MLB | The Volunteers Who Mowed a Ballpark That Was Not There (Navin Field site, Detroit)

Baseball has been played on this corner since 1896, which is the whole point of it.

Bennett Park went up at Michigan and Trumbull in Detroit's Corktown that year, wooden and small. Frank Navin tore it down after the 1911 season and had Osborn Engineering of Cleveland put a steel-and-concrete park on the same ground, rotating the diamond ninety degrees so the batter no longer faced the sun. Navin Field opened on 20 April 1912, the same afternoon as Fenway Park in Boston. Both had been scheduled for the 18th and both were rained out, in both cities, on the same two days.

It became Briggs Stadium under Walter Briggs and Tiger Stadium in 1961. When Ernie Harwell said goodbye after the final game in September 1999, he counted up what the corner had held: 6,873 regular-season games, 35 in the postseason, three All-Star Games. Because Detroit was a charter American League club, every man who started a game in that league between 1901 and 1999 played here at some point. Ten no-hitters were thrown on this field and only two by Tigers, George Mullin in 1912 and Virgil Trucks in 1952.

Most of the stadium came down in 2008 and the rest in 2009. What was left was a fenced lot with weeds six to eight feet high standing in the footprint of the grandstand.

In May 2010 a man named Tom Derry turned up with a mower. Others followed. They called themselves the Navin Field Grounds Crew, cut the weeds down, laid out bases, painted the lines, and kept a playable diamond on ground the city owned and they had no permission to be on. Police moved them off; they came back. Pickup games started, then vintage games, then youth leagues. People got married on the mound and scattered ashes in the outfield. A documentary, Stealing Home, was made about them in 2014.

They were always temporary. A campaign raised more than $20 million, and the Detroit Police Athletic League built its headquarters around the old diamond and opened The Corner Ballpark in March 2018, with the field named the Willie Horton Field of Dreams after the Tigers outfielder who grew up nearby.

The one real argument was about grass. PAL wanted artificial turf, durable enough for thousands of children across several sports. The volunteers petitioned to keep the natural surface on the grounds that it was the last authentic thing on the site. Turf went in. One PAL funder pulled a $25,000 sponsorship over it.

Derry's own summary was that they had been honoured to be the temporary caretakers. Detroit kids play there now, on the same square of ground.

Coordinates are The Corner Ballpark, from OpenStreetMap. It is free to look at from Michigan Avenue; check PAL's schedule before expecting to get onto the field.

Cover: a crowd filling Navin Field for a demonstration against a school amendment, 31 October 1920. Photographed by Spencer & Wyckoff. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, digital ID pan.6a27233. Public domain. Second image: the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in 2014, during the years the volunteers kept the field mown, photographed by Dan Gaken, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.