The Champions Suite

My wife was able to get company tickets for the Champions Suite for my mother’s 70th birthday. My mother likes baseball and was thrilled to be going to the game. My wife’s work has two season tickets to this suite, and employees enter a lottery to win them, so it felt serendipitous to win the August 27th game’s tickets.

People might be interested in knowing whether my mother or I like the game of baseball more, and there are, truthfully, many inconclusive facts to go on. I’d characterize my mother’s love of baseball as abstract and romantic (everyone’s love of baseball or even like of baseball must be romantic). She saw it as a beautiful game played by-and-large by bad men, while my attention to the game was less about moralizing the quality of the players. I was relieved when the OPS statistic began to carry more weight as a diagnostic and exculpatory statistic than categories like batting average and walk-rate, both of which factored into the OPS. My mother and I didn’t often talk about baseball. Still, we both felt a certain elation about attending the game and having access to a suite, which she’d never experienced. That was a fact: she’d never experienced a suite at a baseball game, basketball game, hockey game, football game, concert or any other entertainment event.

Another fact is that she used to write the line-ups for my little league baseball team. Johnny Tafelski lived down the road in our west Detroit neighborhood, played shortstop, and hit a ton. My father, our coach, had him batting sixth. My mother moved him up to third in the order. Little toggles like that made our team better. Our catcher was named Casey Philo, and once when we needed a late-inning rally she recited the poem “Casey at the Bat” from memory (an odd choice given that the titular character strikes out and leaves Mudville joyless) to the entire team within earshot of the parents in the bleachers at that elementary school field of weeds and gravel, much to Casey’s chagrin, but stronger than mere chagrin, less strong than horror, more anodyne than humiliation was Casey at the bat in Warrendale that day.

I’ve thought a time or two about “Mudville,” the name of the team and the town. It was like she’d been proleptically channeling the night of her 70th birthday with that stupid poem all those years ago. All tonights are culminations of all those years ago; it, like much else, can go without saying, but once the saying of it begins there are several disagreements stemming from the past and historical present, the singular category of the temporal and the plurality of the dimensions that the syntax cannot bear. This tonight of the anniversary of my mother’s birth, it goes without saying, was the culmination of many tonights of many years ago.

“Not even with Uncle Emmett?” I asked, when my mother said she’d never experienced a sporting event from a suite.

Not even with Uncle Emmett, the scrap metal magnate who had supposedly known Bill Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa, who’d survived multifarious business dealings with truly awful men.

It was a hallmark birthday for my mother, one about which she felt some trepidation. My father had died just months after his 70th birthday, and my mother associated her impending 70th with my father’s death.

Is he doing this again? Flaying a dead man for more narrative? I hear the voice of Tigers broadcaster Dan Dickerson ask. Dickerson is on the radio side and has a quizzical but soothing voice. He used to share the air with the late great Jim Price, the back-up catcher for the 1968 World Series Champions. I imagine Dickerson must’ve considered his own mortality when Price died and he had to partner with a more recent former Tiger, Andy Dirks. Though Dickerson never offered much in the way of encomium or eulogy for his old partner, his voice became a bit more beautiful after Price died. And Jim Price, a back-up to the amazing Bill Freehan, wasn’t what anyone would call great as baseball players go, yet his proximity to athletic greatness elevated his broadcasting to the level of greatness. Greatness is only as great as our ability to talk about it, Dickerson says; it’s something, as a radio man, he’s had to bring himself to believe.

Old people fear death in the same way young people fear death. To give my mother credit, she voiced her fear unequivocally. Death is unequivocal, so to equivocate over one’s fear of it seems disingenuous and inchoate. My mother has both of those qualities or each of those qualities, but when it comes to the memento mori of the numerals of the age of my father when he died, inchoate disingenuousness is cast aside in favor of real anxiety and fear, and it is the job of the son to ennoble real anxiety and fear when it flows through the filial arterial channels. It can be a kind of gift to one entering their eighth decade of existence.   

Take your mother out to the ballgame. Buy her some peanuts and crackerjacks to get her mind off of things, I hear the voice of Dan Dickerson say, but it’s a fact that in a suite you don’t have to buy anything.

The day was warm; you could cut the air with a knife as the old people might say when they are talking about weather instead of the great eventuality. I’m not neurasthenic about hot, humid air, or at least I don’t mean to suggest I am. I only understand tornadic thunderstorms enough to parrot the language meteorologists pass on to us concerning them. The word “convection” seems poignant; I envisioned great crenellations of cloud rising before darker battlements of cloud. I imagined all this that afternoon as my wife called from a school gymnasium in Bay City to tell me she was sheltering in place as the tornado sirens wailed throughout the township.

It didn’t seem like a crisis really. I love her and would feel terrible if anything happened to her, but I somehow knew it was not serious. Radar-identified weather. It’s quite difficult to know what to remember, what to call it when it doesn’t touch down. Radar-identified or radar-indicated. She was upset that I wasn’t taking the tornado seriously. She survived and no tornado touched down. I said it wasn’t a tornado I wasn’t taking seriously but a tornadic event I was dismissing, an event that had every opportunity to become a tornado given the heat and humidity, the thick air one could cut with a knife or other similar ogival implement.

I love that woman and would have been devastated if something bad happened to her during the course of a tornado. Her day, to that point, had been far more difficult than mine. I’d have been devastated if something bad had happened to her during the course of a tornadic event, especially given how much she hated school gymnasiums, but nothing bad was going to come of this day. It’s not the kind of concluding sentiment you relinquish early in such a narrative, but nothing bad was going to come of this day.

I’m a bit spun around concerning inconclusive dramas that encode concluding narratives. A counterclockwise spinning around when it comes to it, a cyclonic storm north of the equator that culminates in little more than a few blown branches has me spun around.

I got serious later in the day, or at least the weather did in Downtown Detroit as my mother and I walked through the concourse toward the private elevator to the Champions Suite. The sky turned a shade of bottle-green with black tinting and garbage swirled around us like the first combustive stuff the universe spit out. Wrappers and paper cups suspended by a centripetal energy, the way a baseball seems to spin toward itself when you’re looking at an off-speed pitch (I typed out “an off-speed pith,” another fact that has me thinking I should leave the typos in).

My mother ambled with an aluminum cane that she may or may not have needed. I walked cautiously ahead of her, scanning the sky where it emerged in sightlines between the levels. There was a storm like this in 1996 too, I remembered.

I wasn’t far from here, a bit southeast in the Greektown neighborhood. I’d been going to see a hardcore band in the Shelter, the basement of the Blair McGowan-owned St. Andrew’s Hall. An awful song by Radiohead, an awful band, had come on, and an idiot friend of mine insisted we stay in my Ford Escort as the sky turned black to hear it out. We’d heard the song too often, and we heard it once more at great personal peril. As the last distorted madrigal rang out, we ran down Congress Street with the wind swirling and howling and the sky greening up like the skin of a nauseated, vomitous being. We sprinted down that street toward the safest place in such a storm, a beer-besotted basement with a cheap sound system and a small stage.

My mother had gotten scared that night in 1996. Garage roofs not far from the serendipitously-named Shelter had gotten blown off and oak trees had been downed by straight-line winds. She and my father, along with my friend’s parents, had sat up in the living room of that Downriver colonial until we came home near midnight, smelling of cigarettes and sweat.

Needless to say the game started in a rain delay. We entered the suite, and I procured a glass of Pepsi, along with some braised beef tips and popcorn for my mother. The high windows of the Champions Suite looked out onto a Kelly green outfield punctuated by silver tarp and, further out, the skyline of Downtown Detroit.

Another fact was the two championships the Tigers had won during our combined lifetimes. I’d witnessed one, though I didn’t remember it, while my mother had witnessed two that she remembered rather vividly.

1984 and 1968 respectively. It’d been a long drought by the time we entered the ballpark on August 27th, 2024, the first day of my mother’s 70th year, and I wish something more substantive had happened, not a tornado, but something. The storm raced toward Windsor while making menacing but ultimately harmless figures in the sky. The lightning rod above the Fox Theater and the mist in the stadium lights were the cinematic stuff of a sibyl’s mind. 

First pitch was scheduled for 6:40, and we were in the suite 15 minutes prior to that. In a photographic mural montage bannering the high windows, Bill Freehan was covered in alcohol and sweat, holding a bottle of champagne and puffing on a cigar. Mickey Lolitch stood back against a cinderblock wall in that old stadium, looking professorial as he spoke into a reporter’s microphone. Willie Horton, shirtless, had manager Mayo Smith in a headlock as he poured champagne over his mostly-bald pate. Kirk Gibson rounded second base, dirt down the front of his starched white uniform; he leapt toward the floodlit sky with both fists clenched in celebration. He’d just hit a homer over the Tiger Stadium roof and shattered a taxi cab window (or did my mother tell me that to mythologize his already mythic homerun; did my memory invent this fact?).

One fact that’s difficult to argue against is that a suite is antithetical to the demotic spirit of baseball. That if my mother and I were true baseball fans we wouldn’t have been elated at the thought of suite tickets, elated with the mahogany bar backlit, elated with the glass shelves before the mirror displaying bottles of top-tier bourbon and scotch, elated with the nacho bar’s queso fountain. Before the high windows before us were two rows of box seats that one could imagine a few earnest baseball fans sitting in for an inning or two on a nicer day before retreating into the air conditioning. A baseball suite, considered in this light, is a disorienting, glutinous blend of high and low—the beef tips, the top shelf liquor on one hand and the popcorn and hot dogs and nachos on the other, the asyndetonic formality of the high and the polysyndetonic lathering of the low items: and and and and and. Comma.

My mother and I perused these pictures as we ate and shared our memories of these championships, especially the ones from ’68 that occurred 12 years before my birth. The rain kept falling, though the worst of the storm was battering southern Ontario now, pocking the sand along Lake Erie’s northern coast with hail, terrifying motorists along the 401.

I chased a stadium beer in a commemorative mug with Maker’s Mark Bourbon. My mother asked for another Pepsi. She pulled a few bills from her purse as the waiter brought another Pepsi. I asked for another beer; I’d just have the can this time even though I could’ve gotten another commemorative mug. They weren’t very special, just plastic cups with two blue circles ringing two Tigers’ faces emblazoned on either side of the cup.

We talked of my aunts and uncles, their proclivities and habits. My mother feared cigarettes were killing her sister, Joanne. She feared my sister’s fears of household toxins that could be killing my sister were killing my sister. She feared it was getting late and they’d yet to remove the tarp from the field. She feared they’d never remove the tarp from the field.

I told her I had a friend on the radio side who might know. She disbelieved my claim that I had a friend on the radio side. She noted my tendency to exaggerate my connections and my place in the world.

“I’ll text Ayinde right now,” I told her. “He works the sound for the radio broadcast. He’ll know.”

When I texted him, he wrote back that he wasn’t working the game but he was at the game as a spectator. This cast into peril the veracity of the information I might gain from him. My mother was fading. Her second Pepsi was gone, and the beef tips had been rotated around her plate and pecked at but not eaten. Ayinde was going to text a coworker named Tim to see whether and when they might have a game based upon the saturation of the field and the incoming weather.

At this point people were driving around the perimeter of the field in golf carts sprinkling what looked like suet in the dirt of the warning track, some sort of absorbent agricultural chemical.   

I’d driven to the ballpark in my mother’s new car, a little Kia Soul.    It’s probably much too overwrought to say the Kia Soul felt soulless, but it did. And I could tell we were soon to be driving back in her soulless car. Ayinde texted and said that Tim said that the game wasn’t likely to happen. I told my mother. I had it on the authority of Ayinde who worked for the radio station and had it on the authority of a man named Tim whose role at the station was unclear but who also worked at the radio station.

It wasn’t such a bad deal. We’d survived a tornadic thunderstorm, my mother had gotten to experience a suite at a baseball game, albeit a game that occurred long after we had left, and none of these players were going to be pictured in the Tigers Champions Suite anyway. This team wasn’t going to the World Series.

So I walked with my mother to the elevators. We rode down to the concourse, and the sky and everything struck us as bathetic, the way a baseball game can get bathetic in the middle innings, culminating in a late operatic, epiphanic moment—a homer or an RBI to determine an outcome.

We stepped into the parking garage and climbed into my mother’s Kia. I pressed the ignition and turned on 97.1 FM to listen to the banter about the game that wasn’t happening. Some loudmouth was saying how shameful it was that they weren’t telling anyone the game was off. Why torture people and get them wet? Simply send them home.

  At the crest of the Rouge Bridge, hundreds of feet above the Marathon Refinery, my mother complimented my driving. I’d had a few drinks. “Don’t say that,” I told her. “Nobody’s a good driver until they’re in the driveway.” This was a belief of mine. Good driving wasn’t a process but an outcome. This dismissal had the effect of silencing my mother for the remainder of the ride. I toggled the volume on the radio and heard Dickerson’s voice telling me to drive my mother’s car as I would drive my own.

The tarp was off. The game had started after all. I pulled into my own driveway in the second inning. I apologized to my mother, who simply gave me a hug and thanked me for a wonderful birthday outing. She told me she, in so many words, that she couldn’t have been happier if she had actually seen the Tigers play and win.

I stepped away from her little foreign car, a car that was driving through Detroit, Dearborn, and Downriver that hadn’t been manufactured by UAW labor, and watched her putter down the road into the night, in her soulless car called the Soul, toward my lonely childhood home.

I went into the house and listened to the game on my powder-blue Bluetooth radio while sipping blended Canadian whiskey and half-heartedly reading a novel.

A man named Kerry Carpenter, a left-handed platoon bat (a metonym, a double metonym), would hit a homerun deep into left-center. It would trigger a late-night win and a miraculous late-season run.

A few short weeks later, the Tigers would make the playoffs in a wild card spot, a spot that didn’t exist during the seasons of ’84 and ’68, the only championship seasons in my or my mother’s lifetimes. A category that I’m sure Trammell and Kaline, pictured throughout the Champions Suite, would find troubling.

My aunt Joanne, my mother’s sister, a seasoned scotch drinker and chain smoker, would be diagnosed with lung cancer exactly two weeks after this game we never saw. My mother would say that the Tigers were doing it for Joanne.

When I was a boy Joanne sold my parents their first new car, an ’85 Ford Escort, out of the lot at Bielfield Ford. The salesman a desk away from hers was giving out Alan Trammell posters to the kids of parents who bought cars from him. I resented my Aunt Joanne when I received no poster after my parents signed the closing papers. I’d thought of this while merging onto the freeway in my mother’s Kia Soul that night. I’d hoped we all had souls and wondered why more cars weren’t named for metaphysical, theological features. The Escort, the only car my parents drove for their first two decades of marriage, sounded so sleazy, and the Crown Vic sounded imperialist and fascist. The Soul, however, was a source of hope, though the Motor City didn’t make it, though it was a tiny car that stood no chance in a collision.