Ilitch went to bat for devoted Windsor fan
Somewhere in the long line of people waiting to pay their respects to Mike Ilitch at Wednesday’s public viewing inside Detroit’s Fox Theatre will be a grateful Tigers’ fan from Windsor.
Tom Marshall hopes to share with the Ilitch family how their patriarch profoundly affected his own life.
Ilitch died Friday at the age of 87. Back in the spring of 1999, Marshall wrote to the owner of his beloved Detroit Tigers about a recurring dream he had of taking batting practice on the field at Tiger Stadium.
It was going to be the Tigers’ last season at the fabled corner of Michigan and Trumbull, a place Marshall knew well from many delightful childhood trips there with his father, Harry.
Father and son would soak in Sunday afternoon doubleheaders from a $1.50 seat in the bleachers.
With the blessing of school nuns, Marshall listened to the Tigers win the 1968 World Series on his transistor radio at St. John’s elementary.
“I told (Ilitch) from my heart that I’d always had this dream of taking batting practice at Tiger Stadium,” Marshall said of the short one-and-a-half paragraph pitch he punched out on an electric typewriter. “I asked him to ‘make this 42-year-old kid’s dream come true.’ ”
He addressed it to Ilitch using the street number for Tiger Stadium.
A few months went by and another Major League Baseball season was well underway when Marshall got a return post featuring Tigers’ letterhead.
Team president John McHale Jr. wrote to inquire when he might be available for batting practice before a game.
“When I mailed my letter I thought this will never happen,” the now 60-year-old Marshall recalled. “I don’t even live in that country and (Ilitch) doesn’t know me from Adam. Here this man, Mike Ilitch, had enough care to read the letter and get his associate to reply.”
With his teenage son Ryan capturing the moment on a camcorder, Marshall lived out his dream on a Tuesday afternoon in late September.
The club lent him a full uniform. He brought along his own bat, spikes and batting gloves.
“I wanted to look the part,” said Marshall, a contract estimator for Colautti Bros. Flooring. “I wasn’t going to take batting practice in a T-shirt and jeans.”
A little nervous as he stood waiting near the cage, Marshall put too much pine tar adhesive on the bat handle.
“I could hardly get my gloves off of it,” he recalled. “Here I was standing on hallowed ground, the same field where the likes of Al Kaline and Ty Cobb had played.”
One of the stadium workers thought he was a September “callup,” a minor league prospect joining the team for basically a lateseason, big-league audition.
Radio legend Ernie Harwell offered a shout out from nearby.
“You finally made it kid,” Harwell said.
Jeff Jones, the team’s bullpen coach and a former Tigers’ pitcher, took the mound.
Marshall was told he’d get 24 pitches. It was 4 p.m. and with the ball game some three hours away, the stadium was practically empty. A few players had started to drift onto the field to stretch or play catch but they ignored the unfamiliar face in the batter’s box.
Two members of the grounds crew were raking the dirt near second base and also paid him no attention until he cracked the first pitch from Jones on a line shot over their heads. After that, they kept an eye out. “I hit it pretty good,” said Marshall, who played youth baseball in the Mic Mac organization. “I wanted to hit one out (for a home
run) but I didn’t have the power. The closest I got was one bounce on the warning track down the leftfield line.”
Back in street clothes, he and his family got Tiger hats and box seats to the game that night.
“Mike Ilitch and the organization really hooked us up that day,” he said. “I’ve always said I’m the biggest diehard Tigers’ fan in Southwestern Ontario.”
He still takes a glove to games at Comerica Park in hopes of snagging a ball during batting practice.
Each time he walks through the gates he remembers the kindness of a man he eventually got to meet once at a Red Wings’ game.
“What Mike Ilitch did for me really reflects what he was all about. It showed something of his character,” he said.
“I think the world of Mike Ilitch to this day.
“For him to let a perfect stranger from a different country do that, it’s stuck with me for the rest of my life.”