Detroit, MI
CCS student Miriam Wong wins 2022 poster contest

The 2022 Chevrolet Detroit Grand Pix offered by Lear would be the final IndyCar race on Belle Isle, and Miriam Wong’s poster design will commemorate it.
Wong gained the annual Detroit GP poster contest Wednesday with a drawing of a household waving the checkered flag over a pair of screaming race vehicles.
“The poster tells a terrific story. It reveals emotion, household, and the long-lasting Belle Isle Fountain,” Detroit GO chairman Bud Denker mentioned. “And that waving checkered flag closes a chapter in our historical past. The subsequent technology of spectators will likely be throwing a inexperienced flag for our downtown race.”
The annual poster has been a collector’s merchandise for the reason that first System One Detroit Grand Prix in 1982, and has continued on Belle Isle with the IndyCar calendar. For the tenth yr, the winner was chosen in a Grand Prix contest from designs created by college students on the Faculty for Inventive Research in Detroit.
Detroit Grand Prix will go away Belle Isle. However will concrete paddock go too?
A senior at CCS, Wong was joined by her mom and grandmother to rejoice her win. Wong is a primary technology American born in Detroit with mother and father from Mexico and Canada. Her father has labored with Common Motors for years, however she has by no means been to the Belle Isle race. That can change this yr because of her historic poster.
“In my work, I wish to painting inspiring, heartfelt moments,” mentioned the illustration main, who desires to pursue a profession creating paintings for publications. “I needed the poster to deal with the group and household features of the occasion.”
Denker mentioned that Wong’s paintings will likely be refined over the following few days for publication — after which produced in a restricted run of official 2022 posters. They are going to be out there in Could for buy on-line by way of the occasion’s official web site, DetroitGP.com.
The Grand Prix will likely be held June 3-5 per week following the Indy 500 on Memorial Day weekend.
Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit Information. Discover him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or Twitter @HenryEPayne.

Detroit, MI
Detroit Tigers slugger Kerry Carpenter vs left-handed pitchers? Here’s the plan
Detroit Tigers’ Tarik Skubal talks pitching development
Ace pitcher Tarik Skubal joined our “Days of Roar” podcast as spring training began to discuss development of his pitches, more. Full episode out now.
LAKELAND, Fla. — Kerry Carpenter, a left-handed hitter, wants more opportunities to hit against left-handed pitchers this season after being limited to right-handed pitchers since making his MLB debut in August 2022.
The Detroit Tigers are open to expanding Carpenter’s role on offense, but won’t abandon their best strategy for scoring runs.
“I think the goal is to put ourselves in the best position to score the most runs,” manager A.J. Hinch said Saturday morning, referencing left-handed hitters Carpenter, Colt Keith, Jace Jung and Parker Meadows, “and they’re going to get opportunities, and probably more opportunities moving forward, but more doesn’t mean every one. We have an open mind as to how to best use our roster, but I stand behind that my job is to use the roster the best way I can.”
Here’s the big news: Carpenter is going to ask Hinch to play him against every left-handed starter and reliever in spring training games, and when he’s not in games, he wants to be able to walk to the backfields to take swings against left-handers from his own team.
“That’s my plan,” Carpenter said.
He hopes to become an everyday player.
Carpenter already crushes right-handed pitchers, so his value would skyrocket — from a Joc Pederson-caliber player to a Yordan Alvarez-caliber player — if he can hit left-handers.
“I believe that I can do it,” Carpenter said Saturday afternoon, “because I had a lot of success against lefties in the minor leagues. Certain guys are tough, but I know I can do it. It’s just getting the opportunity and taking advantage of it.”
Carpenter was one of the best players in baseball against right-handed pitching in 2024. His .994 OPS ranked fifth among position players with at least 250 plate appearances against right-handers, trailing only Aaron Judge (1.132), Shohei Ohtani (1.128), Bobby Witt Jr. (1.012) and Juan Soto (.999).
He hit .305 with 17 home runs and a .994 OPS in 264 plate appearances against righties.
But he hit .107 with one home run and a .408 OPS against lefties.
Over his three-year MLB career, Carpenter has received 734 plate appearances against right-handed pitchers and 134 plate appearances against lefties. The results: a .290 average, 40 homers and an .897 OPS against righties versus a .202 average, four homers and a .588 OPS against lefties.
Simply put, Carpenter has performed significantly better against righties, which is why he sits against left-handed starters and gets pulled against lefty relievers.
“We know he’s a massive threat, whether he’s in the box or coming off the bench,” Hinch said. “When I make those moves, maybe I’ve done a poor job of trying to convince you guys it’s about the guy coming off the bench, and I think that is going to continue to be the case as we try to adapt to how teams are approaching us.”
The right-handed hitters off the bench: Andy Ibáñez hit .292 with an .802 OPS against lefties; Justyn-Henry Malloy hit .250 with an .893 OPS against lefties; Spencer Torkelson hit .235 with a .798 OPS against lefties.
“Just because I pinch-hit for him doesn’t mean I don’t trust him,” Hinch said of Carpenter.
[ MUST LISTEN: Make “Days of Roar” your go-to Detroit Tigers podcast, available anywhere you listen to podcasts (Apple, Spotify) ]
In 2024, Hinch made strategic pinch-hit moves when opposing teams brought in a left-handed reliever to face Carpenter in the later innings. This forced Hinch to replace Carpenter with a right-handed hitter off the bench, such as Ibáñez.
In 2025, Hinch wonders if opposing teams will start using left-handed relievers against Carpenter as early as the fourth or fifth inning. This would force him to either let Carpenter face a lefty or remove him from the game much earlier than usual.
“Are they going to bring in pitchers in the fourth and fifth trying to chase Carp out of the game? Maybe,” Hinch said. “But I go back to Andy Ibáñez getting a base hit off (Houston Astros left-handed reliever Josh) Hader and crushing lefties. That role is still going to be available to him.”
The pinch-hit strategy worked for the Tigers in 2024, but Hinch plans to keep an open mind to giving Carpenter (and other left-handed hitters) more opportunities against lefty pitchers.
It’s exactly what Carpenter wants.
He needs to prove he can be successful against lefties.
Until then, his value is limited as a platoon player.
“Getting the at-bats here in spring training is going to help in just seeing it as much as I possibly can right now,” said Carpenter, who will be eligible for salary arbitration for the first time after the 2025 season, “and the results are going to be what they are. Coming to peace with that is all I can do.”
Contact Evan Petzold at epetzold@freepress.com or follow him @EvanPetzold.
Listen to our weekly Tigers show “Days of Roar” every Monday afternoon on demand at freep.com, Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And catch all of our podcasts and daily voice briefing at freep.com/podcasts.
Detroit, MI
In “When Detroit Played the Numbers,” Felicia B. George looks at illegal gambling's heyday

For Black History Month, Michigan Public’s Morning Edition is featuring conversations with Michigan authors who have written new books about African-American history.
In her book, When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling’s History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City, Felicia B. George looks at the rise and fall of illegal gambling operations in the city.
The Library of Michigan has selected it for its 2025 Michigan Notable Books list.
George is an anthropologist and teaches at Wayne State University. She spoke with Stateside’s April Baer in 2024.
April Baer: I have to say, before I picked up your book, I was totally unaware of historically how very long lotteries have been with us. Maybe for younger folks who who’ve grown up with the legal lottery systems that exist today, can you explain where lotteries came from?
Felicia B. George: So it’s something that we adopted from England when we came over here in the United States to build the states. It was a fast and easy way to generate revenue without raising taxes. So the United States was literally built on a lot of different lotteries. It paid for roads. It paid for churches, hospitals, universities. You name it, and it was used to pay for it. It even helped pay for the American Revolution.
AB: The bulk of the book addresses this period starting in the early 20th century. Could you lay out for us what you consider to be the dawn of lotteries in the numbers in Detroit?
FBG: Eventually, like with everything, fraud kind of creeped its way into the lotteries. And so a lot of the states make them illegal. And so, after the Civil War, they were illegal. You’re not supposed to play the lotteries by the 1890s. They were done. For a while, Detroit had some illegal lottery going on and they declared that it was dead. And so it was dead just — probably for a few years — in the early 1900s.
But in 1920, something really interesting occurred. John Roxborough was a Black man that came from a elite family. He had his own business where he was a bail bondsman, and one day he went to bail out a numbers operator. And this numbers operator said to him, “Hey, you guys don’t have a policy game.” And that was another name for the numbers game. He said, “I can teach you this and you will make a ton of money.” And sure enough, he learned how to run this establishment from this numbers operator. And he promoted it to Detroit and it just blew up from there.
AB: You give us all kinds of evidence throughout the book that the numbers and lottery games were something that, very much like today with legal lotteries, everyone played. Rich people, poor people, all races. Another thing that you bring up pretty early in the book is pushing back and questioning the concept of gaming as predatory in Black communities. And you point out many different examples of how the games kept money in the community.
FBG: It was really important for Black people to have a financial institution. We’re talking about a period of time when redlining was going on, when Blacks were denied employment, when they were denied loans for businesses, where there was not money to be used to go to colleges and universities. And so these numbers men here in Detroit really considered themselves race men. Even though they became very rich and they made a lot of profit from it, they put it back into the community.
“The United States was literally built on a lot of different lotteries… It even helped pay for the American Revolution.”
Author Felicia B. George
A lot of these men would donate money to the Urban League, to the NAACP. And they would make sure that these organizations had money so that they could keep running. They provided scholarship funds for students. They gave loans for businesses, nightclubs, restaurants. When the Depression hit, these same men made sure that they were feeding the homeless and the people that didn’t have food. And so they really, really gave back economically and socially to the communities that they served.
AB: Felicia, the book also gives us a lot of detail on the very complicated relationship between “policy,” and “the numbers,” and law enforcement. Thank you also for explaining the policy was how people talked about the games where lottery numbers were selected, I guess in the way that we think about it now. And the numbers were a bit more of something that involved published results from from different kinds of things. I never really understood that distinction before.
Can you explain law enforcement’s relationship with illegal gambling in Detroit?
FBG: In order for the numbers game to be played, they had to have protection, and they had to have a way to ensure that they wouldn’t be raided and lose their money. And so they had a number of people, including the mayor of the city of Detroit, the sheriff for Wayne County, the prosecutor for Wayne County, and a number of police officers for Detroit Police Department were on their payroll.
AB: There’s a whole chapter devoted to a period in which John Roxborough … was indicted. And all of a sudden a lot of things that had been going on below the surface were very much more public. Can you explain what played out at the trial and the impact that it had on the numbers in the city?
FBG: There was a woman who worked for one of the Irish number houses, and she was a divorcee and was having an affair with the manager of one of these numbers houses. And he pretty much gave her a Dear John letter and, told her, “Hey, you know, I’m no good. I’m breaking up with you. You can do better than me.”
And she met with him one final time to give him an opportunity to come back to her, and he wouldn’t. And so she picked up her child and she committed suicide and killed her child. But before she did this, she sent letters all over the city. She sent it to the Detroit News, the Detroit Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Michigan State Police, to the FBI. And in these letters, she said, Hey, there’s a lot of bias that’s going on in the City of Detroit. The police department is a part of it. They’re being paid off. These are the players. This is what’s going on.
When this hit the newspapers, the public was enraged and then a lot of the numbers men were exposed. John Roxborough, who was [famed boxer] Joe Louis’s manager, and a whole bunch of other numbers operators. And so they were indicted and eventually convicted. At that point, you start seeing some of the power that the Black numbers operators had, they really, really started to diminish.
“Even though they became very rich and they made a lot of profit from it, they put it back into the community.”
Author Felicia B. George on how Black numbers men in Detroit supported their communities in the early 20th century.
AB: One of the things that was so poignant about the book was seeing how the story of numbers games and policy were really entwined with the story of America and the larger story of Black Detroit. What was the confluence of how the lottery was changing in the years when Detroit’s neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods, were changing as well?
FBG: Before urban renewal, you have these clusters where Blacks were forced to live, and so you have these communities and numbers were a huge part of those communities. They were a way for people to socialize, to bond together, not just the economic part or the entertainment part. And so you would have these numbers writers, they would go door to door. They were the ones that, you know, would kind of pass on whatever news was going on in the community. And so they were important men and women in the community.
And when urban renewal comes, now these communities are being broken up. And so these number writers — who have been a part of the community for years that everybody knows who they are, plays the numbers with them — they’re now gone. The telephone had a part in it. You know, now people are calling in their numbers. And so with urban renewal, you’ve lost the sense of community for a number of reasons. And you can just kind of see how it gradually impacted not just those communities, but the relationships in the game overall.
Editor’s note: Quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity. This transcript and the audio version of the interview near the top of this page are excerpted from a longer conversation that originally appeared on Stateside. You can find that interview here.
Detroit, MI
Apple ‘coming soon’ to downtown Detroit

An Apple store is “coming soon” to downtown Detroit.
The tech giant announced the new retail location on its website, where Detroit is now listed among its other stores.
Apple Inc. hasn’t officially announced an address or a date when the downtown location will open for business.
The company’s website says the store is now hiring and includes links to more information about available jobs.
Apple has six existing retail locations in Michigan, including stores in Ann Arbor, Clinton Township, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Novi and Troy. It also operates a store in Toledo, Ohio, among 274 stores nationwide listed on its website.
mreinhart@detroitnews.com
@max_detroitnews
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