The Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark (Honoring a Detroit Legend)
by Tom Stanton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tom StantonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-05-08
ISBN: 0312291566
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780312291563
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of The Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark (Honoring a Detroit Legend)
Book Review: Heartfelt Narrative
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a moving look at Tiger Stadium (1912-1999) and the vital father-son-family ties of baseball fans. Attending every home game that final season, author Tom Stanton captures the feel of this venerable arena, introducing us to those that played, worked, or watched games there, including four generations of his baseball-loving family. Readers feel as if we are sitting in the close-by upper deck watching Babe Ruth, Hank Greenberg, and Bob Feller. It was here that a stricken Lou Gherig ended his playing streak in 1939, Ted Williams (1941) and Reggie Jackson (1971) hit famous All-Star game homers, Ernie Harwell called the action (1960-2002), and the Tigers four World Series (1935, 1945, 1968, 1984). Readers learn about Stanton's immigrant grandfather cheering on Ty Cobb from the grandstands, then father, author and son arrived to root for guys like Gehringer, Newhouser, Kaline, Freehan, Gibson, Trammel, and Whitaker. I'd have liked better photos and more attention on the economics (urban decline, no skyboxes) leading to the park's abandonment, but this remains an excellent narrative.
We traveled to Detroit to see this inspiring if imperfect ballpark, and found it similar but superior to our city's Comiskey Park (1910-1990). Sadly, they are now tearing it down except for a section of infield grandstands. At least we have this moving narrative as testament to baseball at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull.
More The Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark (Honoring a Detroit Legend) reviews:
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Summary of The Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark (Honoring a Detroit Legend)
Maybe your dad took you to ball games at Fenway, Wrigley, or Ebbets. Maybe the two of you watched broadcasts from Yankee Stadium or Candlestick Park, or listened as Red Barber or Vin Scully called the plays on radio. Or maybe he coached your team or just played catch with you in the yard. Chances are good that if you're a baseball fan, your dad had something to do with it--and your thoughts of the sport evoke thoughts of him. If so, you will treasure The Final Season, a poignant true story about baseball and heroes, family and forgiveness, doubts and dreams, and a place that brings them all together.Growing up in the 60s and 70s, Tom Stanton lived for his Detroit Tigers. When Tiger Stadium began its 88th and final season, he vowed to attend all 81 home games in order to explore his attachment to the place where four generations of his family have shared baseball. Join him as he encounters idols, conjures decades past, and discovers the mysteries of a park where Cobb and Ruth played. Come along and sit beside Al Kaline on the dugout bench, eat popcorn with Elmore Leonard, hear Alice Cooper's confessions, soak up the warmth of Ernie Harwell, see McGwire and Ripken up close, and meet Chicken Legs Rau, Bleacher Pete, Al the Usher, and a parade of fans who are anything but ordinary. By the autumn of his odyssey, Stanton comes to realize that his anguish isn't just about the loss of a beloved ballpark but about his dad's mortality, for at the heart of this story is the love between fathers and sons--a theme that resonates with baseball fans of all ages.
"Where there are ballparks," writes Tom Stanton in The Final Season, his wistful meditation on baseball and family, "there are memories ... I could never go to Tiger Stadium without feeling the ghosts of history about me...." In 1999, the season of that noble ballpark's last stand, Stanton set out to make peace with those ghosts by attending all 81 Tiger home games. He wasn't sure what he was looking for when he started, but what he finds in the end is much more personal than anything he sees between the foul lines.
Conceived as a game-by-game journal, The Final Season is filled with baseball. Stanton steps up with graceful musings on the game, the park, the Tigers and their history, and, most spiritedly, a pair of living legends--former right fielder Al Kaline and announcer Ernie Harwell. But it's Stanton's thoughts about family--his own family and how the game and the ballpark have connected generations--that truly resonate. In his prose, this lovely old rust bucket of a ballpark, this repository of so many memories, becomes metaphor.
Fittingly, Stanton takes his father to the final game. "I've noticed something today," he writes of the experience. "It's not the seventy- and eighty-year-old men who are wiping their eyes. It's the generation that came after them. And we're hurting not only for the loss of this beautiful place, but for the loss of our fathers and grandfathers--belatedly or prematurely. The closing of this park forces us to confront their mortality, and when we confront their mortality we must confront our own.... A little bit of us dies when something like this, something so tied to our lives, disappears." --Jeff Silverman
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