Tiger Stadium

Tiger Stadium was a baseball park in the city of Detroit, Michigan. The venue has been known as Navin Field, as well as Briggs Stadium, and it was even nicknamed “The Corner.” This facility was home to the local MLB team, the Detroit Tigers, who actually used it for 87 years. The team started playing there in 1912, and they did so until 1999. Eventually, the Detroit Lions also joined in as the NFL team for the local city. They had the opportunity to play there from the late 30s to the early 70s. By the mid 70s, the facility had already acquired a lot of cultural importance on a state level, so much so that it is still known as one of the most important Michigan sites that appear in the National Register of Historic Places as of the 1989.

The history of this stadium actually dates back to the end of the 19th century. By the year 1895, the Tiger were actually performing at a venue called Bennett Park, which was a very old-school facility, mostly made of wood. The team was looking to upgrade to a better ballpark, which would do a much better job at setting the bar higher in terms of audience engagement and entertainment.

Early stadiums was fairly rudimental in terms of features, and while that was something undeniably charming about those early ballparks, it was quite difficult to accommodate any significant audience. The owner of the Tigers in 1911 actually wanted to have a bigger stadium, built with steel and concrete, which would accommodate at least 23.000 people. the first run at this stadium was scored by Cleveland Naps player Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was later banned from baseball throughout his entire life due to his involvement in the Black Sox Scandal, involving game fixing and corruption. To this day, Jackson’s involvement in the issue is still a matter of heated debate. The stadium has been home to many legendary moments in baseball history. For instance, legendary player Babe Ruth actually hit what is often considered to be the longest verified home run in the history of major league baseball. It is thought that the ball ended up about 575 feet away, crossing the boundaries of the stadium and landing into the street nearby. Another famous event was the so called “Cobb’s Lake.” In order to slow down Ty Cobb, the area of dirt in front of the home plate was actually kept quite wet by the ground staff, hoping that the opponents would slip.

The stadium continued to host games and expand, and the subsequent owner of the team, Walter Briggs, actually managed to bring the stadium to new heights eventually augmenting its capacity to being able to hold 53.000 spectators. The name that is most commonly associated with the stadium, Tiger, eventually came about in 1961. Eventually, the Tiger Stadium was demolished in 2008, and it was replaced by another stadium, the Corner Ballpark, which opened in 2018 at the very same site. Some people might remember this stadium in many moments of popular culture, including as being featured in the music video for “Beautiful,” a song by Detroit rap legend Eminem.