Читать книгу 100 Miles of Baseball - Dale Jacobs - Страница 9

Detroit Tigers vs Pittsburgh Pirates

Comerica Park, Detroit MI

Game Time Temperature: 37°F

Today feels a little like a homecoming, returning to our Sunday Detroit routine. For ten years, we spent the first Sunday of the baseball season doing exactly this: leaving our house a bit before 10 am to avoid the Windsor-Detroit tunnel traffic, parking at the Milner Hotel, and then walking to our ritual coffee place, 1515 Broadway, with its mismatched tables and chairs and fans instead of air conditioning. On hot days, they’d keep their doors wide open and the large, burly dogs, who lolled in the sun while their owners had a coffee and a cigarette on the patio, would sometimes peer in.

The back of 1515 was a community space where you could see performances of all kinds, listen to poetry readings, and attend political gatherings—today’s consciousness-raising groups. The coffee at 1515 Broadway was decent, there were always good bagels, but the people who worked there were the reason we kept coming back. Over the course of each baseball season, we got to know the staff. We talked about the Tigers’ ups and downs with Danny. Once, two games in a row, I bought Junior Mints before each game and both times the Tigers won. After that, we’d stop in before each game and, if Danny was working, we’d discuss which candy purchase might bring the Tigers the most luck. We talked about books and Detroit history with Crystal. We’d talk about Detroit restaurants and bars with other staff members. One of the women painted a lovely “Free Coffee with Purchase of Wurlitzer Building” just outside the doors of 1515 on the shaky plywood that surrounded and supported the equally dodgy looking scaffolding that surrounded the Wurlitzer Building when the façade started to crumble and pieces of concrete fell to the sidewalk below.

We enter the park through the gates beyond left field, not because the gate is close to our seats, but because it is the nearest to the statues to the right of the video scoreboard. It’s almost an hour before the game so I still have time to stop and pay my respects to men I never saw play. Willie Horton. Ty Cobb. Hank Greenberg. Hal Newhouser. Al Kaline. But most of all Charlie Gehringer. The larger-than-life bronze statues depict the players in action, freezing them for all time in the midst of a kinetic energy that is almost palpable. Horton at the end of his swing, eyes tracking a ball that has just left his bat. Cobb sliding into second, spikes up and dirt flying. Greenberg in the midst of a towering swing, his power traced by the three connected balls that extend off the end of his bat. Newhouser in the middle of his windup, right leg extended to head height in front of him, ball dangling from his left hand behind his back. Al Kaline in full extension as he leaps to catch a fly ball. Gehringer in the air, the ball just leaving his hand as he turns yet another double play.

I stop at the statues partly because these men are a big part of the history of my adopted team, but mostly because they feel like a connection to my father, especially the stoic Gehringer—The Mechanical Man—who never had much to say. He just got on with it and did his job, never flashy, but always positioned exactly where he needed to be. Like Dad. And since it’s 1,800 miles to Dad’s grave and only five to Gehringer’s statue, on days like today I stop and visit for a minute with Charlie and with Dad, my fingers tracing the words under Charlie’s statue, which read “A quiet man who played with remarkable grace and efficiency.”

From our seats behind the visitors’ dugout, I can see the Milner Hotel. For years, we parked on the street outside the Milner for free on Sundays and weekday evenings. Now it’s impossible to park for free on weekdays, but Sundays are still free. There are few other cities in North America with free street parking a few short blocks from an MLB park. This morning, as Dale parked the car, I looked at the recently added parking payment boxes and a lady stopped and told me I didn’t need to pay. I thanked her and said, “So much has changed here in the past few years, I just wanted to make sure.” The Milner Hotel had been a hotel that seemed easy not to notice, but now it has an upscale wine bar on the main floor. We’d been there once, and the waiter became considerably less friendly and helpful once we selected a bottle of wine below $60. On the corner was a place that used to have paper signs with “Fresh Squeezed Kool-Aid” written in large, coloured letters. It’s now Dilla’s Delights, a doughnut shop.

As game time approaches, the players retreat from their warmups and the grounds crew leave the field. The lineups are announced and the video board gives way to this season’s hype video. It starts with highlights from Tigers history—with special emphasis on the ’68 and ’84 seasons—interspersed with shots of baseball cards from the period. Some of the cards are stacked while others flip, and the quick cuts between cards and game action create both excitement and nostalgia. The video then transitions to the current team, both in action and on baseball cards, so that we see them in the context of those previous players and that long Tigers history. Nostalgia. Tradition. Baseball cards. It’s what you sell when you are in the midst of a rebuild year.

Heidi and I first started coming to games in the early 2000s, sometimes alone, sometimes with our friend Dave Burke. At first, we went to the park a few times a year, buying tickets on the day of the game. We’d buy cheap seats and sit wherever we wanted, moving around the park to check out different angles on the game. In those years the Tigers were a bad team, so bad, in fact, that in 2003 they went 43-119—the most losses ever for an American League team and one loss shy of the most losses ever by a major league team. For me, though, having a team so close and being able to go to games any time was magical. Just being at the park was more than enough.

Top of the first and the Tigers make a nice play to throw out the Pirates’ Gregory Polanco at third as he tries to stretch a double into a triple. Nick Castellanos fields the ball cleanly in the right field corner and throws home to try to prevent Adam Frazier from scoring from first. The throw is up the line, but John Hicks catches it and immediately fires to third where Jeimer Candelario applies the tag on the sliding Polanco. It’s a well-executed, heads-up play, but not one we’d likely have seen at the Henry Ford or Wayne State games—what’s routine here would be highlight reel at other levels. It’s the kind of baseball I once thought I would only see on television.

As a kid growing up on the Canadian prairies, I never had a natural allegiance to any ball team, never got to see a major league game live until I was in university. But I grew up the son of a baseball man who, though he was also raised on the prairies, cultivated a love of the game throughout his life. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was the Cardinals, their broadcasts cutting through the summer nights all the way from St. Louis on KMOX, and the Yankees, the narratives of all their World Series floating to him on syndicated radio. Late in his life it was television broadcasts of the Cubs in the afternoon and the Blue Jays in the evening. In between, when I was growing up in a small town in Alberta in the 1970s, it was the Expos, the team that made me love baseball as I sat beside my father listening to Dave Van Horne’s gentle voice call the games on the CBC.

Sitting in the living room, me slouched on the couch and Dad in his easy chair, I began to learn the nuances of the game. How the catcher transfers his weight to his front foot as he rises from his crouch and throws to second. How a runner on first can read when a pitcher is throwing over. How a changeup looks just like a fastball out of the pitcher’s hand. What it means to go the other way, taking only what the pitcher is offering. Dad spoke little, saying only “nice play” or “good pitch,” leaving me to puzzle out what was important about what had happened. As I grew to know the game better, he would ask me what I thought about the Expos/Cubs/Blue Jays bullpen or if they had a shot this year. Like many fathers and sons, baseball was our lingua franca until the very end.

Through most of my adult life, baseball was an occasional pleasure, not part of the tapestry of my everyday, the background hum that it later became. Until we moved to Windsor and started to follow the Tigers, I never appreciated the rhythm of the season, never really understood how one game formed part of a larger whole. Like today’s tough loss, in which Fulmer gave up only four hits and two runs over eight innings. One game in long season and, ultimately, a long rebuild.

1515 Broadway is closed now. The space it used to occupy is currently under construction. I’m uncertain what will open in its place but a valet from the hotel next door stands outside, where the burly mutts used to loaf.¹ When 1515 closed, we settled for a place down the street with pour-over coffees, an unreliable supply of bagels, rotating staff, and an aspiring hipster vibe. This morning we walked past that café to explore other options. Fifteen years ago, these streets were empty, your breakfast and coffee options nearly non-existent. On Woodward, we passed a couple walking two well-groomed Airedale terriers dressed in matching doggie tracksuits. John Varvatos has opened a shop and there are Lululemon, Nike, and Under Armour stores in what used to be abandoned or nearly empty buildings. The beautiful Whitney building has been retrofitted to house an Aloft hotel where guests wait for valets to deliver their shiny SUVs. Shinola is opening a hotel, too. I ask Dale, as I often do, “Do you think we’ll talk about missing Detroit the way it used to be?” Maybe we do already. Someone has purchased the Wurlitzer. I wonder if they got their free coffee.

When my father died in 2008, Tigers baseball and those Sunday afternoons in Detroit were a constant I needed to help me through my grief. I know it’s a cliché, but baseball is what my father and I had, what we always had. Not hockey, not really. It was always baseball. Yes, I’m guilty of being the kind of man who can’t really talk about his emotions, especially with other men. So was my father. Where we come from, you just don’t. We dealt with each other and I dealt with his death the only way we knew how: through baseball. I felt the tears streaming down my cheeks as I read about Tom Stanton and his father attending the final games at Tiger Stadium in The Final Season. I found myself with a lump in my throat when I saw something new at the ballpark because I wanted my Dad to see it. Even now, I want to sit next to him at a baseball game, talk to him about pitch sequence. Or the pick the shortstop just made deep in the hole. Or the importance of hitting the cut-off man.

I felt him with me yesterday, in the rain at Papp Park when Milke snagged a hot grounder just inside the third base line that looked like a sure double. I felt him at the game on Friday when Hitchcock threw fastball after fastball that overmatched the Wayne State hitters. Wherever there is a ballpark, I know I will find my father.

Final Score: 1-0 Pittsburgh