HELPFUL HUG : Fans Try to Blunt Mayor’s Plan to Build New Ballpark in Detroit

One dreary April afternoon, 1,000 baseball fans circled Tiger Stadium in Detroit and joined hands to give the building a symbolic hug on its 76th birthday.

Even die-hard sports fans don’t ordinarily consider hugging massive septuagenarian structures. But talk of tearing down the Tigers’ venerable den has spurred heroic measures this spring to save the stadium.

Like the radio station that rented a 100-foot crane with a five-ton wrecking ball, parked it in a lot across from Tiger Stadium and broadcast from the site for five days. Disc jockeys enlisted thousands of Detroiters to sign petitions to save the ballpark.

Or the handful of fans who, over pizza one night, dreamed up the Tiger Stadium Fan Club, held rallies and organized “The Hug” under the slogan, “Don’t Let Them Make the Biggest Error in Baseball.”

“Them” refers to two men who are almost larger than life in Detroit and who will have a big say in deciding Tiger Stadium’s fate:

--Mayor Coleman A. Young, the strong-willed, 70-year-old politician who has run Detroit since 1973. Under Young, the city bought the stadium from the Tigers for $1 in 1977.

--Thomas S. Monaghan, the 51-year-old, self-made Domino’s Pizza baron. Monaghan acquired the Tigers in 1983 for a reported $53 million and now swoops into home games by helicopter.

Unlike other major league cities, where owners often threaten to leave and politicians scramble to keep teams in town, in Detroit it was Young who started the latest talk about a new stadium.

“We’re rebuilding a new city, and there comes a time when we need a new stadium,” the mayor said early this year. “Nobody in their wildest dreams expects that stadium to last beyond 10 years. Most people say it will fall down in five.”

No one denies that Tiger Stadium is old or that it needs some fixing up. The first game was played here in 1912, when cars were just coming to the Motor City. Ty Cobb stole home in the first inning of that game.

Boston’s Fenway Park opened the same day. Among big league parks, only Chicago’s Comiskey Park (1910) is older.

Just how much fixing up Tiger Stadium needs is hotly debated. The stadium did get $18 million in renovations between 1977, when the Tigers signed a 30-year lease, and 1984--a project that Young said then ensured Tiger baseball in Detroit for “an entire generation.”

A prestigious structural engineer, hired recently by Detroit Monthly magazine, said after a visual inspection that the stadium appeared sound and merely needed maintenance.

But Robert Berg, Young’s press secretary, likens that to “going into the doctor and having him take a quick look without X-rays or blood pressure tests to tell you that you need open-heart surgery.”

Now, the city has hired two competing teams of consultants to estimate both the feasibility of renovating Tiger Stadium and the cost of building a new one--preferably a multipurpose structure with retractable dome and lots of luxury boxes.

Critics say that the consultants, which include Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum of Kansas City, the architectural firm that will design a new ballpark for Baltimore, are playing with a stacked deck.

“The mayor is on record as saying he wants a new stadium,” said Frank Rashid, a founder of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club. “He’s holding the cards. In competing for a contract, will they recommend what’s objectively best or what the mayor wants to hear? The track record is, Mayor Young gets what he wants.”

Baltimore architect Eric Moss said that a multipurpose dome would buck the trend back toward intimate, baseball-only parks like Tiger Stadium, as exemplified by plans for the Orioles’ new stadium. Domes “divorce themselves from the site,” Moss said. “The shape is a circle, not good for viewing a baseball game.”

But Rick deFlon, the Hellmuth architect in charge of the Baltimore design, said that Tiger Stadium is unacceptable by today’s standards because it has “columns in seating areas and a large skew of seats in the outfield vs. seats in the infield.

“We have multipurpose designs that work real well. It basically depends on what the client wants,” deFlon said.

The fan club says that Tiger Stadium’s 10,000 bleacher seats make it paradise for the everyday fan. And, while the posts create 3,000 obstructed-view seats, they also “make possible some of the greatest upper-deck views of baseball,” Rashid said.

What Young and Monaghan want instead, he charged, is a glitzy stadium with high-priced seats that would “squeeze out the common fan . . . If we’re talking about public expense, how much should the public spend to enhance the profits of one of the wealthiest men in the Midwest?”

Faced with Young’s advocacy of a new stadium, Monaghan seems more willing to abandon the House of Cobb and Al Kaline than he once was.

“I’d enjoy fixing (Tiger Stadium) up, giving it some tender loving care and nursing it back to health,” the owner, who is also an architecture buff and antique car collector, said last year. “Personally, I don’t like domes and artificial grass.”

But this year Monaghan called a new stadium with a retractable dome, “what the mayor wants, and I’m going to go along with it as long as the rent doesn’t go up.”

Dan Foley, an aide to Monaghan on stadium matters, said the owner is awaiting results of the consultants’ study.

“Tom does love the old stadium, and he has made it very clear that the issue of renovating the stadium . . . has to be given fair consideration,” Foley said. “But remember, we’re the tenant. We want to see the most viable, economical end result that makes sense for the Detroit Tigers, baseball and the fan.”

As for the study, Foley said: “I have no reason to believe it will be anything but fair.”

The consultants’ proposals are due by year’s end, Berg said. Until then, he added, “Things are basically on hold.”

Not if Walter O. Briggs IV has anything to say.

Briggs’ great-grandfather, as owner of the Tigers, updated the stadium and made it the double-decked, totally enclosed baseball landmark it is today. The Briggs Stadium of 1938 and the Tiger Stadium of 1988 look nearly identical.

The Briggs family sold out in 1956, but now Briggs, a 31-year-old accountant and computer whiz, has proposed that the fans buy Tiger Stadium to save it. He is seeking Monaghan’s blessing before organizing a public stock offering.

Briggs said that the cost could range anywhere from $10 million to $100 million, depending on how much renovation is needed. But for now, his job is to keep the stadium’s fate in the public eye, he said.

“The problem with the mayor’s study,” Briggs said, “is that it takes a long period of time, the stadium issue is out of mind for nine months, then the study comes up and--bang!--we have a new stadium.

“I think there’s still time to save the stadium. In talking to Mr. and Mrs. Detroit, their biggest skepticism is that the mayor said he wants a new stadium and the mayor always gets what he wants.”