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The Final Season: Fathers, Sons, and One Last Season in a Classic American Ballpark

Amazon.com Price:  $10.51 (as of 06/05/2019 16:00 PST- Details)

SKU: 1101514288 Categories: , , , , , , ,

Description

Maybe your dad took you to ball games at Fenway, Wrigley, or Ebbets. Maybe the two of you watched broadcasts from Yankee Stadium or Candlestick Park, or listened as Red Barber or Vin Scully called the plays on radio. Or maybe he coached your team or just played catch with you in the yard. Chances are good that if you are a baseball fan, your dad had something to do with it–and your thoughts of the sport evoke thoughts of him. If this is the case, you are going to treasure The Final Season, a poignant true story about baseball and heroes, family and forgiveness, doubts and dreams, and a place that brings them all together.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, Tom Stanton lived for his Detroit Tigers. When Tiger Stadium began its 88th and final season, he vowed to attend all 81 home games in order to explore his attachment to the place where four generations of his family have shared baseball. Sign up for him as he encounters idols, conjures decades past, and discovers the mysteries of a park where Cobb and Ruth played. Come along and sit beside Al Kaline on the dugout bench, eat popcorn with Elmore Leonard, hear Alice Cooper’s confessions, soak up the warmth of Ernie Harwell, see McGwire and Ripken up close, and meet Chicken Legs Rau, Bleacher Pete, Al the Usher, and a parade of fans who are anything but bizarre. By the autumn of his odyssey, Stanton comes to realize that his anguish isn’t just about the loss of a beloved ballpark but about his dad’s mortality, for at the heart of this story is the love between fathers and sons–a theme that resonates with baseball fans of all ages.

“Where there are ballparks,” writes Tom Stanton in The Final Season, his wistful meditation on baseball and family, “there are memories … I could never go to Tiger Stadium without feeling the ghosts of history about me….” In 1999, the season of that noble ballpark’s last stand, Stanton set out to make peace with those ghosts by attending all 81 Tiger home games. He wasn’t sure what he was on the lookout for when he started, but what he finds finally is much more personal than anything he sees between the foul lines.

Conceived as a game-by-game journal, The Final Season is filled with baseball. Stanton steps up with graceful musings on the game, the park, the Tigers and their history, and, most spiritedly, a pair of living legends–former right fielder Al Kaline and announcer Ernie Harwell. But it’s Stanton’s thoughts about family–his own family and how the game and the ballpark have connected generations–that in reality resonate. In his prose, this lovely old rust bucket of a ballpark, this repository of such a lot of memories, becomes metaphor.

Fittingly, Stanton takes his father to the final game. “I’ve noticed something today,” he writes of the experience. “It’s not the seventy- and eighty-year-old men who are wiping their eyes. It’s the generation that came after them. And we’re hurting not only for the loss of this beautiful place, but for the loss of our fathers and grandfathers–belatedly or prematurely. The closing of this park forces us to confront their mortality, and when we confront their mortality we will have to confront our own…. A little bit of us dies when something like this, something so tied to our lives, disappears.” –Jeff Silverman

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