Opening Day

Strange new colors assaulted my eyes this morning as I walked the dog. As if a layer of paint had been scraped off the floor, there were streaks of green amid all the brown and gray on the ground. Shocking, almost lurid. It looks like spring might come after all.

That conclusion was not foregone yesterday, but we were told spring training was over, so Stu Shea and I piled into the station wagon and drove to Detroit for the Tigers home opener against the Royals. We listened to the WXRT morning broadcast from Yakzie’s til 7, then switched over to WFMT’s Opening Day show, on the hope that the host would be able to squeeze in some poetry from BARDBALL.COM. We heard Dewitt Hopper intoning “Casey at the Bat” and Wayne & Shuster’s recording of Shakespearean baseball, but began losing the signal at the Michigan state line, so if he read anything, we missed it. Mists, pelting rains and fog made driving a bitch and hope a luxury. Huge mounds of snow could be seen in the trees by the highway and on the edges of parking lots. If it was raining at Game Time, we were ready to head back, but somehow the Motor City was dry and windless, as if protected by a magic bubble, and the day was about as perfect as one could expect on March 31.

But driving to Detroit always brings lots of baggage with it, for those who grew up there and left. Everything bad about the town has gotten worse in the 25 years I’ve been gone, and going to a ballgame in an abandoned downtown with a lot of drunken white kids from the far suburbs makes me feel like a predatory tourist, like I’m on a cruise ship landing at an impoverished island prepared to haggle with the natives over the price of trinkets, while my drunken buddies do impromptu limbo dances and laugh at themselves. Like on any Opening Day, there was optimism all over the radio. “Downtown is humming,” intoned a mild-mannered host from WJR as he interviewed middle-aged fans. One harpy came on and said, “This is a great day for Detroit. Of course, I live in Macomb County, but I’m still so excited to be downtown.”

That’s the place in a nutshell. Out of 48,000 people, I personally saw 4 black faces in the crowd who weren’t working (5 if you count Jacque Jones).

After gathering up Mardi Gras beads and promotional handwarmers, Stu and I wandered around a bit. He took my picture in front of the big Tiger statue that always reminds me of a chia pet before it gets watered, so it looks like I am indeed a completely predatory tourist. We found our friends and got our tickets. Many thanks to Gary Gillette and his family for letting us have the good box seats down the left field line. After shelling out $4.50 for a kosher hot dog and $8.25 for a beer (it was a Labatt’s, so maybe the falling dollar is even affecting our drinking habits now), we took our seats with our SABR buddies Frank and Rod. For some reason, Mayor Kilpatrick wasn’t asked to throw the first pitch like he was last year. Perhaps if he’d thrown a wild pitch, he’d have a hard time explaining that it wasn’t his hands that actually touched the ball. Probably on advice of counsel, he decided to skip the public appearance in front of his adoring constituents.

The Tigers ended up losing 4-3, but it was a hell of a good game anyway. A couple of sacrifice bunts, a couple of runners thrown out at the plate (one by Brandon Inge from the middle of left field), extra innings. Unfortunately, no appearance by the pitcher with our favorite name, Yorman Bazardo. Throughout the rest of the evening, we turned his name into a euphemism for everything from body parts to perverted sex acts to foreign espionage. It was even suggested that he’s a phantom, a will o the wisp, a fictional character who never shows up. If Samuel Becket were alive today, he’d be scribbling “Waiting for Bazardo.” And certainly bitching about an $8 beer.

After the game we headed up to Hamtramck for some delicious Polish food at “Under the Eagle” (since “Polish Village” was packed with Tiger fans). Afterward the men in the party headed for the Cadieux Cafe for some beer and some Belgian bowling. This was my first time there, though I’ve heard of Belgian bowling for many years. It’s been going on at the cafe for 75 years–in fact, their anniversary celebration is this weekend. This neighborhood was the center of the Belgian-American community in Detroit, which for all I know could fit comfortably into one rowboat. This is apparently the only site in North America were you can enjoy throwing that cheese-shaped hunk of wood at a pigeon feather. We had a marvelous time.

After hours we went back to Gary’s house in the Indian Village neighborhood. I hadn’t seen the houses down there since I was a child. They were drop-dead gorgeous mansions from 90 years ago, on big lots. We sat in Gary’s study with a big roaring fire, drank Harvey’s Bristol Cream and talked about hundreds of things. A lot about baseball, and a lot about civic corruption and urban decay.

Gary and his family have a beautiful house they bought at a bargain basement price. What their lacking is, in his words, “a functioning city.” I read about the city in the papers all the time, but rarely visit. I was shocked by the utter desolation we drove through from downtown to Hamtramck, and Gary told me that that wasn’t the worst of it. Elaborate Queen Anne houses rotting alone, the only structure left standing on a vacant block. Not blocks of boarded up houses, but miles of them. Mildewing piles of planks and shingles the city is too broke to tear down and haul away. I probably bored Stu on the drive back with comments about it. I know the place is a wreck, a corpse, with really no hope of turning around economically. If we erected protectionist barriers tomorrow and insisted that every single thing sold in America had to be built in America, it wouldn’t help that place, with a 50% adult literacy rate and 75% high school dropout rate. I had to wonder what goes through the minds of Gary’s two children, adopted from Poland, who get to live in a nice home in an integrated and involved neighborhood, surrounded by a moonscape, filled not with faded glory, but raped and maimed and left-to-die-in-a-ditch glory.

I had a great time at Opening Day, enjoying good company, great food and the annual promise that Opening Day embodies. I don’t want to wring my hands like a hypocrite. Even though I have vivid and wonderful memories of many parts of growing up in the Detroit area, I left that place 25 years ago b/c it was a one-industry town, and I wasn’t part of that industry. Also, I like city living, and can still afford that in Chicago, with all its pleasures and headaches. The price Gary pays for his big gilded-era house is to drive through the post-apocalyptic landscape of a powerhouse city that put the world on wheels. If a movie company wanted to shoot a thriller in the style of “The Omega Man,” they would scout out locations in Detroit and then decide, No, this is too unbelievable, no one would believe that this place was ever inhabited.