned in the book, my grandfather died before I was born, and the family home that my father grew up in was burned down and demolished years later, so the ballpark became the only place really, the only physical place where I could go to to connect with this grandfather that I knew only through stories. It was the only place that really still existed. And so it’s a very dear emotional connection there.

BC
I loved all of the characters that you introduced throughout this eighty-one game journey. Some of them were obvious -- Ernie Harwell, for example. And some, like Alice Cooper, were surprizing. But most interesting, I think, were the fans you interviewed who had their own individual stories, and I was wondering, how did you find all of these people? Did you simply approach people who seemed like they were making some sort of a pilgrimage like you were? What was that process?

TS
Yeah, some of it just came about naturally. When you go to every game, you start to see some of the same people, and just get to know some people. The workers, in particular. Nancy Griffin, the African-American vendor out in the outfield. You just get to know people -- ushers, hot dog vendors. Others, though, sometimes it was just a matter of who I was sitting around on that day, or who I was observing. People’s reactions to what was taking place might draw me to them. It was kind of serendipitous in most cases.

BC
That’s how it felt, that’s how it came across in the book.

TS
Yeah, in retrospect I think probably editors would’ve preferred if you knew specifically going in what the poignant stories were gonna be so you could chart those throughout, but it was more of a discovery experience for me, so I didn’t go there knowing... except in a few cases, like when I checked on Ernie Harwell and Al Kaline, except for those cases, it was just who I stumbled upon.

BC
You just mentioned Al Kaline. I wanted to ask you about him, because I enjoyed that section. I was wondering if you could talk about what he meant to you as a boy, and then what it was like interviewing your hero so many years later?

TS
Yeah, it’s still a very memorable experience for me. But if you grew up in Detroit like I did in the sixties and early seventies and you were a baseball fan, Al Kaline was your baseball god. There was really nobody who approached him, not just in terms of skill but just in terms of what he meant to the city. In my case, on a very personal level, this sounds silly to people who haven’t had similar experiences, but there was a lot of turmoil in my life, my mother was very ill for much of my childhood, in hospitals with brain surgeries, and there was a lot of dissension in the late sixties, early seventies relating it, a few changes in our culture and society, and Al Kaline was this one constant who never seemed to change. So he was kind of a stabilizing figure, which sounds odd when you don’t really know the person, but that’s the role I think heroes can play. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but it’s there in the way that they inspire you and affect you. So Kaline had that impact on me, and here I am many years later, no longer a child, I’m in my late thirties at that stage when I’m going to Tiger Stadium, and I do have press access to the field. And I’d notice Kaline throughout the season, I mean he was obviously the first thing I would notice on the field, your hero’s out there. And the other ballplayers treated him with reverence, these young guys. I say in the book they kind of gathered around him as if he were the flame on a cold winter’s night.

BC
I enjoyed that, it was almost comforting. Sometimes you hear stories about older players who walk on the field and aren’t noticed by the current players. I was glad to see that he still had that iconic status.

TS
He did. I mean even though some of those guys weren’t even born when he retired. But he had that, and often Kaline would be on the field before the gates opened, before the fans came in, and having press access I would be there, and you would see him just kind of standing aside the dugout staring out into right field, and you could only wonder what was going through his mind, and he’d disappear before the fans got there and just kind of go into the dugout and the clubhouse. I was on the field one time I couldn’t muster up the courage to talk to the guy. I’ve interviewed people who are more famous than Al Kaline, but instantly when you’re interviewing your hero, or you’re approaching him, you’re that eleven- or twelve-year-old kid. It took me some weeks to get up to the point where I felt comfortable doing that. It sounds silly, especially to my journalistic friends, to say something like that...

BC
It makes perfect sense to me, it makes perfect sense.

TS
Yeah, you’re just kind of plunged back into those old emotions. You’re not on equal footing with your hero. And he’s kind of a shy guy, an aloof guy, and so he’s not real easy to warm up to, as I noted, and we didn’t become best friends or anything, but he did warm up a bit when we started talking about fathers. It’s the one thing I think a lot of ballplayers and ballplaying fans have in common is kind of the role their fathers played in their love of the game. So it was a memorable experience for me. I’m going to be honored later this year by this organization that does a Detroit Celebrity of the Year and a Detroit Sports Media Person of the Year, and Kaline’s supposed to be the Sports Celebrity of the Year at the same time, so I’m kind of excited about that.

BC
Wow, that’s really cool. Another thing that you kind of addressed in the book is the fact that there are whispers about replacing Fenway Park, and George Steinbrenner occasionally makes noises about building a new stadium for the Yankees, but it doesn’t look like either of those two fields seems to be going anywhere. Meanwhile, Wrigley Field has achieved landmark status in Chicago and is probably more important to the city than the Cubs are. Tiger Stadium certainly belongs in that group except for the fact that it’s empty right now. Why do you think that is?

TS
I struggled with that question for much of that season, and still do. I guess it’s... Tiger Stadium never took hold nationally in the same way that Wrigley or Fenway or Yankee Stadium did. I think partly it’s because of the type of town Detroit is. It’s very much a working man’s town, it’s an industrial city, very blue collar. And Tiger Stadium wasn’t celebrated in baseball literature in the same way. There was something that I had to come to grasps with -- why our ballpark and not the others? I adore Fenway and Wrigley, I haven’t been to Yankee Stadium still, although I’ll be there this year, and I’m sure that’ll be pleasurable too, and I want for those places to persevere, but you wonder why Tiger Stadium wasn’t on that equal footing. I think if you go to the place, it has a different feel from Fenway or Wrigley, but it very much has that spirit about it. I think it was just a matter of for some reason it just wasn’t held in the same esteem even though it was every bit as old as Fenway. I mean, it opened on the same day.

BC
One thing that surprized me as I opened up the book and started reading is that his book was as much about you and your family as it was about Tiger Stadium, and obviously, as you explained, the two are kind of intertwined. Did that surprize you at all the way the book ended up, or is that how you always envisioned it?

TS
No, it wasn’t as I envisioned it originally. The book changed over time. When I started I thought it would be a little bit of my own experiences and more of telling the history of the park through the fans that shared the game their through many decades. But as I got into it and started absorbing the experience, it was obvious to me why I was there, very personal reasons, and that started coming through in what I was writing. I’m happy that the book turned out that way, but it was at the encouragement of editors that my agent was approaching who were saying in the early drafts that the strength of the book was really the family stories and that personal connection. I was freed at that point to focus more so on that, which is something you kind of want permission for because it feels a little bit self-indulgent. But in the end it doesn’t come off that way I don’t think, because a lot of baseball fans can relate to that and the story resonates, and when people read your work, especially something personal such as that, they’re not necessarily just seeing you in it, the author, they’re picturing themselves in that story because they’ve had similar experiences and can in many cases see their own family, grandparents and fathers, in those tales.

BC
A two-part question I wanted to ask you. Did you learn a lot about your family through this, and what was your family’s reaction to the finished product?

TS
I knew a lot about my family history prior to this anyway, but you couldn’t help but learn a lot more. It strengthened my family, it was a good experience. You know, some families perhaps would object to having their dysfunctional aspects advertised to the world, particularly in the case where my father had not seen a couple of his brothers for a long time, but it brought that uncle back into our lives in one way, and so that result was something very beautiful. I think I was very close to my father as it was, but it made us even closer, and it created a bond that was even stronger than what we had started. You know, it was positive all the way around. It was a beautiful experience for me personally, and for my family.

BC
You mentioned this a couple of times. I wanted to see if you could elaborate on it a little bit. Much is made about the importance of fathers and sons within the framework of baseball. You write about the bond you shared with your father through baseball, and several of the subjects in your book -- Al Kaline, Brian Moehler, for example -- speak of this as well. Can you talk about that for a minute? What is it exactly about fathers and sons and baseball?

TS
A lot of writers have been pondering that for a long time... It’s not easy to put your finger on. But the bond seems greater, in my case certainly it is, with baseball than it is with other sports. I don’t think it’s always just a matter of being a sport. But I think some of it is... one of the things that people who don’t like baseball complain about is that it’s a slow game. There’s not continuous action on the field, and you have these dead periods of time when you’re watching. But one of the beautiful parts of that is it allows you to kind of have a relationship within the game with the people you’re experiencing it with, and in many of our cases the people we experience it with are family originally, in the early years. So I think our relationships are more tied to the sport in that sense, that you develop a very personal bond with the sport, or in my case with my father, watching those games either in front of the television or at the ballpark itself. It’s not continuous action, you have a chance to talk, whether or not it’s a... it’s not a contrived thing where you’re setting out to do that, but it just happens naturally. You’ve got your father talking about his childhood experiences, and the guys he rooted for, Greenberg and Gehringer in my dad’s case, and then you kind of pass this love on for the game, and share this passion for it, and I think that can’t help but create that bond and sort of reinforce it. And then you have the catches in the backyard, which... when you’re playing catch with your dad in the backyard it’s different from maybe having a game of one-on-one basketball in the driveway. It’s not a competitive thing, in any sense. It’s just connecting with that ball going back and forth between you, and so I guess there are a lot of reasons. I’m not being very coherent or enlightening, but I do think it has to do with the pace of the game and the fact that it’s been around a lot longer than many games, and so consequently you have the ability to have these family stories that go back generations are shared and then retold.

BC
I think there’s a lot to that, especially the pace of the game. So much of what I know about baseball came from listening to Vin Scully talk between pitches about things that happened fifty years ago in Brooklyn, so I think there’s a lot to that.

TS
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Part I | Part II

Comments

[Charles Hogan]

I worked concessions at Tiger Stadium from 1972-78. Loads of memories there. Now I'm hungry to read this book.