September 4, 2003
Tigers 2, Indians 1
W: Gary Knotts
L: Jake Westbrook
S: Danny Patterson
Attendance: 11,371
Time of Game: 2 hours, 25 minutes
Stadium Facts
Location: Detroit, MI
First Game: April 11, 2000
Capacity: 41,000
Type: Open
Surface: Grass
We had a quick turnaround between the game in Toronto on Wednesday night and an afternoon game in Detroit, so following the Blue Jays game, we drove west for a couple hours through Ontario. On Wednesday morning, we completed the drive to Detroit, crossing the border from Windsor to Detroit. To be honest with you, we didn't save the best stop of the baseball trip for last, and it had nothing to do with Comerica Park. It was a late season, weekday afternoon game featuring two awful teams in quite possibly my least favorite city in the USA.
I don't want to offend my Michigan friends, but Detroit sucks. Of course, growing up in the Chicago area, I learned to dislike Detroit well before I ever visited there. Despite that, I don't think you will find many people outside of Michigan who speak highly of the city. From what I've seen, there are very few "nice" parts of Detroit. No downtown has more abandoned buildings. In these tough economic times, particularly for the Detroit auto-makers, I imagine conditions are even worse than they were on this visit.
Having said that, Comerica Park is one of the city's bright spots. In fact, the ballpark area, including neighboring Ford Field (home of the lowly Detroit Lions) is pretty nice. We took our chances and parked in a public lot several blocks away to save some money. Fortunately, my car was still there when we returned after the game.
Comerica Park might be the best park in baseball for kids. There are large concourses with a little bit of everything for youngsters, including a carousel and a Ferris wheel. For many years, these must have been nice distractions considering the awful team the Tigers had on the field.
I really like the design of this park too. The exterior is a traditional brick design, similar to most parks built around the turn of the century. There are concrete tigers perched over the entrances and all around the park. The single level outfield is spacious and open, with nice views of downtown Detroit. There are only two primary seating levels around most of the park, which keeps the upper deck seats a little closer to the field than in some other stadiums.
The other thing I like about Comerica is that it bucked the trend of new stadiums and is a great park for pitchers. Most of the newer stadiums are much more home run friendly. It actually takes a legitimate shot to hit one out of Comerica. When the park first opened, it was even better for pitchers than it is now. They moved in the left field fences in 2003. Prior to that, the left field and center field dimensions were unlike any other park.
Ever since leaving Boston, we tried to spend as little money as possible for the remainder of the trip, so we bought cheap seats in the upper deck all the way down the left field line. Knowing there would be hardly anyone at the game, we figured we would be able to sneak into much better, lower level seats. However, there were so few people at this particular game that the ushers had nothing better to do than to check tickets. So we trekked up to the upper deck for the game.
This September game featured two teams whose seasons had effectively ended weeks, if not months earlier. The Indians were bad, but the Tigers were downright pathetic. They had already lost 102 games at this point and were in jeopardy of breaking the all time record in futility. Jake Westbrook was the starting pitcher for Cleveland while Gary Knotts took the mound for Detroit.
To add to the less than intriguing matchup, the game was extremely boring too. Neither team scored in the first four innings. Westbrook had a no-hitter going through four, so I guess we had that going for us. However, the Tigers scored first in the bottom of the fifth. This is how one of the worst teams in baseball history scored their two runs... After two singles to start the inning, A.J. Hinch grounded into a double play, with the runner from third scoring. Ramon Santiago then singled, stole second and advanced to third on a throwing error by the catcher, then scored on a wild pitch. So in the inning, the Tigers scored two runs on three hits, but had zero runs batted in.
The Indians finally scored a run in the next half inning to cut the lead to 2-1, but did not notch as much as a base hit in the final three innings. The Tigers held on to win 2-1. Westbrook threw a complete game in a losing effort. The Tigers win improved their record to an impressive 37-102, while the Indians loss dropped them to 62-79. The announced attendance was over 11,000, but I can assure you there weren't more than five or six thousand people in the park. The Tigers went on to lose 119 games in 2003, the most losses in American League history.
The Tigers didn't have much going for them at that time, but have had success since then, highlighted by an American League pennant in 2006. Comerica Park is one of the nicer parks in the league. Its just too bad it has to be located in Detroit.
While this game concluded the baseball portion of our trip, we had a lot more to do. We met up with a friend in Lansing the night following this game and then headed to South Bend for the weekend to see the Notre Dame football season opener. As I mentioned in the first 2003 recap, this was probably my favorite summer baseball trip.
Photo Album
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Next stadium: Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
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