Beyond Detroit's Economic Woes and World Series Deficits While the word from Comerica Park was again bad for Tigers fans, beyond the stadium's fences there were still things to feel good about. This is more like it. This is the kind of place that can turn a disastrous World Series around for a Detroit Tigers fan. It's called the Motor City Bar, tucked into a vale of saloons on Manhattan's Lower East Side, its walls covered with stuff guaranteed to thrum a native Detroiter's heart strings - signs for Vernor's ginger ale, the Bob-Lo Boat, the Bridge to Canada. Bolted into the bar are the chrome nameplates of Detroit cars that are music to any gearhead's ears: Torino, Galaxie and Eldorado, Skylark and Valiant. The handles to the restroom doors are steering wheels from muscle cars. The only TV in the place is a battered little box perched on the bar. Enough said. Meeting me here for Game 3 - a must win for the Tigers - is fellow Detroiter Mark Binelli, who is about to publish a magnificent book called "Detroit City Is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis." It's a crackling rebuttal to ruin porn, those glossy coffee table books that fetishize Detroit's decay, bursting with pictures of the gutted Packard plant and Michigan Central Station and maybe, by way of piling on, a once-bustling thoroughfare like Gratiot Avenue, shot at midday, with not a car or a soul in sight, just the echoes of ghosts. Such pictures don't lie - Detroit is bristling with photogenic ruins and empty spaces - but they tell only a fraction of the truth about the city where I grew up during its last hurrah and where Mark Binelli grew up during the first laps of its long decline. To his credit, Binelli looks beneath the clichés and writes about urban farmers, vigilantes, artists, entrepreneurs, autoworkers, activists, and a successful magnet school for pregnant teenagers and mothers. These are stories about the unquenchable energy that has convinced Binelli and me that something special is happening in our hometown, something way bigger than this so-far disappointing World Series. In fact, as soon as the game begins and I buy a round of beers, I'm astonished to learn that Binelli, 42, has little appetite for the two staples of nearly every Detroiter's daily diet: cars and sports. "There were a few perfunctory trips to Tiger Stadium when I was a kid because that's what Americans are supposed to do," says Binelli, the son of Italian immigrants. I tried to make the effort to follow sports, but I was always faking it. I was never an obsessive car guy, either. He pauses as a dark thought clouds his face. People from Detroit are going to turn against me when they find out I don't care about sports or cars. His book is the medicine our hometown needs right now. It's a clear-eyed look at promising recent developments, without any saccharine optimism. Amazing positive things are happening in Detroit these days. Unfortunately, they're not happening inside Comerica Park tonight. The Giants score two runs in the second inning and the Tiger bats remain as meek as the Yankee bats were a week ago during the American League Championship Series. But I remind myself that this is, after all, just a baseball game. In his book Binelli dismisses claims that the fate of a sports team says something meaningful about a city, including this breathless slice of baloney from a CNN columnist: "History has shown that when the city's sports teams start doing well, it's a sign of healing in Detroit." The Detroit Tigers are not doing well. As the game moves to the bottom of the ninth inning with the Giants still leading, 2-0, Binelli, a hard-wired optimist, says, "I think we're going to turn it around." After the first two Detroit batters fly out, I say, "This was not meant to be." The final batter of the night proves me right by striking out. Mark Binelli heads for the door with a shrug. "Sometimes," he says, "you get the feeling the fates are not aligned for these Tigers." True words, spoken by a teller of important truths.