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 (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-05-08
ISBN: 0312291566
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Book Reviews of The Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark (Honoring a Detroit Legend)
Book Review: "Old buildings bring life to stories..."
Summary: 5 Stars
For the past 15 year or so there's been a small but unmistakable conflict in my mind when it comes to professional baseball. The game today, though one that I still love, is speckled with disappointment and resentment. Every time I go to a game at Ranger's Ballpark (I'm a devoted Cleveland Indians fan living in the heart of Texas) and pay $20 for parking, $30 for a decent seat and over $100 for food/souvenirs, I'm again reminded how these inflated prices now pay for the players inflated salaries. Even the magnanimous attempts of the owners at dissuading us "old-timers" with the many new "retro" ballparks (Ranger's Ballpark being one of them) are disillusioning as these are generally too antiseptic to mirror the bygone era stadiums. I've been to the original Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, Shea Stadium and Cleveland's Municipal Stadium and still remember the smell, the simplistic entrances and exits, the obstructed seats and the notable lack of luxury boxes...all things that cultivated a certain sensibility in me for the purity and innocence of the game. This book then by Tom Stanton, in my opinion, strives to understand and hopefully capture this elusive sentiment while eulogizing the end of the Detroit Tigers occupancy of Tiger Stadium. Along with it, I hoped it would be cathartic and restore in me some of that lost affection.
Vowing to attend all the home games in the Tigers final season at Tiger Stadium in 1999, Stanton chronicles his observations at these games and by doing so has scribed a testimonial not only to the loss of a family heirloom, but, as he states, "the sense of mortality". He writes about his family memories and notable milestones in his life celebrated at the stadium (most of these involving his father), while searching for that missing "sensibility" that I mentioned above that will make the loss of the stadium less melancholy and easier to understand. And I think he finds it in the end...clearly it's the acceptance of the inevitable and the sense of moving on. Stanton is truly erudite in describing the end: "This season has helped me realize that my life is becoming like the stories of my father and uncles, set in places that exist only in memory...We live on through our attachments to people, through our relationships with the ones we love."
A necessary closure for Stanton has him, of course, attending some early games in 2000 at the new Comerica Park. Comparisons are inevitable and he admits to liking much about the new place: it "feels a part of downtown and after games the streets show life; people linger, intrigued by the exterior...it's not Tiger Stadium but it has much to recommend it." For me, this book succeeds thoroughly in capturing that elusory bygone passion which is succinctly stated Angell-esque in the closing: "my favorite spot takes me away from the action behind the upper deck near right field. There's a wide walkway where you can stand in the breeze and look down Columbia Street. And on the horizon you can see the top of Tiger Stadium, it's darkened light towers silhouetted by the setting sun. And if you listen with your heart, you can hear all sorts of things. You can hear your childhood, you can hear your dad and your uncles, you can hear Kaline connecting, you can hear the muted cheers distant, ghost crowds, and you can hear your grandpa calling out from the bleachers. It's a beautiful sound and it echos across the decades."
After many attempts by local philanthropists and historical societies to save the site, the remnants of the stadium were finally demolished in September 2009.
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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.
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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