Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

  This evening was quite surprising. Today was a day I planned to go to two Arizona Fall League games. The afternoon game was a walk-filled game that lasted over three hours, so it cut down my transit options, but I still had nearly two hours to get out of one stadium, get some food, and get to the other stadium, with the total driving only 20 or 25 minutes. After waiting 20 minutes without success to get waited on at an Applebee’s, I got a quick bite to eat at a fast-food restaurant, then headed to the Glendale stadium. I was surprised when Google told me I was within a mile of the stadium, and I could see stadium lights on the horizon, but they didn’t look like they were on. I was more surprised when I pulled into the stadium parking lot and there wasn’t a soul in sight. I thought I must have misread the schedule, so I got on the web to see what was what, and it said that Glendale had a home game tonight. As I was doing that, a security guard came up and tapped on the windo

  One of the joys of living in Arizona, for a baseball fan, is the Arizona Fall League. Starting right after the MLB regular season ends, the six-team AFL has three games a day, six days a week, until nearly Thanksgiving. And the players are good – for example, in the 2022 MLB All-Star game, roughly half the players selected to participate (including more than half the starters) had played in the AFL at some point. For decades, players working their way up the ladder in the minor leagues frequently played “winter ball” in Latin America to keep their skills sharp, and to get to compete against a higher level of competition than they were necessarily seeing in the minors. In the early 1990s, MLB decided that they wanted a more controlled environment for some of the top prospects, so they created the AFL. Each of the six teams is stocked with seven players each from five MLB teams (yes, that adds up to 35 per team, and I never have figured out how they decide playing time). The coac