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BIDDER UP!: What's a piece of Tiger stadium worth to you?
September 16, 2007
BY JOHN GALLAGHER
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER
For sale: baseball history.
The long-anticipated sale of Tiger Stadium seats and other artifacts begins today at
www.tigerstadiumsale.com. The site is scheduled to open for business at 6 a.m.
Thousands of pairs of seats and about 700 other artifacts are up for sale. The City of Detroit, which owns the ballpark, is holding the sale to raise money to help pay for partial demolition and redevelopment of the site.
Seats will be sold at a fixed price of $279 for an attached pair of standard seats and $399 for a pair of Tiger Den seats.
Artifacts to be sold to the highest bidder include:
• World Series banners from 1935, 1945 and 1968.
• Benches from the dugouts.
• Al Kaline's corner locker.
• The door to the broadcast booth used by Ernie Harwell.
• Thirty-two equipment bags stitched with a player's number and some with the luggage tags from their last flight home.
• A pitching rubber from a bullpen.
• The Opening Day 1997 mat from the on-deck circle.
• The home dugout urinal.
• Overhead and column section signs.
• Hot dog signs from the refreshment stands.
"This is an outstanding opportunity for anyone with a sports den, or just enough wall or desk space for a piece of history," said Bruce Schneider, chief executive officer of Schneider Industries of St. Louis, the company hired by the city to handle the memorabilia sale.
"We have items of all kinds, from the Tiger Stadium sign at Michigan and Trumbull to the turnstiles below it," he added.
With sports memorabilia a growing business across the nation, the sale could generate a lot of money for the city, possibly even the several million dollars needed to demolish the stadium. When Schneider auctioned off artifacts from Busch Stadium in St. Louis in 2005, the sale raised more than $5.5 million.
The Tiger Stadium sale may not raise that much because the Tigers took much of their equipment with them when they left after the 1999 season, said Dan Rosenthal, Schneider's chief of operations.
On the other hand, Tiger Stadium is one of the most storied ballparks in the United States, and interest may run higher, said Brian Schwartz, president of Schwartz Sports, a memorabilia company based in Northbrook, Ill. Moreover, a sale like this puts collecting in the range of ordinary people.
"It may not be conceivable to get Pudge Rodriguez's actual uniform, but you might get a piece of the field," he said. "People want a piece of the game." Virtually all the items show their age. They're dented, scarred and faded, reflecting their use over many years. But to treasure hunters, that may be part of their charm.
There also are a few non-baseball items, including section signs used when the late Luciano Pavarotti sang with the Three Tenors at Tiger Stadium
Schneider's company has mined the ballpark for unexpected pieces of history. During the 1971 All-Star Game, Reggie Jackson hit a home run that struck a transformer on the roof, and a piece of the fencing around the transformer is one of the items up for bid.
The auction runs through 11 a.m. Oct. 13. But to prevent sniping, the practice of trying to slip in a last-second bid before the deadline, any item still drawing bids at closing time will be kept on sale for an additional 10 minutes.
"A historic stadium like this should generate a lot of interest from all over the country," Schneider said Friday.
The Tigers left the Corner at Michigan and Trumbull for their new home at Comerica Park after the 1999 season. Michigan and Trumbull, through a few stadiums and various renovations to what became Tiger Stadium, had been the site of professional baseball in Detroit since 1895.
After years of debate, the Detroit City Council voted this summer to approve the sale of memorabilia and the demolition and redevelopment of the site, as proposed by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Earlier this month, Harwell joined with a Corktown group called the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy that is trying to raise enough money to save one corner of the ballpark, near home plate, as a memorial and community center.