Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

    At the end of our second trip of 2024 (also known as trip 2024.2), it’s appropriate to take stock of where we are, and what we’ve learned. The numbers of the quest 2024.2 was eight stadiums, five of them MLB and three AAA. That brings our total numbers, in the middle of the second year of our quest, to 12 MLB and 11 AAA. We’ll add one more of each later this summer. At that point, we will have been to all of the stadiums west of the Mississippi except Seattle and Tacoma, but only a couple east of the Mississippi. We’ll fly to Salt Lake City for day. It’s a long day’s drive from any other MLB or AAA stadium, the closest being Denver and Reno, respectively, but we did those two on separate trips, and it makes no sense to make a long drive out, spend a day for a game, then make a long drive back. We’ll go to a couple of games in Pittsburgh. Kerry was asked to attend a church meeting in Pittsburgh, and the person doing the asking knows her well enough that he include...

  I have a love-hate relationship with Los Angeles in general, and Dodger Stadium in particular. Whenever I fly into Los Angeles, I’m struck by two things. One is how beautiful the surroundings are, with the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. The other is how ugly the city is. There are some beautiful things about the city (I think Dodger Stadium is one of them, but more on that later), but much of it has a worn-out feel. I’ve been in airports that seem grungier than LAX in third world countries, but I’m not sure I have been in in the U.S., Europe, Australia,, New Zealand, … And it’s nice that LA has freeways everywhere, but those freeways frequently are just slow-moving parking lots. Maybe I’m just getting older, but it seems like it’s getting worse over the years. Tonight, Google Maps tried not once, but twice, to take us on freeways whose   on-ramps were closed, and we ended up driving over the Angeles Crest Scenic Highway (I’m sure it’s scenic in the d...

  Why do people go to baseball games? I’m not talking about the fuzzy feel-good things like the grace of the players or the pace of the game or the smell of the grass, or even the more subtle things that hook me, like the plethora of statistics. Why do people go to baseball games at Dodger Stadium or Petco Park, but not Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg or the Oakland Coliseum in the early 1970s when the Oakland A’s were the best team in decades? Being a lover of spreadsheets, I put together a spreadsheet with a whole bunch of items that might influence attendance for each of the 30 MLB teams for the last several years, and then asked Excel to figure out how strongly each thing correlated with attendance. If your eyes glaze over at talk of statistical methods, skip this paragraph, but back for the results in the next paragraph. For   2018 through 2024, the spreadsheet has each team’s attendance, number of wins, payroll (there are a lot of versions of payroll listings a...