In Right Field at Tiger Stadium, You Had to Watch Your Head
One of the many quirks of this cherished ballpark was a right field with a bit of a roof.
by Rich Watson
We left-handers have a hard time making it in a world oriented for right-handers. Fortunately baseball has tried to give us a break by building ballparks with shallow right fields. The original Yankee Stadium skewed dramatically inward on the right side to accommodate Babe Ruth, though given the rate he hit home runs, he didn’t need the help.
Detroit’s Tiger Stadium was 325 feet from home plate; left field was 340 feet. What made it peculiar, though, had less to do with its horizontal view and more to do with its vertical one.
The ballpark formerly known as…
In the old days, baseball owners often named new ballparks for themselves. Tigers owner Frank Navin opened the concrete-and-steel edifice at 2121 Trumbull Avenue in 1912, hence the name Navin Field, built on the site of the team’s previous home, Bennett Park. It seated 23,000.
His successor, Walter “Spike” Briggs, expanded the capacity to 53,000 by 1938 and renamed it Briggs Stadium. John Fetzer came after him and ceased the trend in 1961, settling for the moniker Tiger Stadium, which stuck.
The Tigers won their first two World Series during the Navin era, in 1935, and during the Briggs regime, in 1945.
Detroit’s pro football teams played in the ballpark in the Navin era. The Lions, born in 1930, played there from 1938-74.
Joe Louis once fought at Tiger Stadium as boxing’s heavyweight champion. It was used in the Billy Crystal-directed film 61*, about the 1961 home run race between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. It was in an Eminem video. It was also the subject of an Emmy-winning documentary.
The center field flagpole
Tiger Stadium had a flagpole in fair territory on the warning track in center field, 440 feet from home plate. A relic of Bennett Park, Navin originally placed it in front of a railing on the right field bleachers. Over time, as the seating grew, its position changed. The strangest development in right field, though, was still to come.
The right field overhang and “Kaline’s Corner”
During the Briggs era, in 1936, a second deck went not only over the right field bleachers, but out beyond the fence itself. It left an overhang about ten feet above the warning track. The foul pole was divided into two sections, above and below the extended deck!
In addition, box seats on the ground level pavilion ran up against the foul line in the corner.
The combination was perilous for many right fielders, particularly one: Al Kaline, the Tigers’ superstar from the fifties to the seventies. Early in his career, he banged into the box seats often, to the point where Briggs had those seats removed. Also, lights were added underneath the overhang.
Right field in Tiger Stadium soon became known as “Kaline’s Corner.”
Lefty sluggers Cash and Gibson took aim at right field
Kaline was right-handed, but his teammate Norm Cash wasn’t. Only Kaline hit more home runs as a Tiger than the first baseman. They were both part of the World Series-winning 1968 team. Tiger Stadium, with its short right field, made a tempting target for Cash.
Four times he hit balls over the roof, all between 1961 and 1962. In 1961, the year of the Mantle-versus-Maris home run race, Cash had 41 homers, good for sixth place. He led the American League in hitting with a .361 average. Later, though, he did admit he had used a corked bat.
In the eighties, another Tiger lefty became famous for his prodigious blasts: Kirk Gibson. The outfielder and Pontiac native from Michigan State University was part of the 1984 team that also won the championship. As a Tiger, one of his greatest feats was this homer from 1983 that also left the ballpark.
Other sluggers hit titanic clouts in Tiger Stadium, both left- and right-handed, including this shot by lefty Reggie Jackson in the 1971 All-Star Game.
The battle to save Tiger Stadium
Two different pizza entrepreneurs, Tom Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza in 1983 and then Mike Ilitch of Little Caesar’s in 1992, owned the Tigers. They both wanted to replace Tiger Stadium, as did city officials. At this point in time, the edifice had begun to show its age.
A fan-led movement to save the ballpark pushed the Cochrane Plan, a guide to renovating Tiger Stadium for less money than building a new one. Despite support for it in the press and among fans, ownership and city leadership gave it scant consideration.
In the book about new-stadium funding battles, Field of Schemes by Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause, Cochrane Plan co-creator John Davids said the fix was in:
[Wayne] County officials “spent an awful lot of money and time taking columnists out to lunch, and making presentations about how many thousands of jobs the stadium would create and how Tiger Stadium was just too old and couldn’t be renovated,” says Davids. “They were able to really collar some people and turn some people around who had been supportive of us before.”
A referendum to prohibit city spending on a new ballpark was first upheld, then overturned. Ground broke on what would become Comerica Park in 1997. Tiger Stadium lasted until 1999.
Tiger Stadium’s legacy
A number of the newer ballparks from the past thirty years have come with intentional design oddities meant to be reminiscent of older places like Tiger Stadium.
CitiField in New York is one example. When former Mets owner Jeff Wilpon commissioned the new stadium’s construction, one thing he wanted was a right field overhang like Tiger Stadium:
…Its official name is the Pepsi Porch, and it’s a 1,284-seat section that extends eight feet into fair territory….
Team COO Jeff Wilpon, who spent his younger days going to Tiger Stadium in Detroit, was the driving force behind the overhang in Queens.
“It’s one of my favorite aspects of the ballpark,” said Wilpon, who owns season tickets in the Pepsi Porch. “Fans sitting in the Pepsi Porch will really feel like they are part of the action on the field.”
As for Tiger Stadium, all that remains is a Police Athletic League field built from the original field and the flagpole. No doubt a new generation of lefties is eying the short right field and dreaming of glory.
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Have you ever been to Tiger Stadium?