Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

In one of the best baseball movies ever made, “Field of Dreams,” there is an iconic line that “If you build it, they will come.” It turns out that not just in the movies, but in real life, if you build a primitive baseball field in a cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa, they will come, as we found out . However, if you build a state-of-the-art MLB stadium in Florida, they will not. Today we went to our second game in Tampa, last week we went to two at the Marlins’ LoanDepot Park. The total attendance for those four games was less than 35,000. Eight of the 30 major league teams are averaging more than 35,000 per game this year . Put simply, people don’t go to major league baseball games in Florida. The last time either the Marlins or Rays finished above 27 th (out of 30) in MLB attendance was 2012, when the Marlins finished 18 th . And that comes with an asterisk, since they had a new stadium that year, which typically gives a large boost to attendance for at least a year. The games...

This is our hurricane trip. For one thing, we are going to Florida and Georgia in April and early May, rather than August or September, because, well, we’ve never been in a hurricane, and don’t see any need to start now. But there are a couple of hurricanes that will be on our minds this trip. After Hurricane Helene devastated the Diamondbacks’ playoff hopes (more about that next week), not to mention the city of Asheville, N.C., and assorted other places during the last week of the regular season in 2024, Hurricane Milton came along about two weeks later and hit St. Petersburg, taking the top off the Rays’ Tropicana Field, cutting the bottom out from under a deal to build a new stadium in St. Pete, and setting in motion a chain of events that hasn’t come close to playing out yet. That’s why we went to a game tonight with the logo of one team on the banners surrounding the stadium, and that of one of their archrivals on the seats at the end of every aisle (see the picture). T...

    It’s always a challenge to figure out how to get to and from the stadium for a game. The “to” part isn’t too bad, but the “from”, with all those people leaving at the same time, can be a real adventure.   In an automobile-oriented nation like ours, driving is the obvious way to go. In suburban minor league parks (Round Rock, Sugar Land), that works quite well, but at major league parks, particularly those with good attendance and lots of people driving, it can be a real mess. Dodger Stadium is the worst example I’ve ever seen, with the acres of parking lots leading into very few exits, but driving is really the only option there (except rideshare – more on that later). At many parks there are parking garages, but you can get a year’s worth of your carbon monoxide dose just getting out of the garage. What about public transit ? I don’t remember it being an option at any of the AAA parks we’ve been to, but we’ve successfully taken public transit to games in San F...