Essay: Paper Tigers - 10/4/06
Years ago, I was present at a meeting where Denise Ilitch, daughter of the owner of the Detroit Tigers, was berating a newspaper staff for negative coverage of her team.
The fact of the matter was that while some of the coverage had been nasty, the team was in fact terrible. So was attendance, and she blamed the media. “Ms. Ilitch,” I said, “if you had a contending ball club, it wouldn’t matter what the media wrote.
“You’d have to hire extra security to prevent people from flooding into the ball park.” Well, this year proved I was, for once, right. Anyone who has seen the baseball romance Field of Dreams knows the line “If you build it, they will come.”
Well, the Tigers built a good team at last, and they came. They sold more than half a million more tickets than last year. Some of those fans came from Grand Rapids and Flint and Paw Paw and even Escanaba. And some stayed around and bought stuff, had dinner in Greektown or at one of the restaurants on Woodward Avenue not far from the stadium.
Was that enough to spark a major economic revival? Of course not. Let’s imagine that the Detroit Tigers win the World Series the next five years in a row, and the Detroit Red Wings win hockey’s Stanley Cup each of those years.
That still wouldn’t provide as much value as an even partly revitalized auto industry. Nor would it cause people to actually move to Detroit, not as long as the city has a dysfunctional school system.
Still, it is better to have a good major league team rather than a lousy one. And even though football and basketball may now be more popular, still, baseball is the American game in a way those other sports are not. Baseball won’t save Detroit.
But it has had a way of cheering us up. Nineteen-sixty eight was an absolutely horrible year. Vietnam. Riots. The assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
The summer before, Detroit had been devastated by what was then America’s worst urban riot. But in 1968, the Tigers won the pennant and came from behind to win a dramatic World Series.
No one old enough will ever forget that. The Tigers took Depression-era Detroiters minds off their troubles by winning the pennant in 1934 and the World Series in 1935. They won it again in 1945, when the boys were coming home from the war, and in the Orwellian year of 1984, when most of our telescreens stayed tuned to the best year in the ball club’s century-long history.
So -- will the revitalized Detroit Tigers be enough to spark a new era of economic greatness in the Motor City? Of course not.
But it this a good thing? Does Michigan need them? Of course it is, and of course we do. Now if we could only do something about the Detroit Lions …
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