The premise was baseball, as it often is. And, within that familiar zone of balls and strikes, my son and I found ourselves back in the Motor City this past weekend. This had me thinking about the importance of place. Detroit is one city outside of my native South that feels a bit like home. It has an undeniable soul and edge. It is imperfect and correspondingly improvisational. It has an equally grand and troubled history, and its promise is anchored in both experiences. People are thoughtful and nice, but not “Midwest nice.” Rather, there is a refreshing honesty, which I suppose follows considering a century of union struggles, racial tension, and economic hardship. One gets the sense that trust is both earned and maintained here.

Like my treasured New Orleans, the city has steadily lost people over time. One from a massive hurricane, the other from the slow moving storm of de-industrialization. But crisis can unearth creativity, healthy informality, and acts of solidarity. A case of more from less. Detroit has been heralded for urban agriculture and a DIY ethic, and my LinkedIn feed is filled with references to start ups, redevelopment projects, and community initiatives. It has drawn artists and investors alike while seemingly retaining the home grown talent and working people who made the city what it once was and can be again.

At the ballpark, I bought my son a “City Connect” jersey, which features the image of a car tire. So, over the weekend, we talked about the auto industry and he pledged to read the ‘Flivver King’ and ‘Rivethead.’ We talked about Middle Eastern food, we talked about Motown music, and we talked about the vacant lots and empty buildings we passed as a small way to understand hardship and rebirth. He embraced our discussions with real intellectual curiosity and without judgement. But mostly we talked baseball, as fathers and sons do.

On Sunday, the Tigers completed a series win over Toronto, another great cosmopolitan city. Beyond the score board, however, I felt like we were watching something play out on the field that was symbolic of globalization and how cities can compete, coexist, and thrive. By my count, the combined rosters of the Tigers and the Blue Jays had players from 12 states and 8 countries. Outside the stadium walls are the neighborhoods of Greek Town and Cork Town, and Eastern Market hosts vendors from Poland, Mexico, Lebanon, Korea, Iraq, India, and the Philippines, among others, who bargain and mix with native Michiganders. Detroit proper has long been the nation’s largest black-majority city, and the wider metropolitan area is home to the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the United States.

As much of the country retreats and isolates, this border town continues to engage and extend. And just as Tiger outfielder Riley Greene aggressively stretched a routine double into a triple at Friday’s game, Detroit deftly moves both within and beyond its own “8 mile” to a larger world.