Tiger Stadium: It's Time To Move on

Word that the last remnants of a 100-year baseball history at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull will come down set off another wave of nostalgia for Tiger Stadium. I think it’s a testament to how deeply baseball is ingrained in our collective Michigan culture that a ballpark sets off emotions like that.

But I—and I may be in the minority here—will just be glad to see it go. 

This Tiger Stadium thing has been handled poorly from the start—from the Tigers, to the city to the councils, to the commissions, to the development corporations, to the committees to save the world. A place of fond memories became overgrown with trees and weeds on the inside as the facade slowly peeled and fell off the outside. And then the wrecking ball hit it, again and again and again. First a gash, then a hole, then entire walls fell into piles of rubble.

And just like that, on a fall day last year, they stopped. What a perfectly Detroit thing to do; to leave an abandoned, half torn-down building to continue crumbling. Hey, what’s another, right?

So left raw and exposed was the place of so many of our childhood memories, of time spent with mom or dad or best friends, of winning seasons, of historic home runs, of right field overhangs, of the base paths that Ty Cobb and Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline and Kirk Gibson and Cecil Fielder once circled to our cheers. Naked. Without dignity.

Because some wanted to preserve it.

Just get it over with. You’ve destroyed her. You took a simple task, and you screwed it up. 

The Tiger Stadium story will not end with a sellout crowd paying homage, with a Bird scooping dirt from the mound, with a grand slam and a swinging strike three as Todd Jones preserves the win.

But it should have.

It’s time to move on.