Prince returns to where it all started

For years now, the home run has been discussed with awe. Prince Fielder was 8 years old at the time. He was a huge kid for 8, just as his father Cecil was huge man when he was slugging mighty home runs for the Tigers.

This specific home run carried a Fielder trademark. Prince hit it on baseball diamond No. 3 at Ghesquiere Park in Grosse Pointe Woods. The ballpark, behind City Hall, is 180 feet along the foul lines. Trees hover behind the outfield fence, and there is parking lot beyond.

"It was a coach-pitch league," Gary Borushko, who threw the pitch to Prince, told me a while back, before his death in April 2009. "He hit it 30 to 40 feet over the fence.

"He was an exceptionally good hitter. I pitched. I would pitch to his weakness so he wouldn't hit the ball over everybody's heads."

The home run was a majestic shot — majestic, with a towering trajectory, not too different than the homers Cecil was hitting for the Tigers downtown at Tiger Stadium.

Back then Prince played for a team called the Wolverines. It was 1992.

And it was the beginning of a baseball legend. An 8-year-old boy's trip from the Grosse Pointe Woods Wolverines to a 27-year-old man's arrival on the Detroit Tigers.

A 20-year journey through the Grosse Pointe Little League and high-school baseball to the minor leagues and then the major leagues. To more majestic home runs and super stardom with the Milwaukee Brewers. Through free agency and months of rumors and haggling about which team would win the auction for Prince Fielder.

To agreeing Tuesday to a reported $214 million contract that binds Fielder to the Tigers for the next nine baseball seasons.

A ballplayer returning to his roots.

One of the wondrous pleasures of covering and writing about athletes through the years has been watching a youngster evolve into a productive man. A little boy with a zest for sports growing and developing into a professional star athlete.

Yet when we all first saw him Prince Fielder was hardly little.

He was 6 or thereabouts, enormous for his young years, when he first started roaming through the Tigers' clubhouse. It was 1990, the season that Cecil hit his 51 home runs. Cecil's quest to hit 50 was the only drama the Tigers could offer during those dismal seasons.

Prince was Cecil's son — and you knew even then that when the boy grew up he would resemble his father in stature and power. He was the image of Cecil.

You noticed that young Prince was a playful, happy kid who enjoyed mingling with the adult athletes in the clubhouse. There would be mock wrestling matches pitting the lad and the ballplayers. The players would play pranks on the kid.

He was around the Tigers the next few seasons.

It was then, the early 1990s, that tales spread through the Grosse Pointe community about Cecil's son, about the monstrous homer the boy had hit at Ghesquiere Park. I recall that I first heard about it one day at Joe's Barber Shop.

Adults involved in the Grosse Point Woods-Shores Little League discussed it with words of amazement.

"You knew he had it when he was 8 years old," Dave Senters, at the time the Little League's media director, told me while Prince was dominating the National League with his home runs for the Brewers.

"He was always in the right place. He could hook slide, inside or outside."

At the time of that memorable home run, Prince actually played in the coach-pitch league called the Collegiate League.

"His dad showed up when he could," Borushko said of those days 20 years ago. "Tony Phillips would accompany him.

"Prince was an absolutely marvelous kid.

"At the age of 8, he had all the baseball moxie. He was an absolute gentleman. He never questioned anything. We would rotate players (to give all the kids playing time). He never showed even slight resentment.

"He was just a perfect kid."

The day Prince hit the home run at Ghesquiere the coach of the Wolverines' opponent got on coach-pitcher Borushko's nerves.

"The coach on the other team became disgruntled," he told me in my interview before Prince was going to visit Detroit with the Brewers. "He was disappointed that his team wasn't doing well.

"So I pitched to Prince's strength."

And Prince drove the ball 220 feet into the trees.

"Most of the kids, you have to hit their bats," Borushko said. "Prince would hit the ball every time if I had been grooving it. Prince showed up every day for every practice. He would show up with bats and gloves.
 
"He was one of the kids. The kid really loved the game. He was a kid you'd remember if you'd seen him."

At age 9, Prince Fielder graduated to Little League.

By 12, he would be taking batting practice with his dad and the Tigers. One day before the Tigers traded Cecil to the Yankees, Prince took his licks at Tiger Stadium.

And the legend expanded. He was a hulking 12 and Prince hit a ball over the fence and into the seats.

And now, Prince Fielder, at age 27, the former home-run champion of the National League, a slugger who emulated his father in 2007 with a 50-homer season, is home again. A Tiger, a cog in a batting order that could evolve into Major League Baseball's new "Murderer's Row."