More on Tiger Stadium--I mean, moron Tiger Stadium

Wrecking crews sunk their first set of iron teeth into the old, empty Tiger Stadium in Detroit yesterday. I've mentioned here several times that I am one of the many in favor of this. The club stopped playing baseball there in 1999. They should've began dismantling it the very next day. But lo, it has sat unoccupied for nine years, while vandals and the curious helped themselves to what was inside and nature overran the rest of the place. It's an eyesore. Yes, it is a historical sporting venue. I get it. But it's a paint-peeling piece of shit that had its time and now its time has come.

The thing I look forward to the least is already starting to happen, and that is the dreamy, wistful bullshit rhetoric that's going to come down like a weepy little hammer in the months during demolition. Every little shithead who stands in opposition of Tiger Stadium meeting its date with a wrecking crew is going to run off at the mouth about the injustice of reducing this building to rubble. Everyone has an idea. Everyone has a plan that THEY think is the best solution. Turn it into lofts and condos; turn it into retail shopping while keeping the lower bowl of the park; donate it to a university to play their games there; do this; do that. I have suggestion too, you know. How about you all shut off and let the grown-ups handle all of this? I understand historic preservation. It's about breathing new life into something while letting its past continue to shine. I get it. It is happening with the Book-Cadillac building, a regal, domineering structure of the city's skyline that sat vacant for decades before undergoing this massive transformation to turn it into a hotel with penthouses, condos and retail. People will stay there and spend money. It's owners might see a profit. Those owners might invest elsewhere in the city and create a very nice ripple effect. See? That works. Taking a huge baseball stadium, one that doesn't host baseball and never will, and rendering it into a 15,000-square-foot monument, some sort of oversized plaque to the city's baseball past is, well, it's just goddamn stupid.

And so the first leg of my decathalon of being irritated to the point of enragement has begun. Yesterday, in a report appearing at the Detroit Free Press' Web site, was this little nugget: A wrecking crew already poked a hole on the north side of the stadium. And near it, behind the fence, sat Rich, a man identified by the paper as a freelance radio journalist from Bloomfield Hills. That's code for "My ass is unemployed." And this is what Rich had to say about the initial piece of demolition work: "This is my friend," the article read, identifying him as making a sweeping hand gesture toward the stadium. "My friend is leaving me. A punch in the wall is like a punch in the heart."

My friend is leaving me? See, this is what I'm talking about. There are going to be hundreds of people very much like this tool, personifying a decaying object as if it possesses human qualities. This is my friend? How is an empty ballpark your "friend"? Has it loaned you money? Did it help you move that one time? Did it set you up with its sister, which, in this case, would make it a date between Rich and a five-story parking garage. Your friend? Did you two -- and by you two I mean, you AND A BUILDING -- get trashed one night and innocently hook up?

Look, City Chicken embraces nostalgia as good as anyone else. And man, I did have my fair share of wonderful times at Tiger Stadium. I really did. From my first visit to my last, and all of the times in between (which, interestingly enough, as I look back on them, involved me at the park by myself), I have a plentitude of magnificent memories of my time at Michigan and Trumbull. But I let it go, and Rich and those who think like them might not feel as frowny-faced and heavy-hearted as they do now if they would just grow a fucking set and get over it.

A punch in the wall is like a punch in the heart? That may be true for the sad sacks who, nine years later, still can't let go, but a punch in the wall is a tickle compared to the kick in the taint I'm going to administer if I have to endure this melancholy bullshit all summer long.