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Detroit is the most American of American cities. In its heyday, it drew unto itself by the hundreds of thousands blacks and whites from the South, Jews, and assorted "ethnics" from Europe. A Detroit neighborhood in the fifties was "a microcosm, an urban experience," Tiger Stadium Fan Club founder Frank Rashid (himself Lebanese) once told me. "We had the influx of blacks. We had a Chinese family, a German family. I can't imagine a better childhood. Don't tell me it doesn't work. It worked. It was great, it was wonderful. What a way to learn from other people and to get a sense of what could and what should be."
Already then, the yang of industrial triumph carried within itself the yin of its own demise. The city emptied out in the sixties, with white flight accelerating after the 1967 riot. By the time I arrived in 1991, the physical city was in places a burned-out shell of its former self. In a seemingly recovering neighborhood like Corktown, where I lived, you could read the curve of the city's history: a brick house built at the turn of the century, maintained just to the point of being inhabitable (by the now elderly sister of Ty Cobb's personal batboy); across the street, what in the 1860s had been a German immigrant's farmhouse, impressively restored by an affluent stockbroker; down the block, a crack house. On the next block: the charred wreck of a house recently burned by its owner for insurance. Across the street: an empty lot.
Who was to blame for the city's state was a rhetorical question that hovered in the air amid the dignified half-empty skyscrapers and seeped unspoken into conversations. The battle lines were clear enough: blacks blamed whites; whites blamed blacks. It wasn't quite as black and white as that, but it was difficult and trying for even well-meaning and intelligent people to cross the line symbolized so starkly by Eight Mile Road.
Like Detroit, baseball is a rich and complex metaphor. "Baseball has had a different and more important role in Detroit than it has in New York or in many other American cities," asserts Patrick Harrigan, rightly, and it is my privilege to have served my apprenticeship helping Michael Betzold to demonstrate this in Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1991), the history of the site where baseball has been played in Detroit since 1896. At the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues, two of the most telling of American metaphors intersect.
It's right out there in your face, as always. Nineteen forty-five was "the end of the magic," Detroit native Don Shapiro told me. "The war was over. Hitler was dead. I was already graduating from dental school. And [Hank] Greenberg came back [from serving in the war] for one last heroic home run, to win the game against the St. Louis Browns on the last day of the season. It was the loss of innocence, there's no question about it. It was never the same after that."
Yet for some decades more, as Harrigan puts it, "Continuity and memories combined with postwar prosperity to produce … a sense among Detroiters that Detroit baseball was one of the constancies of life." The 1968 World Series champions were "a fascinating mix of personalities," wrote my co-author, Michael Betzold. "The integrated, never-say-die Tigers provided Detroit a badly needed image of achievement and equality. They were a team of strong-willed individuals, each contributing his share to collective success. In a city where people were arming themselves to the teeth, many were fleeing, and social divisions were widening, the Tigers embodied hope and unity. Throughout that turbulent summer, Michigan and Trumbull was a common ground where people set aside their differences, where everything somehow turned out all right in the end."
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