THE FINAL SEASON

A fan’s affectionate notes on America’s game—one whose spirit seems to be at grave risk.

Stanton, a Gen-X native of Detroit, is too young to remember the Tigers in their glory. He does, however, have a keen sense of history, one given full air in this account of a season spent in the city’s now-demolished Tiger Stadium. Detroit squads had played there since 1912, when (a few days after the Titanic sank and on the same day that Boston’s Fenway Park opened) Ty Cobb and his teammates faced off against Cleveland’s “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. Stanton’s pages are populated by countless baseball heroes, many of whom (Charlie Gehringer, Al Kaline) are not likely to be known to readers who did not grow up Tigers fans—or to those younger than Stanton. His hero worship for these players is a constant, but he has sharper words for the modern game—and especially for the New York Yankees, a longstanding bête noire whose current six leadoff hitters earn more than the Tigers’ entire roster. The latter-day Tigers turn in only a so-so performance to punctuate Stanton’s meditation on the meaning of baseball to generations of Americans, and on a park that would soon be demolished in favor of a soulless and corporatized replacement stadium that places fans ever farther from the players. Still, as his narrative closes, Stanton lapses into celebratory reveries not unworthy of Field of Dreams: standing in a baseball diamond, he writes, “if you listen beyond the silence, if you listen with your heart, you can hear all sorts of things. You can hear your childhood, you can hear your dad and your uncles, you can hear Kaline connecting, you can hear the muted cheers of distant, ghost crowds, and you can hear your grandpa calling out from the bleachers.”

That’s just right: Stanton’s is another entry in the roster of excellent works devoted to baseball, sure to please fans of the game.