Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

                To my surprise, the minor league stadiums feel more alike on the inside than the major league stadiums do. They’re pretty much the same size, with 26 of 30 AAA parks seating between 9,000 and 12,000, while MLB stadium capacities range from the Dodgers’ 56,000 to Cleveland’s 34,600. OK, if you take the extremes of the AAA parks, the range goes from 7000 to 16,000, but there seem to be more that are nearly the same size. Except for Tacoma’s Cheney Stadium (1960), the oldest AAA park was built in 1988. Fenway opened in 1912, Wrigley in 1914, and three more between 1962 and 1973. Wrigley has ivy on the outfield walls, Fenway has the Green Monster, Minute Maid has the Crawford boxes, Chase has a swimming pool, Coors has evergreens over the center field wall, and it seems like there’s something unique about the outfield fence in almost every one. The outfields of the minor league parks generally have...

    Truist Park, in suburban Atlanta, is one of those parks I have mixed feelings about.               The good:               This is a remarkably easy park to get to, for an out-of-towner. There are a lot of hotels within a mile, and even though the hotels are on the opposite side of Interstate-75, there’s a nice sidewalk on the bridge over the freeway, and even lots of benches along the bridge, if a half-mile walk is too long.               There are a lot of restaurants (mostly chain restaurants, but decent chains, like Pappadeaux Cajun and Pappasito’s Mexican), also within walking distance of the hotels. They’re in the other direction, but there are plenty of sidewalks, and you can walk around easily.            ...

                  This is the second venue that reminds us of the effects of hurricanes on baseball, so maybe it’s appropriate that we had our first rain delay of this trip (and only our third overall).               Hurricane Helene In the last week of the 2024 regular season, the Diamondbacks, Mets, and Braves were competing for the last two of the three wild-card spots in the post-season. Moreover, the Mets and Braves had three more games to play against each other, scheduled for Atlanta on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But Hurricane Helene was bearing down on Atalanta, and the Mets and Braves were playing gamesmanship with schedule. They’d had a game in Atlanta rained out in the first two weeks of the season, and could have made in up when both teams had an off-day, But the Mets didn’t want to have to fly into Atlanta for a single g...