Tucson (6+4+3=2, luggage racks, and other lessons learned)

 

 

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 included the fact that the Pirates are in town in his ask. We were already planning on going to Europe the next week, so it’s kinda on the way.

At that point, we will have been to a little more than 40% of our target stadiums, in two years. That keeps us on pace to get to all 60 in five years.

How much baseball is too much

We’ve also been to 15 games at Chase Field in Phoenix this year. The last two were on our way home from trip 2024.2. We were staying in Lancaster, California (on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains from LA), to go to Dodger Stadium, and the last game was on a Friday night. Lancaster to Tucson (our home) is drivable in a day, but it’s a very long day, and we’d had enough of those. Lancaster to Phoenix is two hours shorter, and the Diamondbacks’ Saturday night game was a late start, at 7:10, plus they were giving away T-shirts we knew we’d wear (more swag!). And Sunday was an afternoon game, and Father’s Day, to boot, when they always give away nice aloha shirts (even more swag!), so we could go to two more games, and add less than 24 hours onto our trip.

The Diamondbacks lost the Saturday game, 9-2, and won the Sunday game, 12-5. We agreed that the Saturday game was the game we enjoyed the least of our entire trip, in part because we were tired, but in part because having a strong interest in a team makes it more difficult when they don’t play well. As we were leaving a Diamondbacks game in Phoenix not too long ago, we got to talking with a fan who had just come to the game because he had business in Phoenix, and he commented that he had concluded that it may be more fun to go to a game when your team is not one of the ones playing. I think that’s true, if your team loses. But there’s nothing better than being there when your team wins in a walk-off, particularly if it's one where they came from behind in Game 7 of the World Series. We’ll always have 2001.

Buying things

We got a lot of giveaways, including jerseys, blankets, fanny packs, and bobbleheads. But we didn’t buy much memorabilia. You can buy a charm bracelet with spots to put the charms you buy at each major league stadium you go to, but since we plan to go to all 30, that would be a lot. Plus, I don’t know whether they have them for the AAA parks, but if they do, that would be even more of a lot. I figure our memorabilia is this blog, the photos we take, and all the scorecards.

We did buy a couple of things. Since we’re Diamondback fans, and Reno is their AAA team, it seemed appropriate to buy something from Reno. The souvenir mugs were nice. Also, we saw a store called Baseballism near Oracle Park in San Francisco. We didn’t go into many (any?) team stores, but this was a little more broadly oriented. Kerry found a T-shirt that is nearly identical to one she bought at the gift shop at the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, a few years ago, and wore out, so she bought it. It says, “6+4+3=2” See above.

She was wearing that the Saturday we were driving home.

6+4+3=2

But what does that mean, anyway? It’s baseball nerd humor.

In keeping score, the defensive positions are numbered, 1=pitcher, 2=catcher, 3,4,5=first, second, and third base, 6=shortstop, 7,8,9=outfielders from left to right. So 6 is the shortstop, 4 is the second baseman, and 3 is the first baseman.

One of the more exciting plays in baseball is the double play, where a team gets two outs on one play. The most common is 6 to 4 to 3. It’s sometimes written 643, or 6-4-3, seldom 6+4+3, but I understand the sentiment. The standard 6-4-3 double play is when there is a runner on first base, and the batter hits a ground ball to the shortstop, who throws it to the second baseman, who steps on second base to force out the runner coming from first, and then throws to first in time to beat the batter. A good 6-4-3 DP is a beauty, as the second baseman comes running to the base, then catches the ball, and turns nearly 180 degrees to make the throw, while a runner is sliding into him.

In the Friday night LA game, we saw a 6-4-3 double play that was unlike any I’d ever seen before. The Dodgers had a runner on first, and the batter hit a soft popup into shallow left field. It looked like it was going to fall between the shortstop and left fielder, but Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. made an amazing play, turning and sprinting toward the outfield, catching the popup over his shoulder while going full speed, then jumping and turning in one motion and throwing to the second baseman, who made a strong throw to the first baseman that got there just before the runner, who had thought the ball was going to fall, got back to the base. I looked at the scorebook, and it said “6-4-3.” We probably see a 6-4-3 ground ball double play on average once every one or two games. I suspect there haven’t been many 6-4-3 popup double plays in major league history.

Travel lessons

We’ve honed several of the strategies we learned on trip 2023.

We go to restaurants some, but we try to stay at hotels with breakfast included, and we try to go to a grocery store if we’re going to be in a city for two or three days. And we bring along a cooler that we can put the leftovers in when we travel to the next city. Besides being cheaper, we can get more fresh fruits and vegetables, things that are hard to get at a restaurant, and almost impossible to get at a ballpark. I do like Dodger Dogs, though.

We stay at hotels in the same chain as much as possible. I had started staying more at Marriott properties than Hilton or any of the other big chains, and once you started building points with one, it makes sense to stay there. We’ve got enough “points” for two or three nights at a pretty nice Marriott on one of our next trips, plus we often get upgraded to a bigger room, which is nice, though not essential. We also know which Marriott hotels include breakfast. One other advantage is that I know how to use their app, and they’ve got lots of properties, so I can get away with some mistakes. When we got to Palmdale, at the end of a long California drive, we found out that not only had I not clicked the last button to reserve the room, the hotel was full for the night. So I sat in the lobby, got on the app, and within minutes had a reservation at a comparable Marriott property 10 miles away.

I’ve become a connoisseur of luggage carts. If the hotel has one of the tall ones (like the one on the right in the photo), with bars at each end so you can stack bags two high, and hooks on the top to hang lighter bags, I can get it loaded from the back of the car, or vice versa, in just a minute or so. I know where every bag goes, both in the car and on the luggage rack. Other luggage racks are less handy – the ones like they have at airports, without a bar at the end away from you (like the ones on the left), are the most difficult to use, and usually take at least one extra trip between the car and the room.

 

What’s left

We have several trips left, and three years to do them. In general, we’ll fly in, go to a couple of games in that city, then rent a car and drive to other places. We won’t know details until the schedules come out each year. And that’s another thing I’ve learned – schedules for the next season come out sometime in August, but for the minors, the teams release their own schedules, and they do it over a period of days or weeks.

The one place we’ll take our car is Tacoma and Seattle. We drove between LA and the Bay Area a lot, but it was too long a drive for us to use the Pacific Coast Highway. Driving that is still on our bucket list (and never again driving the I-5 between SoCal and the Bay Area is a new addition to our bucket list), so we’ll do a version where we take the Pacific Coast Highway all the way up to Seattle.

There’s one place where we won’t rent a car, New York City. We might combine that trip with Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts (Boston’s AAA team), in which case we might rent a car to get to Worcester.

Florida-Georgia: There are five teams (3 MLB and 2 AAA) ranging from the Atlanta area to Miami. We may do that trip next April.

Upper Midwest: There are 6 MLB and 3 AAA teams in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. We might combine that with dropping down to Nashville and Memphis. Otherwise, we'll fly into either Nashville or Memphis, catch a game, drive to the other, and fly out.

Mid-Atlantic: We’ll do Washington, Baltimore, Norfolk, Durham, and Charlotte in one trip.

Pennsylvania-New York (and Toronto): There are two AAA teams in Pennsylvania, three in upstate New York. They’re pretty much on a line between Philadelphia and Toronto. Cooperstown (no team, but always nice to go to the Hall of Fame) isn’t far off the line.

St. Paul: The St. Paul Saints weren't in town when we were in Minnesota last year, and St. Paul is a long ways from Milwaukee (the next closest team). We might start, or end, our Upper Midwest trip in St. Paul, but the Twin Cities airport is a hub, so it may be another where we'll just fly in for a day or two.

The bottom line

Kerry swears she’s still enjoying this saga, at least most of the time (see comment about I-5 above), and that’s certainly true for me. With each completed trip, the possibility of completing the quest seems more realistic.