Opening Up on Opening Day
Just Another Baseball Love Story
“The sounds, the smells. Did you ever hold a ball or a glove to your face?” —Shoeless Joe Jackson, “Field of Dreams”
“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” —Billy Beane
melting flakes glisten
the palace turf twinkles green
we exhale, “Play ball!”
Birthdays, Christmas, Last Day of School — these celebrations offered no comparison once he fell completely in love on April 6, 1987 — and on every Home Opener since.
The signs in early childhood hinted at such an endearment.
Early bedroom decor sported team pennants and glossy black-and-white player pics tacked to a large bulletin board, amid piles of bubble gum cards, a souvenir program from dad and fragile bobbleheads, the inanimate open-eyed audience for his frequent slow-motion highlight replays, amidst the faint aroma of luxurious leather.
Clutching his pre-adolescent sports fantasies (admittedly clichéd), he even slept with his cradled NFL football or MLB fielder’s glove, depending on the season, drifting off further into the dreamland of athletic glory.
In 1968, he had attended his first live professional sporting event.
Dad piloted the Mercury Station Wagon, the one featuring fake wooden exterior side panels, a goofy design allusion to covered wagon trains. The son climbed eagerly into the very back, to join his two uncles and two cousins for the 30-minute exodus south to Michigan and Trumbull, aka, the mystical Tiger Stadium in Corktown.
Spectacularly, they witnessed the Detroit Tigers slaughter the Cleveland Indians 13-1, the same year those bengals became come-from-behind World Series Champions.
When his atypically loud father stumbled home for dinner, it provided the only instance where he (years later) suspected dad had been drinking too many beer concessions, justifiably, during the stunning Game Five win.
Yes, the shared discovery of frenzied fandom.
While the 1984 World Champion Tigers had further solidified his baseball romance, he still had yet to experience that Special First Day.
Some 15 years later, when the ascendant 1984 World Champion Tigers1 further solidified his baseball romance, he still had yet to experience the true meaning of that Special First Day.
The euphoria in the Roar of ‘84 did reinforce his ties to the often afflicted city, even the bad coda of fan rioting after the raucous crowd took to the field and then to the streets around the stadium well into the early morning hours.
Stepping by the eerily hypnotic pull of burning cop cars, he strangely felt another connection with the city. Unfulfilled visions had gradually dominated his only slightly more mature rock ‘n’ roll ambitions of the 1980s, visions which included relocating into the city proper.
Thoroughly invigorated, he would join the over two decades of revolutionary art and music lurking about the fabled Cass Corridor — which also happened to remain within walking distance of his preferred cathedral, Tiger Stadium.
While intensifying a belief to the music’s transformative potential, he also enjoyed the weekly escapes with six months of ball games from the lively $4.00 bleachers and the almost as cheap and lively reserve seats.
Back during that tumultuous 1984, his alternative rock band started playing regularly around town. Tragically, in July, he would lose a best friend and former middle school teammate, which permanently tempered his embrace of all entertainment, perhaps somewhat like the post-Championship rioting had messed with the Tiger’s best season ever.
His youthful career aspirations had undergone a realignment of sorts, despite several false starts and the hidden trauma he shared, by sad coincidence, with his quietly young, late 1980s girlfriend, Ellie, who shyly showed off an English D baseball cap perched loosely atop her long blonde hair.
During an especially magical 1987 baseball season, his elaborate, slightly make-believe music world never seemed more achievable than when the Detroit Tigers won the American League East Division on the last game of the season, the only year he witnessed the first and last regularly scheduled games in person.
Opening Day would finally be felt in the flesh.
In January, he had abruptly quit his fulltime law firm job a few months earlier. He began managing a full-time manic rock ‘n’ roll exuberance with two or three rehearsals a week, writing several new songs (such as “Amidst the Ruins,” a homage to local protest-based street fairs) to pad the bi-monthly live gig set list, while teaching music part-time on the side.
In 1987, such a bohemian livelihood seemed deliriously sustainable.
So, on Opening Day, he and Ellie drifted about, like bullpen ghosts, in glowing solidarity with the thousands of revelers skipping work and school around the seemingly indestructible stadium.
The couple instinctively warmed each other in the bleacher ticket line, the ecstasy of high expectations filtering through the snap of beer can chugging and occasional marijuana smoke clouds, whenever the police would temporarily disappear.
Thus, in 1987, his epiphany with a New Favorite Holiday.
Against the always affluent Yankees, of course.
That breakthrough realization moment came when Larry Herndon, the veteran Tiger outfielder and one of several shy heroes of the 1984 World Series, blasted a line-drive straightaway comet into the upper-deck of the bleachers, 20 rows beyond the 440 foot mark, roughly 500 feet, soaring high over our frozen lower-deck heads, all mouths gaping.
After Larry jogged the bases, the crowd still roaring, they had to sneak in a kiss.
Losing 2-1, they later stumbled out of the Stadium, green and cold, to continue wandering the Corktown streets, then up and down Michigan Avenue, his left hand on the wheel, his right hand locked with hers, then again walking arm in arm, duplicating Bob and Suze on the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover, all the way to Mexicantown and then back to his Cass Corridor loft, all with the electric buzz of Opening Day, despite the close loss, the promise of a season which would indeed bring the city back to the brink of more baseball glory.
First baseball photo, circa 1964. Stances questionable, smiles genuine.
Corktown Opening Day, 1993, with friend Roberta, an eventual relocated Phillies fan, beneath lost cause of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club HQ.
Cass Angels, Detroit Amateur Baseball Association, Opening Day at Northwestern Field, next to where the Olympia Stadium once stood. Guess which five woud become college profs or high school teachers?
We won only one game that inaugural year (lasting seven amazing seasons, 1993-1999).
Photo by Juan Shell
Of course, Mr. Herndon would score the only run with another homer on the final 1-0 regular-season Sunday afternoon victory over the Toronto Blue Jays, in front of over 51,000 at The Corner, before the Tiegs subsequently lost the pennant to the Twins in a five-game playoff, with the ever modest Larry retiring for good in 1988.
He and Ellie would switch their sports priorities when the Pistons took over after the Tigers floundered, yet they would break up after the Piston’s Second World Championship — and not coincidentally, the last major riot in Detroit.
His rock n’ roll dreams would last only a few years after that, and with the Cass Corridor a fading center of spirited agitprop, he returned to school, to earn a social studies degree and a secondary teaching certificate.
City planners and one billionaire would gradually shut down the unique cathedral of Tiger Stadium and slowly demolish the site after fans migrated to Comerica Park (which always sounds like a little cough when pronouncing) in a major sports consolidation downtown.
On Opening Day, over the next three dozen years, there would be other girlfriends, solo outings, get-togethers with the guys, a couple of fiancés and an eventual wife, and finally, a couple of young starry-eyed boys, with fresh leather gloves in hand, in jubilant reaffirmation of his Favorite Holiday.
The one which always asks, could this be the year we again go all the way?
1984, Detroit’s most recent World Series victory. At least they have fared better than the Lions, whose last championship win occurred in 1957, in fabled Tiger Stadium.
Opening day pushes aside the daily grind for 24 hrs. Hope springs enternal. Magic. I revived my older arm and was grateful to wear Nolan Ryan's number 34 for the Cass Angels. Also magic. I was the visitor's clubhouse guard during the 1984 season at Tiger Stadium. Bill was correct, Detroit fans were over the top after the Series win. It was a giant street gang. I suspect many were not true fans, and had an agenda to come in for destruction only. Strange times mixed with euphoria. Baseball marks American history. Ken Burns showed us that. Thanks for your take, Bill. Detroit and baseball owe you a great debt.
Really nice story about Detroit Sports fandom. The Blue Jays and the NY Yankees were some of my favorite teams to watch against the Detroit Tigers. I used to know most of the team members but have lost track. Still - a nice tradition to hand down to family and friends.