Las Cruces, New Mexico (The logistics of a quest to see all the ballparks)


We’re off on the first trip of Year Two of our quest to visit all 30 of the MLB ballparks plus all 30 of the AAA minor league parks over a five-year period. Today’s trip was just a four-hour drive to get started on a tour of the Texas parks we haven’t seen. The image is of the appropriately-named Texas Canyon in southeastern Arizona, a very scenic area that we saw, as we see large swaths of the country, through the car window.



Half the fun of planning a years-long ballpark odyssey is figuring out the logistics to make it work. As Kerry reminds me, I’m a person who loves spreadsheets (she was surprised when she found out I didn’t have a spreadsheet that listed all my spreadsheets), and trying to figure out how to get to all the parks with the least amount of doubling back and the fewest random airplane flights to places we don’t have any other reason to be. That’s not to say that neither of those will happen this year.

Last year, we covered the Great Plains teams and a few Midwest teams, in a long circuit from El Paso through Albuquerque, Denver, Omaha, Des Moines, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Arlington TX, and Oklahoma City (a little doubling back there), plus a trip to the Louisville ballpark when Kerry had a meeting there. And we went to more than 30 games, including the somewhat sad final game of the World Series, in Phoenix.

Here’s this year’s schedule (our rules are that it’s two games in each MLB park, one in each AAA park):

Trip 1 (Texas):

Houston

Sugar Land (Houston’s AAA team)

Solar eclipse in Austin

Round Rock (AAA team in an Austin suburb)

Trip 2 (West Coast):

Las Vegas

Reno

Sacramento

San Francisco

Anaheim

Oakland

San Diego

Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles

Trip 3 (Random)

Salt Lake City

Trip 4 (Random)

Pittsburgh

Notes on Trip 1

The solar eclipse in Austin is the anchor point for this trip, just as a high-school reunion was the anchor point for last year’s Great Plains trip.

Notes on Trip 2

We wanted to do California this year because it looks like it might be the last season for the venerable Oakland-Alameda County Stadium. My understanding is that only a real hard-core fan would want to see a baseball game there, but hey!

We decided we needed to see Las Vegas before June, so we’re starting in late May. The ugly thing about this trip is all the trips up and down the California coast. Turns out I just couldn’t work out a way to see the Giants and A’s back-to-back, even with a couple of days in between, so we’re going to be doing some driving. Driving route 101 was on my bucket list anyway, so one of those trips will be along there.

The other thing that’s quirky enough to seem interesting is our hotel arrangement for Dodger Stadium. I was looking for hotels near the stadium, but know from experience that there really aren’t any particularly close. So I searched the Marriott website, and found various hotels in areas I was familiar with, like downtown LA or Pasadena, that cost a fortune, as well as various other expensive hotels. And in the middle of the list, perhaps 30 minutes farther than Pasadena, were hotels costing a fraction as much. That’s because they’re in Palmdale, in the Mojave Desert on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains from Pasadena. I’ve never been to Palmdale, but since it’s the access to places like Edwards Air Base, and I’ve seen “The Right Stuff”, it’s a place that intrigues me.

Notes on Trip 3

Salt Lake City is “only” 6 or 7 hours driving from the Nevada teams, but otherwise is a full day’s drive from any other park. We couldn’t find a way to fit it in, and (like Oakland) this year is the last year for their current stadium. So in the middle of a Diamondbacks’ home stand, we’re going to skip one game in Phoenix, and instead we’ll go to the airport late in the morning and fly to SLC, take in a game that night, return the next morning, and be back at Chase Field that evening. That seems appropriately crazy for a quest like this.

Notes on Trip 4

Kerry was asked to attend a church meeting in Pittsburgh. The person doing the asking knows her well enough (he’s used our tickets in Phoenix before), that he pointed out in his ask that the Pirates were in town. Turns out I’ve got a meeting in Europe the next week. So we’ll fly to Pittsburgh, go to two games, she’ll have a couple of days of meetings, then we’ll fly on to Europe. I travel for the adventure.

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