Not every baseball player dabbles in nostalgia: former Detroit great Jack Morris says people should celebrate Comerica Park and not spend too much time missing Tiger Stadium.
While Morris says he was thrilled to play in Tiger Stadium, it was a challenge to pitchers and lacking creature comforts of all sorts. From the Detroit Free Press:
Morris was asked if he missed seeing it when he returns to the area.
He laughed before answering: “I was the guy that wanted to push the plunger. I’m not sure I’m gonna answer that the way you want me to. They built the dugout for Ty Cobb, and he’s about 4-foot-6. Every time I went in there, I hit my head.”…
“I look at it this way,” he said, “the beautiful things in the world are created by God. Man-made things come and go. It was time. Comerica is a great place. Who doesn’t like this place?”
Now, to say Morris is a throwback is an understatement: it usually took a crowbar to get the ball from his grasp on any given start, and in the biggest games — say, in 1991, when he threw 126 pitches in a World Series Game 7 over 10 innings — managers like Tom Kelly and Sparky Anderson didn’t even try hard to get him to sit. These days he spends a lot of time wondering why starters don’t stay in games longer. And Morris spent 14 seasons pitching at Tiger Stadium, so he has some basis for his opinion.
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