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. Enjoy.
Behind the Book: First of all, I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your book an awful lot, and the biggest question that I had as I was reading it, and you address this obviously in the book, but can you talk about how you decided to attend all 81 games? And did you know right away that you wanted to turn the experience into a book, or did that kind of occur later in the process?
Tom Stanton: Just before I get into that, just so you’re aware, The Final Season
BTB: One of my favorite aspects of your book is the idea that a place like a ballpark can hold such incredible emotional significance for so many people. What was it like for you to walk into Tiger Stadium on any given day?
TS: In my case, four generations of my family had been going to that ballpark, first when it was Navin Field back in the era of Ty Cobb, then as Briggs Stadium, and then as Tiger Stadium. My grandfather, who had immigrated to America from Poland, learned about the country through baseball. He used to see Sam Crawford and Harry Heilemann and others play. And so whenever I’d walk into Tiger Stadium, you’d feel the ghosts of history kind of swirling around you. You couldn’t go to the place without hearing your uncles tell the stories they had told in your childhood of running up and down the ramps that still existed there, of going to ballgames with their father. The love of the game has been passed down through generations by my family from father to son, and that’s not unique, that happens with lots of people. I think that’s why so many people feel emotional bonds to these green cathedrals.
BTB: Yeah, I agree with you completely. There’s something almost tangible that you feel, you know, when you walk into these parks. I agree.
TS: You have your own memories, and then you have kind of your inherited memories, and it’s just a very rich experience. I think people who don’t share that passion for the game, you know, they probably struggle to understand it, but it’s about more than just a place, it’s about so many other things. In my case, as I mentioned in the book, my grandfather died before I was born, and the family home that my father grew up in was burned down and demolished years later, so the ballpark became the only place really, the only physical place where I could go to to connect with this grandfather that I knew only through stories. It was the only place that really still existed. And so it’s a very dear emotional connection there.
BTB: I loved all of the characters that you introduced throughout this eighty-one game journey. Some of them were obvious -- Ernie Harwell, for example. And some, like Alice Cooper, were surprizing. But most interesting, I think, were the fans you interviewed who had their own individual stories, and I was wondering, how did you find all of these people? Did you simply approach people who seemed like they were making some sort of a pilgrimage like you were? What was that process?
TS: Yeah, some of it just came about naturally. When you go to every game, you start to see some of the same people, and just get to know some people. The workers, in particular. Nancy Griffin, the African-American vendor out in the outfield. You just get to know people -- ushers, hot dog vendors. Others, though, sometimes it was just a matter of who I was sitting around on that day, or who I was observing. People’s reactions to what was taking place might draw me to them. It was kind of serendipitous in most cases.
BTB: That’s how it felt, that’s how it came across in the book.
TS: Yeah, in retrospect I think probably editors would’ve preferred if you knew specifically going in what the poignant stories were gonna be so you could chart those throughout, but it was more of a discovery experience for me, so I didn’t go there knowing... except in a few cases, like when I checked on Ernie Harwell and Al Kaline, except for those cases, it was just who I stumbled upon.
BTB: You just mentioned Al Kaline. I wanted to ask you about him, because I enjoyed that section. I was wondering if you could talk about what he meant to you as a boy, and then what it was like interviewing your hero so many years later?
TS: Yeah, it’s still a very memorable experience for me. But if you grew up in Detroit like I did in the sixties and early seventies and you were a baseball fan, Al Kaline was your baseball god. There was really nobody who approached him, not just in terms of skill but just in terms of what he meant to the city. In my case, on a very personal level, this sounds silly to people who haven’t had similar experiences, but there was a lot of turmoil in my life, my mother was very ill for much of my childhood, in hospitals with brain surgeries, and there was a lot of dissension in the late sixties, early seventies relating it, a few changes in our culture and society, and Al Kaline was this one constant who never seemed to change. So he was kind of a stabilizing figure, which sounds odd when you don’t really know the person, but that’s the role I think heroes can play. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but it’s there in the way that they inspire you and affect you. So Kaline had that impact on me, and here I am many years later, no longer a child, I’m in my late thirties at that stage when I’m going to Tiger Stadium, and I do have press access to the field. And I’d notice Kaline throughout the season, I mean he was obviously the first thing I would notice on the field, your hero’s out there. And the other ballplayers treated him with reverence, these young guys. I say in the book they kind of gathered around him as if he were the flame on a cold winter’s night.
BTB: I enjoyed that, it was almost comforting. Sometimes you hear stories about older players who walk on the field and aren’t noticed by the current players. I was glad to see that he still had that iconic status.
TS: He did. I mean even though some of those guys weren’t even born when he retired. But he had that, and often Kaline would be on the field before the gates opened, before the fans came in, and having press access I would be there, and you would see him just kind of standing aside the dugout staring out into right field, and you could only wonder what was going through his mind, and he’d disappear before the fans got there and just kind of go into the dugout and the clubhouse. I was on the field one time I couldn’t muster up the courage to talk to the guy. I’ve interviewed people who are more famous than Al Kaline, but instantly when you’re interviewing your hero, or you’re approaching him, you’re that eleven- or twelve-year-old kid. It took me some weeks to get up to the point where I felt comfortable doing that. It sounds silly, especially to my journalistic friends, to say something like that...
BTB: It makes perfect sense to me, it makes perfect sense.
TS: Yeah, you’re just kind of plunged back into those old emotions. You’re not on equal footing with your hero. And he’s kind of a shy guy, an aloof guy, and so he’s not real easy to warm up to, as I noted, and we didn’t become best friends or anything, but he did warm up a bit when we started talking about fathers. It’s the one thing I think a lot of ballplayers and ballplaying fans have in common is kind of the role their fathers played in their love of the game. So it was a memorable experience for me. I’m going to be honored later this year by this organization that does a Detroit Celebrity of the Year and a Detroit Sports Media Person of the Year, and Kaline’s supposed to be the Sports Celebrity of the Year at the same time, so I’m kind of excited about that.
BTB: Wow, that’s really cool. Another thing that you kind of addressed in the book is the fact that there are whispers about replacing Fenway Park, and George Steinbrenner occasionally makes noises about building a new stadium for the Yankees, but it doesn’t look like either of those two fields seems to be going anywhere. Meanwhile, Wrigley Field has achieved landmark status in Chicago and is probably more important to the city than the Cubs are. Tiger Stadium certainly belongs in that group except for the fact that it’s empty right now. Why do you think that is?
TS: I struggled with that question for much of that season, and still do. I guess it’s... Tiger Stadium never took hold nationally in the same way that Wrigley or Fenway or Yankee Stadium did. I think partly it’s because of the type of town Detroit is. It’s very much a working man’s town, it’s an industrial city, very blue collar. And Tiger Stadium wasn’t celebrated in baseball literature in the same way. There was something that I had to come to grasps with -- why our ballpark and not the others? I adore Fenway and Wrigley, I haven’t been to Yankee Stadium still, although I’ll be there this year, and I’m sure that’ll be pleasurable too, and I want for those places to persevere, but you wonder why Tiger Stadium wasn’t on that equal footing. I think if you go to the place, it has a different feel from Fenway or Wrigley, but it very much has that spirit about it. I think it was just a matter of for some reason it just wasn’t held in the same esteem even though it was every bit as old as Fenway. I mean, it opened on the same day.
BTB: One thing that surprized me as I opened up the book and started reading is that his book was as much about you and your family as it was about Tiger Stadium, and obviously, as you explained, the two are kind of intertwined. Did that surprize you at all the way the book ended up, or is that how you always envisioned it?
TS: No, it wasn’t as I envisioned it originally. The book changed over time. When I started I thought it would be a little bit of my own experiences and more of telling the history of the park through the fans that shared the game their through many decades. But as I got into it and started absorbing the experience, it was obvious to me why I was there, very personal reasons, and that started coming through in what I was writing. I’m happy that the book turned out that way, but it was at the encouragement of editors that my agent was approaching who were saying in the early drafts that the strength of the book was really the family stories and that personal connection. I was freed at that point to focus more so on that, which is something you kind of want permission for because it feels a little bit self-indulgent. But in the end it doesn’t come off that way I don’t think, because a lot of baseball fans can relate to that and the story resonates, and when people read your work, especially something personal such as that, they’re not necessarily just seeing you in it, the author, they’re picturing themselves in that story because they’ve had similar experiences and can in many cases see their own family, grandparents and fathers, in those tales.
BTB: A two-part question I wanted to ask you. Did you learn a lot about your family through this, and what was your family’s reaction to the finished product?
TS: I knew a lot about my family history prior to this anyway, but you couldn’t help but learn a lot more. It strengthened my family, it was a good experience. You know, some families perhaps would object to having their dysfunctional aspects advertised to the world, particularly in the case where my father had not seen a couple of his brothers for a long time, but it brought that uncle back into our lives in one way, and so that result was something very beautiful. I think I was very close to my father as it was, but it made us even closer, and it created a bond that was even stronger than what we had started. You know, it was positive all the way around. It was a beautiful experience for me personally, and for my family
BTB: You mentioned this a couple of times. I wanted to see if you could elaborate on it a little bit. Much is made about the importance of fathers and sons within the framework of baseball. You write about the bond you shared with your father through baseball, and several of the subjects in your book -- Al Kaline, Brian Moehler, for example -- speak of this as well. Can you talk about that for a minute? What is it exactly about fathers and sons and baseball?
TS: A lot of writers have been pondering that for a long time... It’s not easy to put your finger on. But the bond seems greater, in my case certainly it is, with baseball than it is with other sports. I don’t think it’s always just a matter of being a sport. But I think some of it is... one of the things that people who don’t like baseball complain about is that it’s a slow game. There’s not continuous action on the field, and you have these dead periods of time when you’re watching. But one of the beautiful parts of that is it allows you to kind of have a relationship within the game with the people you’re experiencing it with, and in many of our cases the people we experience it with are family originally, in the early years. So I think our relationships are more tied to the sport in that sense, that you develop a very personal bond with the sport, or in my case with my father, watching those games either in front of the television or at the ballpark itself. It’s not continuous action, you have a chance to talk, whether or not it’s a... it’s not a contrived thing where you’re setting out to do that, but it just happens naturally. You’ve got your father talking about his childhood experiences, and the guys he rooted for, Greenberg and Gehringer in my dad’s case, and then you kind of pass this love on for the game, and share this passion for it, and I think that can’t help but create that bond and sort of reinforce it. And then you have the catches in the backyard, which... when you’re playing catch with your dad in the backyard it’s different from maybe having a game of one-on-one basketball in the driveway. It’s not a competitive thing, in any sense. It’s just connecting with that ball going back and forth between you, and so I guess there are a lot of reasons. I’m not being very coherent or enlightening, but I do think it has to do with the pace of the game and the fact that it’s been around a lot longer than many games, and so consequently you have the ability to have these family stories that go back generations are shared and then retold.
BTB: I think there’s a lot to that, especially the pace of the game. So much of what I know about baseball came from listening to Vin Scully talk between pitches about things that happened fifty years ago in Brooklyn, so I think there’s a lot to that.
TS: Yeah, that’s a good point.
BTB:
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?
TS:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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...
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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.
BTB:
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...
BTB:
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.
BTB:
That’s great -- whatever it is that ends up coming out, I look forward to it.
TS:
Well thank you, I appreciate that.
BTB:
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.
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