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" People will come, Ray. No, really, they will. They&amp;#039;ll come for reasons they can&amp;#039;t even fathom. They&amp;#039;ll turn up your driveway . . . well, not really your driveway. It&amp;#039;s Ilitch the Pizza Guy&amp;#039;s driveway. Anyway, they&amp;#039;ll turn up somebody&amp;#039;s  driveway, not knowing for sure why they&amp;#039;re doing it, although some possible reasons--like Genuine Authentic Replica Gear!--will be suggested at top volume by the kids howling in the backseat.  They&amp;#039;ll walk through what used to be called a neighborhood before we had new &amp;quot;urban villages&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;shops, restaurants, offices, and other attractions.&amp;quot; They&amp;#039;ll enter through one of three gates: the one with the eighty-foot bats, the one with the two immense sculpted tigers, or the one that has big bats and a big tiger and that faces the new &amp;quot;restaurant/retail&amp;quot; complex at the other end of the avenue. People will come, Ray.  There&amp;#039;ll be one cash register for every 125 fans. (Did you know, Ray, the typical ballpark has one cash register for every 200 fans?) They&amp;#039;ll wander through the food court. They&amp;#039;ll ride the carousel. Later, perhaps exhausted, they&amp;#039;ll sit in the large, open-air beer garden. They won&amp;#039;t even have to come inside, Ray. They&amp;#039;ll sit on the roof decks along Witherell Street, which will be &amp;quot;easily accessible&amp;quot; from the food court and the carousel and all levels of the ballpark.  The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers, but this field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that was good and could be again if we can just line up the bondholders. And now, Ray, look out there. Now it&amp;#039;s baseball that&amp;#039;s rolling by like an army of steamrollers. Not clumsy metaphorical ones but real ones, the kind that build new and modern things, like urban villages and genuine authentic replica ballparks. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. They&amp;#039;ll arrive at your door, innocent as children, longing for the past.  And, by God, Ray, we&amp;#039;ll be there to sell it to them. (Is this heaven?) No, Ray. It&amp;#039;s Detroit. The ball has a cushioned cork center and the signature of someone named Gene Budig. It also has a black splotch where it came off the bat, and, tight against one seam, there&amp;#039;s a very suspicious-looking scuff mark approximately the width of two fingertips, which may account for the fact that a promising young Detroit Tiger infielder named Frank Catalanotto was able only to loft the ball foul, along the third-base line, through the velvet evening rain and up into the outdoor auxiliary press section at the very top of Tiger Stadium. I found the ball there, sitting in a small pool of rainwater. I was alone. There&amp;#039;s little call for an outdoor auxiliary press section during a game between the Detroit Tigers and the Anaheim Angels on a softly flowing night at the beginning of May, not even at the beginning of the last May in which baseball will be played at Tiger Stadium. There was nobody to fight me for the ball. I am not sentimental about old stadiums. Which is odd, because I have spent most of my life around Boston, where ballparks and arenas generally find themselves afflicted with talismanic charac-teristics as though they were concrete Kennedys. The relentless palaver about Fenway Park leaves me cold because, far too often, especially during night games in April, so does the ballpark. (David Halberstam claims to love even Fenway&amp;#039;s smells. I don&amp;#039;t know. Maybe the smells remind him of the good old days in the Mekong Delta.) In the first game I ever saw at Fenway--and, yes, I saw it with my father--the Red Sox lost by a fat pile of runs on their way to a 62--100 season. There were about ninety-five hundred of us there, and nobody was talking about history, tradition, quaint patriarchy, or lyric little bandboxes. Because I am not sentimental about old stadiums, I am equally unmoved by the new ones, the plasticine nostalgia palaces that have sprung up in places like Denver and Cleveland and, most famously, Baltimore, a place of the kind of ersatz instant tradition perfect for a time in which tele-vision anchormen fancy themselves historians. The new ballparks are comfortable tributes to the modern service economy, and they are not as ugly as old Crock-Pots, and that is all that can be said for them. Now, on this soft and liquid evening, Tiger Stadium was about as empty as Fenway was the first time I saw it. The two parks are rather married to each other; both opened on April 20, 1912, although neither event received the attention it might have, since the Titanic went down that same week. However, whereas Fenway has become an icon, Tiger Stadium is looked at now as an anachronism: old, a bit leaky, and possessed of far too much inherent architectural democracy to meet the oligarchic demands of modern baseball economics--to wit, luxury boxes, club seating, and a babelicious young hostess to bring you refreshments. Even to those people whose memories of the place are the longest and the fondest, Tiger Stadium is ending its days as something of a public inconvenience. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s time,&amp;quot; says Ernie Harwell, who broadcast his first game for the Tigers in 1960. &amp;quot;I mean, I&amp;#039;m ready. I&amp;#039;m not one of those Good Old Days guys. History and tradition are great, but it&amp;#039;s time for them to go forward in a new ballpark.&amp;quot; I looked down from the outdoor auxiliary press section. The field was bright and wet and impossibly green. Tiger Stadium always has been an odd mix of impressions. From the outside, it dominates the corner of Trumbull Street and Michigan Avenue with a blank and cheerless facade. (Harwell and Al Kaline both had the same initial reaction to the park; they thought it looked like a battleship.) Inside, however, it is a warm, self-contained universe. Tiger Stadium is the only major league ballpark that is double-decked all the way around, from home plate to the thin wedge of bleachers in dead center field. It is done up in deep blue and bright orange, like a child&amp;#039;s happy castle, and running along its top level is a series of wooden enclosures that look for all the world like the running chutes in a stockyard. Unlike Fenway, which forces baseball to adapt to its weird, procrustean angles and corners, Tiger Stadium encompasses the game within itself. Next season, the Tigers will move into Comerica Park, a $290 million nostalgia factory along lower Woodward Avenue for which the public will pay nearly half the tab. I will miss Tiger Stadium, which is remarkable, because I&amp;#039;ve been here only six or seven times in my life, and even more remarkable because baseball has very little to do with why I&amp;#039;ll miss it. I rolled my last souvenir of the place around in my hand, and my fingertips once again stuck in the peculiar abrasion along one of its seams. I don&amp;#039;t trust immaculate history, one impeccably straight-line, survey-course, and sound-bite ready. Give me history that&amp;#039;s suspiciously scuffed, a touch of rough mischief that you can put your fingertips on so that you can make it sail and dive, a kite in gypsy breezes. It can break all the rules, this history. You can make it dance. Shortly before the turn of the century, Samuel Brooks built his lumberyard on the corner of Cherry Street near Michigan Avenue. It was a time of frenzied woodcutting, with thousands of newly arrived Swedes and Germans and Lithuanians plunging into raffish settlements deep within the wide forests around the Great Lakes, and Samuel Brooks prospered. In 1896, he saw a baseball field rise on what was once an old hay market at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. Over the next twenty years, after Samuel handed the business down to his son, Arthur, the Brooks family and their employees watched as what was once Bennett Field became Navin Field. Then when the great teams were in town--the Athletics with Al Simmons and that burly gobblehog Jimmie Foxx, or the Yankees with Ruth and Gehrig--the men working in the lumberyard would hear the crack of the bat and look up through the spreading twilight for the ball. The men would chase after the ball. You could get a half dozen in one afternoon if you were quick enough. Arthur Brooks handed the company down to his son, Arthur, who is retired now and living in Fiorida. His first memory of what would become Tiger Stadium is of sprinting from Jefferson Intermediate School in order to make the 3:00 p.m. starting time. In the days before night baseball, the games started at three so the men coming home from work might be able to catch the last few innings. Arthur Brooks would run to Trumbull Avenue and hop a streetcar to the ballpark. He&amp;#039;d pay his fifty cents and sit in the bleachers, and he&amp;#039;d watch the home runs soar into his father&amp;#039;s lumberyard.  &amp;quot;They wouldn&amp;#039;t always find them all,&amp;quot; Brooks says. &amp;quot;Used to be, especially if those Yankees were in town, I could still find half a dozen balls all over the lumberyard.&amp;quot; The home runs stopped coming regularly in 1938, when Walter Briggs finished the job of enclosing the stadium that had been started by Frank Navin, Arthur Brooks&amp;#039;s godfather. It was a whole new ballpark, considered to be state-of-the-art. There would be no more rickety temporary bleachers, the fans atop the last row standing and craning their necks until it seemed the whole structure would capsize onto Cherry Street. Baseball was contained within itself. The cheers reached the streets in softened roars. To hit one into the lumberyard now required a luckless conjunction of Homeric power and a truly terrible curveball. &amp;quot;Ted Williams did it a couple of times, though,&amp;quot; Brooks recalls. &amp;quot;He put a couple into the yard for us.&amp;quot; Reggie Jackson almost did it in the 1971 All-Star Game, but his rising line drive banged off a transformer that sits atop the right-field roof in what is still one of the defining home runs of the age. The baseballs don&amp;#039;t come as frequently these days, but Brooks Lumber is still where it always was. It&amp;#039;s baseball itself that&amp;#039;s moving now. The home runs will soon go sailing by the Hard Rock Cafe and into a whole neighborhood that is part of the ballpark as surely as the whole ballpark was once part of a neighborhood, baseballs falling into the new urban village like so much captive rain. One day in 1987, a Tiger scrub named Jim Walewander knocked a ball into the right-field seats to win a game. It was Walewander&amp;#039;s first career home run. It was also his last. There was a nice crowd that day, and everybody cheered, especially four sallow youths sitting in the boxes near the Detroit dugout. Their names were Dean Clean, Joe Jack Talcum, Dave Blood, and Rodney Anonymous. They were the Dead Milkmen. No matter how hidebound its bureaucracy, baseball was the sport of choice among the countercultural Left. Back in the days when only FBI informants had any money, baseball&amp;#039;s bleachers were always cheap and, therefore, suffused with the spirit of &amp;quot;participatory democracy,&amp;quot; that charmingly impossible philosophical template so central to, among other things, the Port Huron Statement, composed by Michigan native and Tiger fan Tom Hayden. This has not always been easy for the game&amp;#039;s purists to accept. George Will, who has replaced the late Bart Giamatti as baseball&amp;#039;s preeminent dilettante nuisance, once even blamed the rise of those awful multipurpose stadiums in places like Cin-cinnati and Pittsburgh on the &amp;quot;wretched excesses&amp;quot; of the sixties, on which Will also blames the popularity of professional football. It should be noted that those same purists--a coalition of corporate and political elites--are behind most of what have been called, with no apparent irony, the &amp;quot;new vintage ballparks.&amp;quot; Rather, the people most directly involved in that &amp;quot;wretched excess&amp;quot; of the sixties hated football--too militaristic, man--and loved baseball, which is why the center-field bleachers in Tiger Stadium were once regularly bathed in the aroma of certain American Indian religious compounds. In fact, that same season in which Walewander brought joy to the Dead Milkmen with his one and only home run, Tiger Stadium also played host to something called the Eugene V. Debs Memorial Kazoo Marching Band. So, as the tie-dye faded and the Grateful Dead turned into a cabaret act, it was no real surprise that the young ballplayers of the eighties developed a jones for ham-fisted drumming and atonal guitar strangling. And the ham-fisted drummers and atonal guitar stranglers came to love baseball. Thus did the Paycheck Lounge in Hamtramck meet Tiger Stadium. Walewander hit his dinger, and the Dead Milkmen cheered, and everybody got together afterward in the Tiger clubhouse, where Walewander talked about his homer and the Milkmen talked about their breakthrough album, Big Lizard in My Backyard. After a while, Detroit manager Sparky Anderson came out of his office and sized up the Milkmen. &amp;quot;Jeez,&amp;quot; Anderson said. &amp;quot;Them boys don&amp;#039;t see much sunlight, do they?&amp;quot; There are people who come to Tiger Stadium and can still hear Ty Cobb cursing the pitcher from second base, or they can still hear one of Hank Greenberg&amp;#039;s home runs hitting the second deck in right field, echoing deep and solid like a ripe melon dropped into a barrel. Me? I look down at the boxes along the first-base line and hear my favorite Milkmen single, &amp;quot;Methodist Coloring Book&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;But don&amp;#039;t color outside the lines / Or God will send you to Hell.&amp;quot; Alas, the Dead Milkmen broke up in 1994, and Jim Walewander was out of baseball not long after that. People say he&amp;#039;s in California now, working as an investment banker, which isn&amp;#039;t bad for a guy who once used Hefty bags for curtains. On the last weekend I was there, Jon Beavers and his friend Louis Koroyanis had come to Tiger Stadium as part of their annual spring ballpark tour. They found themselves trapped in the no-alcohol family section deep in the left-field seats and were returning from a thirsty eastward pilgrimage through the grandstand as the rain fell, steady and percussive, on the empty seats. Far away, Tiger center fielder Gabe Kapler caught the better part of a fastball. The ball stayed on a line, nearly flat, dipping just slightly as it approached the low fence in left field. Jon Beavers, beer in hand, turned back toward the plate just in time for Kapler&amp;#039;s home run to hit him right in the stomach. Louis Koroyanis, of course, in the tradition of all those who once ran through the Brooks lumberyard, immediately dove past his wounded friend and grabbed the ball. &amp;quot;Do you believe this shit?&amp;quot; Beavers said, laughing. &amp;quot;I get hit in the gut, on television, and he winds up with the ball.&amp;quot; My personal history of Tiger Stadium took its last little mystifying break when Gabe Kapler went long to Jon Beavers&amp;#039;s midsection. It sailed with the Eugene V. Debs Memorial Kazoo Marching Band, and it dipped once each for Jim Walewander and Dean Clean and Rodney Anonymous. My history here had some stuff on it. It never moved the way things will move in the new urban village, which will be a safe and convenient place, where the line will run straight and true, from Ty Cobb to Gehringer and Greenberg, to Cochrane and Kaline and Alan Trammell, who played shortstop for twenty years and who played it only in Detroit. Before the game, Trammell talked about the old ballpark and the new one and about the difference between history and sentiment, a subtle distinction often lost on the people who build new stadiums or write about baseball. In fact, it&amp;#039;s a distinction that eludes quite a few historians who look for life to color between the lines because they&amp;#039;re afraid we&amp;#039;ll all go to hell if it doesn&amp;#039;t. &amp;quot;Look, I&amp;#039;m not saying that I&amp;#039;m not going to miss this place,&amp;quot; Trammell said. &amp;quot;This was home, and I&amp;#039;ll cherish that. But you don&amp;#039;t erase twenty years. I&amp;#039;ll have that right here.&amp;quot; And he puts his hand over his heart. &amp;quot;But,&amp;quot; Trammell went on, &amp;quot;the history will travel. It will come with us, I hope, and there will be some new history in the new ballpark.&amp;quot; I have a little piece of that history to carry with me, an inauspicious foul ball that fell into a small pool of rainwater during an extraneous game on a rainy night in May. The ball is nowhere near as signifi-cant as the one that hit Jon Beavers amidships, or the one Reggie Jackson pounded off the transformer, or the one with which Jim Walewander delighted the Dead Milkmen, or even most of the ones that went rattling through Brooks Lumber. There is a black mark on my ball, and there is a suspicious scuff on it, and that&amp;#039;s why it will bring forward for me Tiger Stadium, where history always dove and sailed and fooled you, because it was a place where history always had its very best stuff. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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