Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

      You can seldom recapture one of those magical moments in your life, but sometimes you can come really, really close.    This weekend is the last weekend of regular season home games for the Arizona Diamondbacks, and Kerry and I will finish by having seen about half of them, plus another 21 games in other stadiums, for a total of over 60 MLB and AAA games, a record for us. The Diamondbacks are finishing the home season with a series against the Yankees, a team that a) has a lot of fans everywhere, and b) is hated by anyone who isn't a Yankee fan.     In any case, the weekend opened with a Friday night game in which Yankee fans outnumbered Diamondback fans by nearly 2 to 1 (based on a count of who was wearing which team's gear during a circuit of the concourse before the game), and the Diamondbacks played terribly in a 9-2 loss. This afternoon, I told Kerry that for the first time I could remember, I wasn't looking forward to going to the game...

  One of the poignant things about Triple-A baseball is the quiet desperation beneath the surface. Every player there is trying to make it to “The Show,” the major leagues. Some are young players streaking through the minor league system, just biding their time until their inevitable call-up. Some are those who’ve had a taste of the majors, but didn’t play well enough to stick, and are trying to prove that they deserve another chance. Some are players in their 30s who have spent a decade or more as major league regulars, some even making All-Star teams or playing in the 9 th inning of a World Series Game 7, trying to make it back for one last shot. It’s those latter two categories that fascinate me. Cooper Hummel, who was never a star, but ended up playing in 119 major league games for four teams over four seasons, is now 31, and playing in Japan. His best season (66 games) was as a rookie with the Diamondbacks in 2022. One of the notes about him that was shown regularly on the ...

    We went to a carnival last night, and a baseball game broke out. Yes, that’s shamelessly borrowing Rodney Dangerfield’s classic one-liner, “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” But it’s also an apt description of an evening of St. Paul Saints baseball that was full of between-inning entertainment and snarky comments by the P.A. announcers, and ended with a walk-off win by the home team. And while there’s a lot of cynicism in the Dangerfield quote, I don’t mean to be cynical about the Saints. It was a good vibe all night. Let’s start with the carnival aspect. When we walked in, 30 minutes before gametime, the seats were almost empty, but the concourse was full. What was everyone doing on the concourse? It helped that it was two-for-one beer night, and the lines for beer were long (above), but I never heard anyone in the crowd who sounded drunk, unlike many a major and minor league   game I’ve been to (we’ll find out how much that contr...

  When I realized that tonight’s game was not only our 49 th wedding anniversary, but also a game in the 49 th of the 60 stadiums we hope to get to in this five-year quest, I couldn’t resist paying to put a message on the message board. It probably didn’t make sense to anyone except us, but these trips have become a central theme of our early retirement years. Incidentally, Kerry posted a Facebook message about spending our anniversary at a ballpark a few minutes earlier, but when I posted the picture above, high school classmate Tim Smith commented, “Annniversary message on the Jumbotron for the win!” We often get asked whether it was one of us that started out as a baseball fan, and the other comes along for the ride, or whether we were both fans from the start. The couple we went to the Tacoma game with Thursday night, Bill and Connie Robey, concluded that they bonded over the fact that they were both baseball fans. In our case, Kerry always answers that question by saying...