Comerica Park and the Detroit Tigers

Next to Ford Field, Comerica Park is home to one of the oldest franchises in American professional baseball, a team whose history stretches from the dead-ball era to the present and whose greatest players are enshrined in bronze at the ballpark's entrance.

The Detroit Tigers have played baseball in this city since eighteen ninety-four, making them one of the original members of the American League when it achieved major-league status in nineteen oh one. Their first great star was Ty Cobb, perhaps the most ferocious and least-liked dominant player in the sport's history, who batted roughly three hundred sixty-six, a career average that stood as the highest in major league record books for most of a century, and who terrorized opponents with his spikes-high baserunning for over two decades. Hank Greenberg, the team's first baseman through the nineteen thirties and forties, hit fifty-eight home runs in nineteen thirty-eight and was one of the sport's first Jewish superstars at a time when antisemitism was open and widespread in American public life.

The Tigers played at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues from nineteen twelve to nineteen ninety-nine, in a ballpark called Navin Field, then Briggs Stadium, and finally Tiger Stadium. It was, for most of its life, one of the most beloved parks in the country, intimate and loud and freighted with nearly a century of memory.

Comerica Park opened on April eleventh, two thousand, to thirty-nine thousand fans in thirty-four-degree weather with snow on the field from the night before. The park is distinguished by its large sculpted tigers at the entrance gates and by statues of six Tigers legends lining the main concourse: Cobb, Charlie Gehringer, Greenberg, Willie Horton, Al Kaline, and Hal Newhouser. A massive water feature in center field can be choreographed to music. The park has hosted two World Series, in two thousand six and two thousand twelve, though the Tigers lost both.