Introduction - It's a bucket list thing

If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess, right?

I know that a lot of people set out to go a game in each of the 30 major league ballparks, and I’d always harbored that dream. But when I got to thinking about, I thought that was a little limited. Why not go to each of the 30 major league parks, and each of the 30 AAA minor league parks as well?

Part of it appeal was the challenge: could you get to a game in each of those 60 parks (well, gee, you probably ought to go to at least two games in each of the major league parks, right?) in a single year? I love spreadsheets, so for two or three years in a row, as I dreamed of retirement and the grand baseball journey, I set up a spreadsheet with various itineraries. I concluded that it was just barely possible, by driving from city to city (with some doubling back when a team just wasn’t at home at the right time), and by taking a plane trip or two (there’s no reason to drive all the way up to Seattle and Tacoma). Also, it would take at least five months of the season. I even built in at least one rest day each week.

The other thing is that Kerry and I like traveling, we like traveling together, and there are a lot of cities in the U.S. that we haven’t been to. We often find even the small towns to be interesting, so why not hit some of those not-quite-major cities, and see a little bit of them.

Kerry and I discussed it, and were thinking about how to make it happen, but three things got in the way. First, I had a little trouble getting retired – it took two years longer than I had hoped to get to where I’m down to working only 10% time. Second, we’re the primary caregivers for Kerry’s parents, and it’s not fair to them to be gone for five months straight. Third, we like traveling, but do we really like it THAT much? We’d agreed to flip a coin in advance to see which one of us got the services of our friend the divorce lawyer, but still.

So we decided to try to do it in chunks, over the course of four or five years. This year, Retirement 2.0 for me looks like it’s going to take, and my 50th high school reunion is 1500 miles away, so I figured out a way that we could go to nine parks over the course of a month, and see a lot of friends along the way. I’m going to keep a journal of the baseball portion of the trip, so here goes.

Here’s the rules (it’s our game, so it’s our rules, right?):

We intend to go to at least two games in each major league ballpark, and at least one in each AAA park. If, at the end, there are ballparks that weren’t on the list when we started, we won’t necessarily go back to pick them up, particularly for the AAA parks, since franchises move around. And does anyone think the A’s will still be playing in Oakland in four years?

In case of rainouts, though, we’ll find a way to get to that park, whether it’s staying an extra day in town, doubling back, or maybe even just flying in for a day or two.

We expect that we’ll get to most of the parks as part of extended trips, but as long as we get to the park, it counts.

This journal is going to be more about The Game than about the games. I’m old, so I’ve collected stories and opinions over the years, and it seems that every game I watch, I’m reminded of some story. So while the journal may just be about a particularly exciting game on some days, more will be about the parks, and a lot of it will just be the stories that a particular game reminds me of.

I’ll post from every ballpark, but I won’t necessarily post every day, because I doubt that you really want to know what gas mileage we got or where we ate. But there may be some posts about places along the way where we don’t go to a game (will we manage to get Cooperstown again on one of the routes?).

And if we want to change the rules, we will. As I said, they’re our rules.

I hope you enjoy this as much as (I hope) we will.

Tucson, May 24, 2023

 

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