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 two. Enjoy.
BrokenCowboy
So your book centers on the emotions connected with Tiger Stadium. I was wondering, now five years later, what do you feel when you walk into Comerica Park?
Tom Stanton
I don’t say anything disparaging about Comerica. It’s a nice place to watch a ballgame, but it’s still a fact that most of my memories are at the place a mile down the road. And as I tell in the book, there’s a spot in Comerica where you can go up behind the first base, left field stands and look off in the horizon and still see the light standards on Tiger Stadium about a mile away, and it’s a very melancholy feeling when I go to the ballpark, because I always go up that area and I’ll take a look at the old ballpark. If I’m down there often I’ll drive past the old ballpark. The new ballpark is a good place to watch ballgames. The view is much less obstructed, in the upper deck you’re further from the action. One of the things people dislike is that there were a lot of obstructed view seats, and that’s because there were these huge columns that held up the upper deck, which was right on top of the action. In the new ballpark the upper deck is further back from the action, but they don’t have as many obstructed view seats. So I miss that closeness to the field itself that you had at the ballpark, and it’s almost a metaphor for what’s happened to baseball in a broader sense. There is more of a distance between players and fans, not just in terms of physical distance, but I think psychologically and emotionally. You see that in a lot of respects. I mean, ballplayers used to have hangouts. I know in Detroit ballplayers used to go to Lindell A.C. Bar after ballgames. For a lot of reasons, probably litigation being one of them, they don’t socialize with fans in that same way. You have the physical distance on the field, and Tiger Stadium, old ballparks, players after the game used to have to come out of the clubhouse and walk through the tunnels to get to their cars. Now they can avoid the fans entirely if they want to. And you have the differential in the wages, too. Ballplayers have always made more money than the fans who watched the games, but the multiples now are just so astronomic it’s just difficult for fans to relate.
BC
You mentioned the obstructed view seats. I grew up in Detroit for my first eight years of life, and the first baseball game I attended was at the stadium there. Mark Fidrych was pitching. It was the game that he came out after two thirds of an inning, and it was pretty much the end of the road for him. It was in ‘77, and I remember spending the rest of the game pouting -- I was seven years old -- just being so devastated, because I had been looking forward to this game all summer. But anyway, we go back from time to time for family reunions, and maybe ten years ago I bought tickets to a game -- we had an afternoon free -- and it said on the ticket “OBSTRUCTED VIEW” and I had no idea what this meant. When I got to my seat, there was a girder directly in front of my feet, I had one foot on either side, it was out in left field. It was an interesting way to watch a game. I always think of that when I think of Tiger Stadium and hear “obstructed view.”
TS
(Laughing) It was a fact of life there. In fact they estimated that, one of the officials told me that probably two thirds of the seats were obstructed in some way. But most of the time it wasn’t an issue. They didn’t sell enough tickets, you could just kind of move somewhere else. But that’s a classic moment.
BC
Can you imagine one of your grandchildren attending all 81 games of Comerica’s final season in say, 2099, and writing of the emotional significance of the place? Do you think that a modern park can collect that kind of nostalgia, or is history the only thing that’s necessary for that?
TS
I think a modern park can collect that kind of nostalgia, however I don’t think any of the modern parks are gonna be around eighty years from now. When you look at the chronology of ballparks, right now we just have three that existed before 1925, and all the others have been built since 1960. We have this huge gap in there, and even those that were built in the sixties are now disappearing and replaced by other ones. I suspect it’ll be the same for Comerica and the other ballparks, that they’re not going to be around in thirty to forty years, from teams moving around or from something new happening which forces a change in construction. It was the lack of suites that largely did away with a lot of the old ballparks. I think certainly you can collect the memories wherever people share that game over generations, but I’m not sure those places will exist for generations.
BC
That’s probably true, I agree with you.
TS
I mean, I don’t know. I probably sound too much like a curmudgeon, but we’ll see I guess. It’s just that given the history of those that existed in the sixties and the fact that many of them are gone already... but wherever you make memories, wherever you have fond memories, you always have an emotional attachment to those places. But I do think it’s different where you have a place where you can go that you know Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb played there, because baseball is so much about its history and its tradition and its heritage that I think it’s imperative that they keep the ballparks, the old ballparks that exist, Fenway, Yankee Stadium, and Wrigley Field.
BC
So what’s the latest you’ve heard about any plans for Tiger Stadium? And if the decision were up to you, aside from moving the Tigers back, what would you do with that site?
TS
You know, other than moving the Tigers back, there’s not a whole lot that you can do with an old ballpark that will allow it to be sustained financially. There aren’t a whole lot of uses for a place that seats 50,000 people and shaped as a ballpark. There were some grandiose plans for a while of doing a combination of retail and Tiger Museum and condos throughout the outfield and turning it into like a community and having the ball field be a national park. But Detroit has a lot of economic and development problems as it is, and doing something that grand, it just kind of smells as if it would fail. I don’t think that the city office officials want to do a whole lot with the place. I think what will probably happen is over time there will be a lot of plans floated that will get shot down and eventually the place is just going to be demolished. Because there’s just not a whole lot you can do with a big hulking ballpark. I mean, you’ve been to the place. It’s just kind of planted there right in the neighborhood. The most recent thing was the city was talking that they wanted it demolished to make room for something like a Home Depot, which is, Detroit has so much vacant land, it seems kind of silly that they’d need to have that spot. In Detroit, I don’t want to come down too hard on the city, because there’s some great new developments -- Ford Field and Comerica and different areas that are coming back -- but there are still a lot of old empty skyscrapers that are simply vacant or a huge train depot down the street from Tiger Stadium. And I think it would be worse if Tiger Stadium just kind of deteriorated and rotted away as the train depot has. I guess my preference would be that it come down if that’s what its future is.
BC
You talk a little bit in the book about the current state of baseball, and the division between baseball’s haves and have nots, a gap which only seems to have gotten much wider since 1999. Is the playing field too skewed right now? I mean I don’t know how you could answer that question except for one way, but...
TS
It is. I find myself rooting each year for the Minnesota Twins or the Oakland A’s or some of the teams that don’t have the huge payrolls, and I don’t know if the solution that they’ve developed is really going to accommodate it. You know, the luxury tax, sharing revenue over a certain point. It is, and I say that from the perspective of a Tiger fan whose just experienced losing seasons for most of the decade, decade and a half. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a winning season here, but now our owner is shelling out some bucks, last year for Rodríguez, this year for Magglio. I’m hoping personally their situation turns around, but it’s hard to envision a bright future for a lot of these small market teams. I’m not sure how financially they do compete, and whether the solution baseball has come upon is really going to solve the problem.
BC
Earlier you talked about your passion for the game. Pitchers and catchers report in about a week. When I was a kid, I remember waiting all winter long for that -- it was almost like Christmas for me. Do you still look forward to baseball in the spring? Do you still have that same passion you had when you were younger?
TS
I still look forward to baseball in the spring, but the passion is, it’s very different. I mean, I lived and died for baseball as a kid, and it sounds like you did too. You’re right -- I waited, just anticipated spring training arriving, and the daily news reports that you were getting, and just devoured the stuff and lived for it, but it’s a little different now. I still have the passion for the game, and this year I might actually go down to spring training, which I’ve never experienced that, but it’s different. It’s only natural, I think, that it’s different once you’re out of those childhood years because you come to see the ballplayers, I think, as more human than when you’re a kid. When it’s spring training and you’re a kid, it’s as if your cultural gods are reawakening, your life is spring forth again. But it’s a little bit different. I have children now who are in high school and one in college, so your perspective on what’s important kind of changes.
BC
I have one more question about the Tigers. Even though they missed on some of the bigger free agents, they still had a fairly nice off-season. I was wondering, is there excitement in Detroit about this team coming up in ‘05?
TS
Well, it started last year, I think, with the signing of Pudge. That brought a huge amount of excitement here. I can’t say the latest signings have done proportionately the same, but there certainly is a general sense that the Tigers are now moving in the right direction, that they’re going to be more competitive, and it’s nice to see the owner of the team take more of an interest. You’re probably a big sports fan, so I’m sure you know that Mike Illitch, who owns the Tigers, also owns the Detroit Red Wings, and for years one of the complaints baseball fans have had here is that...
BC
He ignored the Tigers.
TS
He ignored the Tigers at the expense of the Red Wings, which I don’t really think is the case, but his philosophy kind of is that he wants them to get to a competitive point and then he’ll start investing money. But what had happened is the team two years ago was just so dismal that it totally embarrassed the man. I mean, he was a baseball player who actually made it to the minor leagues. It was so devastating the way the team performed that he knew he had to do something, and so he’s been taking steps to make us more competitive, and people are enthused and excited about it. And some of the enthusiasm comes from the fact that we’re going to be hosting the All-Star game this year, which has spurred ticket sales because they’ve tied the All-Star tickets into the season ticket packages. So there is more enthusiasm. We didn’t have any Red Wings hockey this year, so I think that helped too.
BC
Right now I’m about half way through your most recent book, Hank Aaron and the Home Run that Changed America, and it’s impossible to read that without thinking about the chase we’ll see this season and next. The cultural significance is obviously not there, but when Barry hits #756, assuming that he does, will it mean anything to you individually or to America in general?
TS
It’s gonna be different, because all the interviews I’ve done, all the fans I’ve spoken with since my book came out, it’s obvious that people kind of view Bonds as a different animal than Aaron, and view his record in a different light, especially given the accusations of steroid use. I don’t know what the significance is going to be. I mean, it will be different, because you don’t have a black man playing in the South surpassing the greatest white sports legend of all time. It’s an African-American man passing the record of another African-American man, and their contrast is somewhat in their style of play but also in terms of personality they’re very different figures. So it won’t resonate in the same way. I think it’ll be a glorious moment, hopefully, for sports when it happens for baseball, and people will celebrate it. There’ll be a lot of attention. But I think even as Bonds was approaching Mays’ record, he got more attention than Aaron, not when Aaron surpassed Ruth’s record, but through much of that 1973 season when he was closing in on it. The media world has changed substantially since then, so we’re gonna be inundated with the fact that he’s caught and surpassed Aaron, if in fact that happens. I think there’ll be a lot of attention as he passes Ruth, partly because of some of the things that Bonds has said about that being an important goal to him.
BC
Right, and a bigger goal.
TS
Yeah, a bigger goal, you’re right. I don’t have any sour feelings about Bonds doing it. Most of my feelings, it’s kind of a nostalgia thing. One of my uncles, when Aaron was pursuing Ruth’s record, and he had seen Ruth play at Navin Field, he said, “Well, he may pass Babe Ruth, but he’s never gonna be a Babe Ruth.” And I find myself kind of thinking the same thing. You have your own biased outlook which ties to your own childhood. Bonds may break the record, but in my heart he’s never gonna be Hank Aaron, which is natural, I guess.
BC
Finally, I was just wondering if you were working on anything right now, if you have any other projects in mind, baseball or non-baseball.
TS
Yeah, the Aaron book comes out in soft cover in a couple weeks, so I’ll be doing some promotion for that. I edited through the University of Michigan a kind of what’s called a Detroit Tigers Reader. It’s some of the best writing on the Tigers over the past hundred years. It was a real joy to that. And my agent’s shopping a variety of proposals, so we’ll see which one comes to fruition. Both are tied to baseball in some way, though. One of them is much broader than baseball, and a different one involves Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and the friendship that developed later in life that a lot of people aren’t aware of, so we’ll see. I’m not sure at this stage. I’m guessing that you’re a writer? But I don’t know that...
BC
Actually I’m a school teacher. I enjoy writing an awful lot, and it’s something that maybe I’d like to pursue someday.
TS
When you do nonfiction books, and you have an editor, you usually develop a proposal for the book before you write the book. The idea that you better be sure that somebody’s gonna buy it before you go to the trouble of writing it. So we’re shopping one proposal, the Ruth and Cobb one, and I’m developing a back-up one in case that one doesn’t get the kind of offer we want. And I’ll just kind of take it from there. I’m sure there will be more books. I feel very blessed to be able to do what I’m doing, which is write about a sport I love and have the freedom to do it at home.
BC
That’s great -- whatever it is that ends up coming out, I look forward to it.
TS
Well thank you, I appreciate that.
BC
Well thank you very much for your time. Are you going to be having a book tour with the paper back?
TS
Probably not, because you usually do that with hardcover. Probably a radio interview tour. I don’t imagine making it out to the west coast, but if I do I’ll look you up.
Part I | Part II
Really enjoyed that interview, but just a couple of minor things... The hangout that players used to go to was the Lindell A.C. (Athletic Club), that was transcribed to something else entirely. Later in the interview, he referenced the embarrassment of Ilitch over the team "ten" years ago. I think he probably said two years ago, as in the 2003 Tigers.
I read The Last Season and enjoyed it immensely. I recommend it highly to baseball fans of all teams. I enjoyed this interview and will now probably look for the book on Hank Aaron.
Posted by: Jeff | February 24, 2005 at 08:25 AM