Net54baseball.com Forums - Navin Field/Tiger Stadium Site Preservation.

Very cool video -- thanks for posting!

It reminded me of this article posted a few days ago on detroitnews.com....

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2...ON03/210220322

October 22, 2012 at 10:47 am
Neal Rubin

Tiger Stadium lives on, nurtures old memories

The flags were snapping, straight out from home plate. With no structure to block the wind, the sunshine was deceptive. On the field at Tiger Stadium, it was cold.

In a few hours, at Comerica Park, the Detroit Tigers were going to play baseball in front of tens of thousands of fans. At Michigan and Trumbull, Jerry Wright of Lincoln Park had the old ball field to himself.

The people who love the stadium enough to tend the playing field have put up two makeshift dugout benches. Wright was sitting on the one along the third base line, drinking Busch from an oversized can.

With baseball on so many minds, and with one of the ballpark gates swung open on the Michigan Avenue side, the field has been something of a destination over the past few weeks. Hours earlier, in the rain, a young man stood with an older man at shortstop and pantomimed the long throw to first.

Drive past most any time and you might see two or three small clusters around the field, walking on the surface they used to dream about. Some bring their gloves. Some only bring memories.

Wright brought his bike, but he had memories, too.

Unwinding at third base

Twisting to his left, he pointed to the pedestrian overpass above Interstate 75. He grew up in Corktown, close enough to ride go-karts down its slopes. In his 30s, he had a job at the stadium, part of the invisible overnight crew cleaning up each game's debris.

Now he's 52, and he was just enjoying the solitude, waiting for a bus.

He's one of those guys who can do a lot of things, even with the balky right knee that mustered out with him when he left the Army. These days he drives a truck for the Salvation Army, over on Fort Street. He'll take a SMART bus up Southfield Road to Fairlane Mall, transfer to another one that lets him off right outside the old ballpark, and pedal five minutes to work.

Once, he says, when he worked a later shift, three men jumped him at the bus stop. "We were fighting, right out in the middle of Michigan Avenue."

Nobody bothers him inside the gate, so he picks up a few beers, hangs the plastic bag from his handlebars, rides to the field and unwinds.

Diamond survives

The city insisted on knocking down Tiger Stadium, but it couldn't kill 104 years of history, and so far, it has granted a pardon to the diamond.

An unofficial corps of volunteers keeps the playing surface from becoming yet another weed-filled Detroit lot. The grass is mowed, the base paths are smoothed, and the trash is picked up. An American flag hangs above a Tigers flag on the original pole in centerfield, 125 feet tall.

There's nowhere like it in any other city, a place where you can stand where Babe Ruth stood or run where Ty Cobb ran. Or, if the mood strikes you, where you can just sit and soak things in.

"A box man," Wright said. That was his job on the late shift at Tiger Stadium, before a casino rose behind the fence in left-center.

The sweeper would start at the top of a section, pushing the cups and wrappers and spilled popcorn from beneath the seats. The box man would break it all down and toss it into the rolling bin they called a truck.

Nowadays, the process starts with leaf blowers. It's a different, louder world. But not at Tiger Stadium, where the greats used to roam, and where a workingman waited for his ride home.