Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark (review)

Book Reviews263 will result in a coherent and meaningful confrontation with one's own death." "San Francesco's life . . . requires neither defense nor interpretation," writes Martin in her introduction. However, it is a life that merits recognition , to discover how the variegated light from that distant life is somehow reflected into our own time. As I write this review, in the diminished days immediately following the massive loss oflife in NewYork, Salvation is a whisper of hope against the mad howl of our mortality, reminding us that death is "not a trap set out somewhere in the obscure forest of the future . . . but the vanishing point of everyday, which provides perspective , orders the chaos of experience, and is the proper object and goal of life." Reviewed by Peter Ives Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark by Tom Stanton St. Martin's Press, 2001 245 pages, cloth, $23.95 Tom Stanton began this book to vent anger and ended it venting grief. He hated that the great somebody in the sky had determined that, after eightyeight years on that spot, the famous landmark intersection Michigan and TrumbuU in Detroit, Tiger Stadium would be torn down and a new stadium would be built somewhere else. When you are a little kid and you go to the baUpark with your dad, you see the place as enormous, thriUing, and (though you can't quite apprehend it at the time) eternal, and you project onto the players who are out on the field a godlike status. The skiUs and forces playing out on the field, you think (though you can't apprehend it at the time), are the forces of life. The moment is primal. The memory is locked in. Later, when you go as an adult, and your son is with you, there is a storm ofemotion about it. The stadium is stfll beautiful, but it's old and "bleeds rust when it rains." The vertical steel posts block the view. The place is perfect because it's one of the last venerable things you have and also because you can't see it only the way it is. You are seeing it through the eyes of the kid you were and are wishing that hard, sweet, indelible memory for your own son, sitting there next to you in this new age that, compared to memory, 264Fourth Genre invariably disappoints. The place is old and not eternal; the players aren't gods—they're entertainers loyal not to Detroit but to their agent and their contract. And your son, given the option (the place is only halffuU), sits one seat away from you in the stands because it's that time in his life. When word is out that this wfll be the last year forTiger Stadium (1999), Tom Stanton, a Detroit native and Michigan journalist and author, decides to attend, rain or shine, aU eighty-one of the last season's home games. The book he writes from that project is ajournai ofthe season and, ofcourse, an analysis and contemplation ofbasebaU new and old, a reverent reflection on the old neighborhoods ofour northern cities in the salad days as exemplified by Detroit, and finaUy a remembrance of, and great, thundering reconciliation in, his own family, across four generations with him in the middle—an elegy to fathers and sons (his grandfather, his father, his own fatherhood, and his own sons). In addition to being a man in the pastoral thraU of a love of basebaU and, for those who love it so, its nostalgic power, Stanton is also a sportsjournalist , a storyteUer, and clearly a former baU player with a sense about actuaUy playing the game. In this book, aU ofthat comes together. In the early pages, the author is sore from hurting. But then he finds a revelation and relaxes. Death and loss are huge enemies to the man in midlife. To the older man, hard to believe as it may seem, it's okay. Tom Stanton's father, in his late seventies , sits with him inTiger Stadium in the last game. There is almost nothing to be said about it. Time and its...