The Grounds Crew

This story dates back to the summer of 2013. It first appeared on a personal website my ISP has since obliterated. I now present it here, six years later and without updates, although plenty has changed – so much, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I am, however, adding the last names of several people, left out of the original for various reasons.

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There is nothing left of Tiger Stadium, nothing at all, unless you count the flagpole that once stood in the deepest part of center field.

Now the flagpole is in an empty Detroit lot, and everything else is gone. The grandstands, the dugouts and bullpen, the outfield fences and the enormous light towers that once turned night into day – all gone. The club houses are gone, the broadcast booth where Ernie Harwell called the play-by-play, the press booths built into the stadium’s very top tier, and the massive rolls of waterproof tarpaulin the stadium grounds crew pulled over the infield when it rained. All of it is gone.

And yet, there is still a grounds crew.

Or at least, there’s a version of the grounds crew, a self-selected, volunteer corps that over the last few years has reclaimed the abandoned field at Michigan and Trumbull. This handful of Detroit-area fans remember Tiger Stadium with great fondness.

“This is sacred ground,” one of them said to me, the day I stopped by. “I love it here.”

That was Joe Michnuk speaking. Joe is a onetime Detroit Tiger employee whose tough appearance belies a basic friendliness. “How ya doin’, man?” he greeted me earlier, as I first approached the field. He walked barefoot from an entrance along Michigan Avenue, and I began to think of him as Shoeless Joe.

There’s also a guy out there named Tom Derry. By all accounts, he is the driving force behind this loosely-affiliated group known as the Navin Field Grounds Crew. Disturbed by the weed-infested remains of the playing field after a visit in 2010, Tom took it upon himself to return with a tractor-mower and start the laborious task of bringing ten overgrown acres under control. A few others joined him, including his girlfriend Sarah.

After several years of hard work, it’s a baseball diamond again.

Its dimensions are as accurate as can be, short of getting official league input. The Navin Field Grounds Crew located anchors in the field where the bases used to go, and another for the pitcher’s slab. They have set the field up accordingly.

Tom is a mail carrier, presently sidelined after an on-the-job accident. The day I met him he hobbled around on crutches, wearing a Tigers home jersey bearing Norm Cash’s number 25. Cash, the Tigers’ slugging first baseman during the 1960s and 70s, was his favorite player.

The Navin Field Grounds Crew has had a lot of publicity since forming. Tom told me all the local TV stations and the local print media have done stories, and national outlets like ESPN and NPR. And that’s to name but a few.

Tiger Stadium met with a wrecking crew between 2008 and 2009. By then I had lived out of state for many years. But during a trip back to Detroit in August 2008, I couldn’t resist spending a few hours at Michigan and Trumbull to witness what I could of the stadium’s dismantling. An unpleasant sight: big chunks of it were already gone. Heavy machinery occupied rough dirt where the center field bleachers and left field stands used to be.

From time to time, as the stadium gradually came down, people snuck in for a last look around. I’d have done so myself that day, if my wife hadn’t been with me. And if I’d been able to summon up the necessary chutzpah.

You wouldn’t think it takes much chutzpah to mow the lawn, but technically the Navin Field Grounds Crew is trespassing. Tom told me the cops threw them out a few times over the first year or so. Now they pretty much leave them alone.

I should have, but didn’t, ask how they settled on the name “Navin Field Grounds Crew.” But it’s easy to see. Professional baseball was played at Michigan and Trumbull from the late 19th century on, first at a wooden structure called Bennett Park, and later at the concrete-and-steel Navin Field, which opened in 1912. The original grandstands extended from about first base around to third base. By the 1930s there was an upper deck, and the ball yard became Briggs Stadium. It became Tiger Stadium in 1961.

“How you folks doin’?” Shoeless Joe greeted visitors on that June morning I was there. He’d been working with a shovel around the home plate area. Back in the 1980s Joe worked clubhouse security at Tiger Stadium. “Best job I ever had,” he says today. “It was never like going to work.”

The visitors were a middle-aged man with a couple of children. “I just had to bring my kids down here,” the man explained. He lives near Adrian in southern Michigan and was on his way to a game at Comerica Park, the Tigers’ home now for more than a decade.

Tom says this happens all the time. People on their way to a home game stop by to see where Tiger Stadium used to be. The Adrian man and his kids began an improvised romp around home plate and the pitchers’ mound.

I met a guy named Dave Mesrey out in right field. During the week he’s a copy editor. Now he was bent over, stuffing a big plastic bag with windblown trash. Like everyone else I met with the Navin Field Grounds Crew, Dave is a friendly fellow with an obvious love for not just the Tigers and Tiger Stadium, but the very grounds on which the stadium once stood.

He described to me the incredibly overgrown condition of the field when the nascent NFGC first began clearing it. “I shudder to think what would have happened to this place if Tom hadn’t come along.” A picture on Dave’s smart phone shows him standing in chest-high weeds.

There’s an openness about this crew, an unassuming, all-in-a-day’s-work attitude I found very appealing. I don’t deserve any credit, several said to me. It’s guys like Jerry, who drives all the way across the state just to be here. It’s the guy who paid for our three rider mowers out of his own pocket. Or the guy who picks up trash in the outfield. Or all the other volunteers who show up every single Sunday to weed the infield and mow the outfield and rebuild the pitcher’s mound or lay down the white lime lines from the batter’s box at home plate all the way down to where the foul poles used to be. They’re the ones who are interesting. They deserve all the credit. Not me.

As the morning progressed I wandered all over the field, from home plate to the flag pole in center, to the left and right field corners. I went beyond the field to a service drive outside the gate (the corner of Kaline and Cochrane), to a pedestrian bridge over the Fisher Freeway, where fans once streamed to the stadium on game days.

This is, indeed, sacred ground to a lot of people. Shoeless Joe asked whether I’d seen the ashes. When I said no, he led me to ashes laid out like a foul line and adorned with roses. He didn’t know who left them there: someone’s cremated remains.

One of the crew told me they mark birthdays – a little celebration in left field for Willie Horton, and another on the pitcher’s mound for the late Mark Fidrych. They had one in 2012 to observe the centennial of Navin Field.

At the beginning of this essay I said the flagpole was the only thing left of Tiger Stadium. I lied. There’s a rather fancy gate running along Michigan Avenue, and it’s still there, too. But Tom said it didn’t go up until the early 1990s, when management moved the player’s parking lot and created a new spectator entrance. By then I had left the Detroit area. I’m glad the gate is still there, but to me it doesn’t really count.

I retain a powerful, if sentimental, attachment to Tiger Stadium, and this grassroots reclamation of what’s left – dare this curmudgeon say it? – is one of the most heartwarming things I’ve seen in a long time. As I looked around the day of my visit I imagined the previous condition of the field, the way Dave and Tom described it: overgrown, unruly weeds where the likes of Ty Cobb, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg, Babe Ruth, and Shoeless Joe Jackson once played.

Tiger Stadium, Briggs Stadium, Bennett Park, Navin Field – in spite of our best efforts we know it won’t always be there, not in the form of a baseball diamond. We know nothing lasts forever. But for now a group of self-appointed groundskeepers have reclaimed a small piece of Detroit’s heritage, and of Major League Baseball’s heritage. They did it because they love it and because it was the right thing to do. And that is a very noble thing.

Stuff A Sock In It

You know what Benjamin Franklin said: fish and visitors stink after three days.

Not this time, though. Our son and his girlfriend flew into town on New Year’s Day; our daughter was already here for Christmas break. No stink to any of it. I wanted them all to stay and stay and stay.

Admittedly, their presence disrupted certain household norms. My son brought his dog, for example, which upset our cat. (The cat, a genuine ’fraidy cat, spent three days hiding under a bed.)

And my usual routine got kicked. As an early riser whose pre-dawn routine is not complete without at least an hour of guitar playing, I had to make a few adjustments.

Ordinarily I use the basement guest room, a quiet and secluded place – but for the time being, ocupado. O where to play, in this slumbering house?

What about the living room? 

The answer to this question: an emphatic yes. I took my old beater guitar, loosened the strings, and stuffed it like a turkey – socks and t-shirts, lots of ’em, crammed into its body to muffle the sound. Re-tightened the strings. Tuned.

Did it work?

Better than I hoped! I played all my current stuff without a care, without the least concern I would disturb somebody.

Did I play “Sleepers Awake”? Too obvious. Instead, I worked on (what I call) Ted Greene Arrangements for Prepared Guitar.

The guitar, incidentally, is surprisingly heavy with all of that fabric concentrated in its guts.

As this is written, things are about to return to normal. Twang twang. Pleased as I am, I miss the kiddos – and they ain’t even gone yet.

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