PHOTOS: Little Prince Fielder – Been Hitting Bombs in Tiger Stadium Since 12 Years Old

So, Prince Fielder just signed with the Detroit Tigers… I love this for nostalgic reasons. I know that Prince and Cecil don’t get along these days, but it’s so cool to me Prince is gonna play in the city where his dad had his best MLB years. Sad that it’s not the old Tiger Stadium still, but it’s still awesome. One of my favorite stories ever was when I first heard about fat little Prince jacking one out of Tigers stadium.

DFT (excerpt) – The swing is a piece of local hardball lore, even though the stadium was nearly empty and the hitter wasn’t old enough to watch a PG-13 movie without mom or dad.

The story is so Bunyanesque that it might be a little difficult to believe, were it not for expert witnesses.

“I saw it,” Ernie Harwell said.

“Not a myth,” Alan Trammell asserted. “It really happened.”

Prince Fielder was only a boy — albeit a “terrifically big” boy, in Harwell’s words — when he stepped to the plate at Tiger Stadium and swatted a baseball the way his father, Cecil, so often did.

Prince bats left-handed, Cecil right-handed, but the result was the same. Prince pulled the ball down the rightfield line, and it landed in the lower deck.

“Our mouths dropped,” Trammell said in a telephone interview Monday. “You don’t expect a 12-year-old to hit the ball out of a major league ballpark.

“He had always been a big kid, but this showed that he had the hand-eye coordination and the athletic ability to be a baseball player.”

How rad is that? Love it. Here are the photos I was able to google of little Prince.

**UPDATE: complete breakdown of this amazing pic and outfit. Must read**

Same year as that locker room photo, let us not forget this 1992 McDonald’s commercial.

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Oh hey lil buddy! So good.

First order of business though, when Prince gets in uniform… call up the San Diego Chicken and recreate this baseball card…I don’t care that Upper Deck is out of business.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what the city of Detroit thinks about this signing… this is what the entire city of Detroit will look like tonight…

-bp

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