Читать книгу 100 Miles of Baseball - Dale Jacobs - Страница 16

University of Michigan-Dearborn Wolverines vs Concordia University Cardinals

Police Athletic League Field, Detroit MI

Game Time Temperature: 84°F

As we drive to Detroit from Toledo, Heidi and I talk about how different our notes are on games, about what completely different things we notice. And we talk about what compels us to finish this project. What are we trying to learn? Before we began, I had a vague notion that the answers to those questions, at least for me, involved something about how baseball both changes and remains constant as you move between different levels of the game. But that’s not quite it any more, at least not completely. It’s more about the universe of baseball that’s contained in this one-hundred-mile radius, about the soul of the game that inhabits these parks, about trying to understand why embarking on this project felt so important to me. It’s about what I can learn about baseball and my relationship to it by seeing games in parks like Ray Fisher Stadium, or Fifth Third Field. Or Police Athletic League (PAL) Field, the small park that now sits at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues, the former site of Tiger Stadium, the long-hallowed center of the baseball universe in Detroit.

The layout of the field is just as it was in Tiger Stadium, though there is no longer an upper deck looming over the diamond, enclosing the park and insulating it from whatever was happening in the city beyond. Now, in the distance beyond center field, I can see the Masonic Temple. The old water tower a block to the east serves as a backdrop to right field, while Motor City Casino dominates the view beyond left. Across Trumbull, beyond the outfield walls, stands the Ace Hardware/Brooks Lumber store, at this location since 1896. Look towards foul territory down the right field line and you’ll see the Detroit skyline, a mix of familiar buildings and new construction.⁴ The grass and infield are artificial, out of step with what traditionalists wanted to see on this site. But then again, the real purists never wanted Tiger Stadium torn down in favour of Comerica Park, a mile and a half to the east. With PAL Field, at least there is baseball at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull again, a site that hosted Tiger baseball from 1895 to 1999. Bennett Park. Navin Field. Briggs Stadium. Tiger Stadium. And now PAL Field.

A few weeks ago, I caught myself telling someone I hadn’t given much thought to baseball over the past two or three years. Hearing those words out loud, I had to correct myself. For the past three years, I’ve thought constantly about baseball—just not MLB or the Tigers. My work on the Chatham Coloured All-Stars with my historian colleague Miriam Wright has occupied my thoughts since 2015. More recently, Miriam and I have been researching a book about the All-Stars’ 1934 season. And so, when I find myself saying that I haven’t been thinking about baseball, I need to remind myself that I’ve thinking about baseball for most of every day for several years.⁵

By the time we moved to Windsor in the summer of 2000, I had twice been to Tiger Stadium. The first time, in early September 1989, my friend Peter and I rolled into Detroit for a game against the Royals. Living in Edmonton, it seemed to me that the two-hour drive from Peter’s home in London, Ontario was more than reasonable. I remember emerging into downtown Detroit. The manhole covers steaming. The people slouched into their coats in the early September chill. The wonder and fear of being in Detroit, its reputation extending all the way to the prairies. But as we drove down Michigan Avenue, I began to see the bustle of the neighbourhood around the stadium. Hear the men outside hawking extra tickets. Feel the pull of the stadium on a cool September evening. We parked as close as we could and followed the crowd into the park. Today, we wandered around the neighbourhood before the game, walking the few blocks over to Batch Brewing for a bite to eat. Tiger Stadium is gone and Corktown has gentrified.

The only concrete image of that game that I can summon is Bo Jackson hitting a home run into the upper deck off Frank Tanana, a baseball memory as acute as any I have. In my mind, the park was packed to see Bo slam that ball into the night sky, but the box score tells me that there were less than 13,000 people there that night. For me, though, that crowd was electric and I knew I wanted to be part of it, again and again.

Ten years later, I was back at Tiger Stadium with Heidi and our friend Steve Shively. As always, I felt the familiar draw of the crowd and the excitement of being in a Major League park, but I also felt strangely at home. We were visiting from North Carolina and as Steve drove us along Jefferson Avenue, he pointed across the river and told us that was Canada. Less than a year later, we would move to our new home in Windsor, while the Tigers would move to their new home at Comerica Park.

The years the Tigers won the World Series at this corner: 1935. 1945. 1968. 1984. The players who took the field here. Ty Cobb. “Wahoo Sam” Crawford. Henry Heilmann. Mickey Cochrane. Charlie Gehringer. Hal Newhouser. Hank Greenberg. Al Kaline. Alan Trammell. Lou Whitaker. Kirk Gibson. The baseball legacy of Michigan and Trumbull, still alive in the memories of everyone who ever saw a game here. As history and memory wash over me, part of me wonders how much these college players, most of whom are from Michigan, recognize what this site has meant to baseball fans and to the city of Detroit. But another part of me doesn’t want the past to intrude on the present, on the game being played in front of me.

A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. In 2017, I spent most of the year reading eight months of the Chatham Daily News from 1934 on microfilm, reading every article I could find about the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. Over the months, I got to know the players through the game coverage, box scores, and editorials in the same way fans today might follow a team. As a result, I feel a certain kinship with them, especially having had the opportunity to meet the siblings, children, and friends they left behind. The more I read, the more I saw how the colour barrier, while not formalized in Canada, still existed, and robbed Canadian athletes like Boomer Harding, King Terrell, and especially Earl “Flat” Chase⁶, of opportunities to excel because of the colour of their skin. Everyone who saw Flat Chase play, all say the same thing: he could have made the big leagues.

Sitting at this storied corner, it’s not hard to rattle off the names of those who called this corner their home field. It’s much more difficult but no less important to think about the names of players who were never able to play here. Detroit was the second-last team in MLB to integrate. It wasn’t until 1958, when Ozzie Virgil broke the colour barrier with the Detroit Tigers.

In 2017, when I heard about PAL’s “Buy a Brick” campaign to help build this new ballpark and saw that I could get a brick on the storied corner of Michigan and Trumbull, I knew instantly what I wanted to do. Today, I was anxious as I walked along Michigan Avenue to the gates of PAL Field. It took me a few minutes to find it, but there was my sidewalk brick: “In honour of Boomer Harding, Earl ‘Flat’ Chase and the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars.” The mezzanine was empty and I took the opportunity to kneel down and brush away the fallen leaves around my brick. “Hey guys,” I whispered. I spend so much time writing and thinking about this team that sometimes I forget I never met them or saw them play. But here they are. At Michigan and Trumbull. At last.

It’s 3-1 for Concordia in the top of the second inning and the pitcher for UM-D has walked the first two batters. The UM-D coach ambles to the mound, has a brief talk with his starter. “Settle Down. Throw strikes.” The first pitch is a strike that results in a fly ball to center field for the first out. A deeper flyout to center then allows the lead runner to advance. First and third with two out. As the next batter waits for the pitch, the runner at first seems to stray too far off the bag. On the throw to first, the lead runner breaks from third. The runner on first attempts to get himself caught in a rundown so that the lead runner can score before the tag is applied for the third out. Maybe a mistake, maybe a set play. Either way, the UM-D first baseman has to come home with the throw to try to prevent the fourth run from scoring. Out on a close play at the plate. Score it 1-3-4-2 for the third out. 3-1 Concordia in the middle of the second.

I notice an African-American man, maybe mid-thirties, in business attire, suit jacket over his arm. I watch him watch the game through the fence as he walks west on Michigan Avenue, slowing down until he stops twenty feet from the gates to witness an at-bat. I see him notice the open gate and come in. He sits down at a table and loosens his tie. I imagine him marvelling at being able to watch a few moments of live baseball while walking from point A to point B on a sunny, late-spring work day in Detroit. I marvel at all of this too.

On the same day that John Hicks bunts to score JaCoby Jones with the winning run for the Tigers against Tampa, the bunt features prominently in Concordia’s eventual 11-6 win. For the rest of the game, Concordia lays down bunt after perfect bunt. It’s not an easy thing to do, especially with an aluminum bat, but they are consistently able to deaden the ball in the perfect spot, moving runners over, sometimes managing infield singles.

As we walk to the car, I think about the execution of those small fundamentals, the way that repetition allowed Concordia to make something very difficult look easy. What occupies my thoughts isn’t all the home runs in the Mud Hens game or even seeing the Tigers’ prospects play so well. Instead, it’s a well-played ground ball or a player knowing how to advance the runner or an outfielder hitting the cut-off man. Little things. Nuance. Like appreciating the steadiness of Charlie Gehringer. Or realizing what your father was trying to say to you all those years you watched baseball together in the family living room.

Final Score: 11-6 Concordia