I figured all cities had ballparks like ours. When they won the pennant, my friends and I were among the thousands who danced in the outfield, grabbing pieces of sacred sod because we wanted to preserve the magic of that time and place. The Tigers were a last-place team, but Birdmania was infectious. In the mid-1980s, I would get off work at the Detroit Free Press at 11 p.m. If a game was going long, I'd slip in a gate, claim an empty seat behind home plate, and drink in some bracing late-inning tension.
Serendipity makes city life and baseball fun.
Detroit lacks the cultural riches of some cities, but I'd always run into friends at the park, which remained a center of urban life even after much of the life had gone out of the city. It's an incomparable perch. We had heaven. Little did we know how lucky we were. It all changed on the evening in September 1987 when four friends and I met in a pizza joint to discuss the growing threat to Tiger Stadium.