I visited Comerica Park, my home away from home, before any of the other ballparks featured on this blog, but I hadn’t visited since I started the blog. Hence what seems like a rather delayed story about a place I first started going to when it opened back in 2000. And even though we moved to California in 2015, I’m still pretty sure I’ve seen more games here than I have anywhere outside of the Coliseum in Oakland.

This game, I think, may have been my coldest.

My daughter Dylan and I have been planning a trip back “home” to Michigan for a few months now, and it was a happy bit of luck that Tigers’ Opening Day fell during our spring break. So we left the mid-70s sunshine of Menlo Park behind to fly to the Arctic Circle of Detroit, where it poured down rain for a while earlier in the week, and then was super windy, and finally decided to go ahead and give us the full snow show on game day.

Believe it or not, this was the first Opening Day that I have ever attended in Detroit. I always thought about going, but for a variety of reasons (not wanting to skip school, being on vacation, etc.), it never panned out. For a few years, if it fell on the right day, I’d head downtown and hang out in the various parking lots and tailgates and tented bars, but I had never actually set foot in the ballpark during the first game of the season. It turns out I just had to move 2800 miles away to make it happen.

Comerica Park is a good place to catch a game; it’s not exactly underrated, I don’t think, but it’s solidly in the cluster of stadiums built post-Camden Yards. If you’ve been to Progressive Field or Nationals Park or Citizens Bank Park or Coors Field, you essentially know what Comerica is all about. Nice skyline views, open walkways, good food, fun for the family. There’s nothing wrong with ANY of them, and there’s no reason to mess with the model for success.

Our plan was to meet with my father-in-law, Buzz, at Lafayette Coney Island around 10:45 and then walk over to the game. Detroit is somewhat surprisingly walkable now, with the hustle and bustle of Woodward Avenue spilling out in all directions. This is a big benefit to Comerica as compared to the old Tiger Stadium, which wasn’t in a particularly appealing part of town in terms of other stuff to do.

I found my greatest parking coup that morning, and I can’t stop thinking about it. As we exited from 375, we immediately started seeing lots with giant signs for $40 or $50 parking. But somehow, maybe because we were just outside the range most people would want to walk, I found a garage that was 12 bucks. TWELVE BUCKS. To park! At Opening Day! Truth be told it was so cheap that in the back of my mind I was thinking maybe it was a scam, but once we returned to the car later that afternoon, I finally had to admit, I had found parking nirvana. We were about a 10-minute walk from our breakfast Coney Dogs.

If you aren’t aware (and either you already ARE aware, or you probably don’t care much), the two Coney Islands, Lafayette and American, have sat side-by-side in deep-seated chili dog rivalry for more than a century now. I’ll be honest: I’ve never actually been inside American Coney Island, since it seems…I don’t know…kinda fancy. Lafayette, by contrast, still looks like the type of establishment where you’d find Jimmy Hoffa in the basement. Side note: I didn’t even know they HAD a basement until my daughter and niece asked where the restroom was and they were directed down a narrow set of damp stairs into the set of a horror movie. OK, it’s not that bad. But it’s pretty bad. And really, it all adds to the ambience of Lafayette.

It’s possible there are other items on the menu, but I don’t know anyone who orders anything other than Coney Dogs. Ours were brought out by a delightfully gruff waiter named Abdul. who also took a minute to snap a photo with us. Two up with Everything means a hot dog with chili, onions and mustard. Two of those are all you really need to sustain your strength for a bitter cold few hours at the game later in the day.

After a short, brisk walk to the ballpark, we had about an hour to wander around before the game started. There was plenty to see, that’s for sure; Opening Day in Detroit is one of the biggest parties of the year, and despite the cold everyone was in high spirits. We spent some time listening to one of the ballpark’s house bands; Dylan and Brynn decided it was impossible not to start dancing like maniacs (they’re cool like that!), and I think they helped get the crowd even MORE hyped up. The band closed, of course, with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” which Detroit has adopted as a theme song even though “South Detroit” is not an actual place that exists. Still, it’s awfully fun hearing everyone shout DETROIT at the top of their lungs in the appropriate spot.

We completed a full circuit of the ballpark, which is what I typically try to do before any game I attend (also, while I’m thinking about it: if you are one of the people who is complaining about games going by WAY TOO FAST now that the pitch clock has been instituted, what you really should be doing is getting to the stadium an hour earlier and wandering around to see all of the stuff you never get to see. Instead of complaining that “I went to get a hot dog and missed three innings!” But I digress…). Buzz admitted another piece of info during our tour: that he had never actually walked all the way around the park before. It was fun getting a chance to be there for a lot of his Comerica Park ‘firsts.’

Buzz, who is now pushing 80 and has been coaching 9th grade football teams since the invention of the leather helmet, give or take, is a fantastic game companion and an even better person. He is one of those coaches who inspires literally every single player he’s ever come across. His son Brad has also coached forever and is likewise beloved. And his daughter (my wife), Leigh, is just as celebrated, but hers is more specifically as a teacher and less so as a football coach. Football, truth be told, is not an area of expertise for her, despite decades of coaching experience in the family. Her most impressive suggestion to make football more interesting is to put a little voice recorder in the flags that referees throw, so they can quickly yell the name of the penalty into the flag before throwing it and therefore allow everyone in the stands to immediately know the specifics of the call. I only point it out here because she points it out literally any time we watch a game together. It’s the sort of commentary I really look forward to!

At any rate, Buzz is a big baseball fan as well, so when I first floated the idea of going to Opening Day, I thought he’d be the perfect partner. At some point during our walk over from Lafayette he told me that the last time he was at an Opening Day was probably in 1974, which was also the year I was born. That felt like a cool kind of symmetry: I had never been to an Opening Day in my nearly 50 years, and he hadn’t been to an Opening Day over the course of those same 50 years. Except after we researched a little further, it turns out that wasn’t actually the right year.

But I did a little research on that first game at Tiger Stadium during the ’74 campaign, which started a couple of months before I was born and which ended up being a somewhat uninspiring 72-90 season and a sixth place finish. They opened that particular year by getting shutout by the Yankees, 3-0, on Tuesday, April 9. Also a little weird: I’m writing this piece on Tuesday, April 9. Mickey Lolich gave up two runs in the top of the first but went the distance in front of a crowd of 44,000.

After some subsequent texting back and forth to try to figure out the ACTUAL year that Buzz was last at an Opening Day, I think we may have settled on 1969. He remembered it being unseasonably warm in the right field bleachers, in contrast to our 2024 opener, where it was snowing at first pitch. The game time temp in ’69 was 68 degrees, which probably seemed fitting after the Tigers won the 1968 World Series six months before. During that game, Denny McClain went the distance to beat Cleveland 6-2. Al Kaline swatted his first of 21 homers that season, the most he’d have in a year over the remainder of his career.

After the tour, we settled into our third deck seats, along the third baseline. Comerica does a nice job of feeling pretty intimate no matter where you’re seated; these felt way closer than they were, somehow. Not all of the seats necessarily face the ‘correct’ way, however; I’ve noticed having to turn in somewhat awkward directions in order to feel like I’m properly pointed toward the game. And there’s a giant new jumbotron which has an excellent resolution but wasn’t quite as useful from our spot on the third base side, as we had to shift pretty far each time we wanted to look at it. It’s awful pretty though!

It’s also a good park for kids, since there are so many cool areas for those fans, especially tiny ones, who aren’t all that interested in the action on the field. My mom always tells the story of when she and my step dad took our kids to a game and midway through the top of the first they were both asking how much longer before they were leaving. They spent a lot of time (and money, I’m guessing) on the Ferris Wheel and the merry-go-round that afternoon.

I’ve been thinking a little about some of the games that I saw at Comerica over the years. I saw Justin Verlander lose a no-hitter in the ninth inning against the Pirates in May 2012. I brought my son to his first game in 2006 when he was about a month old. And probably the craziest games I’ve ever seen in person was during the Tigers worst season of all time, 2003; at the time I was a huge Roger Clemens fan (much more of a fan than I am now, I suppose) and he was going for his 300th career win against the hapless Tigers, who finished that season 43-119. It seemed like it would have been a slam dunk historic moment…other than having to root against the Tigers in order to see it.

In that game, Clemens and the Yankees jumped out to 7-1 lead going into the bottom of the fifth and the outcome seemed all-but-decided. But then the Tigers decided to find a pulse. They scored five runs off the Rocket in the bottom of the fifth, although Clemens still pitched through the sixth and left with an 8-6 lead intact. But then Sterling Hitchcock gave up two runs in the seventh to make it 8-8 and make it so that Clemens, of course, couldn’t get the milestone victory. At that point the stadium shifted their allegiance back to the hometown Tigers; I mean…if we couldn’t see history, we might as well see a Detroit win over the Yanks, right? But at that point both teams forgot how to score for the next two hours: the game went to the 17th inning, still tied at 8 apiece. Mariano Rivera threw two scoreless innings and then David Wells(!) came on to pitch 5.2 scoreless innings in relief. New York finally pushed two runs across in the top of the 17th, and the Tigers scored one in their half of the inning but could do nothing else. Knuckleballer Steve Sparks threw 7.2 innings but was the hard-luck loser at the end, giving up homers to Alfonso Soriano and Jorge Posada. So we didn’t see Clemens get his 300th win…and then we also got to see the Tigers lose in heartbreaking, agonizing, 5+hours fashion. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.

One other note from that nutso game: Carlos Pena pinch hit for Craig Monroe in the 7th and singled to drive in Ramon Santiago to bring the score to 8-7. Why does that matter? Well, it doesn’t, really. But it does give me a smooth opportunity to transition back into TODAY’S game because guess who I met? Carlos Pena! He was part of the Tigers TV pregame show and after it was over, Buzz got his attention and had him come over to say hi. Pena played for both the Tigers and the A’s, and I wanted to make sure he had a chance to see my SELL shirt. It was a pretty cool moment in a day full of them.

The game itself was entertaining too: the Tigers were taking on the A’s, and I had basically just sworn off rooting for the A’s; the day before the game they announced their move to Sacramento and the whole uprooting of the team has been so depressing and overwhelming that I think I’m just back to rooting for Detroit full-time. Unless they somehow end up in Oakland, I’m done with them. I did encounter a few other SELL t-shirts at Comerica, and a few nice people in the stands who were empathetic to Oakland and shared my disgust for A’s owner John Fisher and team president/super snake Dave Kaval. And I got to talk to one annoying guy who was super excited to go see games in Vegas. Best of luck to you as well, I guess.

Game wise, the Tigers jumped out to a 3-0 lead, then the A’s came back a couple of times. With the score knotted 4-4 in the bottom of the eighth, Gio Urshela doubled in Spencer Torkelson, and the bullpen held on in the ninth for the win, taking Detroit to 6-1 overall. The crowd was announced at 44,000 but I don’t think they all managed to make it into the ballpark.

All in all, a fantastic Opening Day of baseball!