American Family Field, Milwaukee (The highs and lows of the third season of trips)
Some of the best and worst of our 2025 travels:
Best name for a ballpark food kiosk: Béisbowl, in Miami. It’s a double play on words, since 1) they sell bowls (with quinoa or something like that as a base), and 2) the bowls have a distinct Latin flavor to them, and “baseball” translates as “béisbol” in Spanish.
Best ballpark food (tie): Béisbowl (the food is the other thing to like about the place, which is why we ate there both times we went to the stadium), and the Philly cheesesteaks in Philadelphia (we ate one or two in town, and the ballpark ones were just as good).
Most disappointing ballpark food: Loonie Dogs in Toronto. On Tuesday nights, they sell “loonie dogs” for $1 Canadian (the Canadian dollar coin is known as a “loonie” because of the picture of the loon on it), and keep a count of the number they sell on the scoreboard. The night we were there, it was more than 60,000, roughly two per attendee. I love the promotion. However, the dogs themselves were pretty bland – much as I hate to say it, I liked the Dodger dogs better.
Best-looking stadium from the inside: Toronto’s Rogers Centre with the roof open and the CN Tower rising above the outfield. Runner-up Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, with the view from the top rows behind home plate looking into downtown Philly.
Most pleasant surprise in an MLB stadium: Going to two games in Philadelphia was fun, and the crowd was big and loud, but not nearly as obnoxious as their reputation.
Least pleasant surprise in an MLB stadium: After admiring Rogers Centre one night, the roof was closed because of rain the next night, and they apparently cranked up the loudspeaker system to make up for it. It felt very, very loud, and soulless.
Best customer service: Allentown (Lehigh Valley). We buy our tickets online, but somehow, it doesn’t work as well for AAA games as it does for MLB games, even though it’s all part of the same system. So as we were going up to the gate, the app wanted us to login again and then change passwords, and it ended up taking something like 90 minutes for the verification code to show up. But when we told the person at the gate, a supervisor nearby went over to the box office, found our names in the list of tickets (we knew where we were sitting), and came back with paper tickets. Maybe that’s why Lehigh Valley has the best attendance in the minors.
Most pleasant surprise at a AAA stadium: Bruce the Bat Dog, in Rochester, a charismatic and talented golden retriever, who made an appearance in the big leagues the next day.
Favorite “I saw them when” moment in the minors: Not Bruce the Bat Dog, not even a player, but umpire Jen Pawol, who we saw umpiring in AAA a few weeks before she became the first woman to umpire in the major leagues. She made a brief appearance as a fill-in, and went back to AAA, but she’s good – she’ll be back.
Most bizarre story: The story of the Tampa Bay Rays’ quest for a stadium, complete with rumors about them selling pieces of a roof they don’t own and having dead bodies underneath the parking lot.
Sorriest excuse for a major league team fanbase (tie): Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays. We went to two home games for each, and the total attendance for the four games was less than the single-game attendance for most of the other MLB games we went to.
Minor league park that felt a lot like a major league park: Sahlen Field in Buffalo, which was built to be expandable into a major league stadium if they got a team. They didn’t, but the stadium didn’t go unnoticed – the architects got the next two contracts to design MLB parks, and those two, Camden Yards in Baltimore and Jacobs (now Progressive) Field in Cleveland set the standard for the current generation of stadiums.
Major league game in a park that felt like a minor league or spring training stadium: George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. That’s because it IS a spring training stadium, and the spring training stadium of the Yankees, the Rays’ biggest rivals, no less. It’s all part of the bizarre Tampa Bay stadium story (see above).
Favorite hotel: The Saint Kate in Milwaukee, an “arts” hotel whose website made me think it might be way too cute for its own good. But on the last day, when I found myself considering whether to wait for another elevator because I liked its artwork better, I knew that I’d been hooked.
Least favorite hotel: A Fairfield Inn in Philadelphia, where the room was so small there was only room for one chair. To put it another way, we concluded there simply wasn’t enough space for two people to be awake in the room at the same time.
Stadium that we both enjoyed, and couldn’t explain why: CoolRay Field in Lawrenceville, Georgia (Atlanta’s AAA team). Their attendance isn’t great, but it just had a vibe that we both liked. Plus, I loved the idea of the block of condos for sale just over the outfield wall.
Worst experience getting to/from the ballpark: Philadelphia. On the first day, we took Lyft. The first driver that accepted our ride to the park dropped us, and then the price doubled for the next driver. Getting home from the park, they had a nice area for rideshares, and nice people working there, but it was crowded. The first two Lyft drivers who signed up for us dropped us when they got near the stadium and saw the crowd; the third tried hard, but the gates to the rideshare area had been locked (with people still waiting for rides!); the fourth had been ferrying people from the stadium for a couple of hours, so knew the unofficial location to tell us to go to. The second day, we took the subway, which was far better, although we had a 15-minute delay on the way back because they didn’t have enough drivers scheduled (for a stadium that consistently gets 40,000 people).
Best experience getting to/from the ballpark (tie): Atlanta and Toronto, where we were able to stay at hotels within walking distance.
Rain delays: Two, both at Atlanta
Rainouts: One, at Syracuse (it will now be part of a New York/Boston trip)
And finally, lessons learned about pronunciation:
1) Toronto is pronounced with only one “t”, “Tuh-RON-o.”
2) Milwaukee is pronounced without an “l.” Actually, when the locals get going, they come close to losing the “i” as well, so that it becomes a two-syllable word, “MWAU-kee”
Best stadium to experience the feel of a game, unless you want to actually see it
Milwaukee. On this trip, we sat in three very different locations, and I found the viewing worse than I expected in two of them.
The first night, we sat 15 rows behind the 3rd base dugout. I expected that to be a great view, but instead, I found that I had to move around enough to stay limber, and keep my posture good, if I wanted to see. I think the lower deck is flatter than most, which would reduce the height of the steps and make them easier to traverse. But there was a person a couple of inches taller than me in the row below me, between me and home plate, and I couldn’t see over his head, and had to keep moving back and forth to see around him. Next to him, between me and third base, was a woman who was shorter than I, but I had to make sure I sat up straight, or I couldn’t see the base over her head.
The second night, we sat in an all-you-can-eat section beyond the right-center field fence. Now, I understand that teams put all-you-can-eat sections in places where no one would buy a ticket otherwise, so I didn’t expect a great view. But they had it set up with 15 or 20 chairs at the rail (good seats, for the location), and put the other 30 or 40 people at tables behind them, with not much height difference, so at the tables, you might be able to see the infield, but couldn’t see anything of the field within a couple of hundred feet of you. We saw a single chair at the rail, so my loving wife let me take it, and she sat at one of the tables and we texted about the game. But several people in the group moved to some unoccupied bleacher seats nearby so that they could see.
Today, we sat in another all-you-can-eat section, this one in the third deck (of four) in the left field corner. They’re not great seats, but at least they had a bigger difference in height between rows, so you could see the game from the back. Unfortunately, it was an afternoon game on a sunny day, and the first two rows of that corner are in direct sunlight, so after everyone scrambled to get seats in the front, by the third or fourth inning almost everyone had retreated into the shade. It would have been OK for a night game, or with the roof closed.
Statistics of the quest for 2025
We’ve now seen 19 MLB and 18 AAA parks, after three years of a five-year quest. This year we picked up six of each. In other words, we’re on target. 2026 will include a three-week fly/drive through the Midwest, a short trip to Nashville and Memphis, a trip that will include only two teams, Seattle and Tacoma, but will include lots of visiting with friends and family, and probably a quick trip to St. Paul.
We should be able to finish in 2027, although we’ll have to decide some things like whether to go see the Rays in Tropicana Field (we saw the A’s play in Oakland Coliseum, so we’d like to be able to have a first-hand opinion in the ongoing debate about which is the worst MLB stadium of the last 25 years) and whether to see Salt Lake City’s new ballpark. And so far, no team that we’ve seen has changed cities except for the A’s, and they moved into a ballpark where we’d seen a AAA game, so we don’t feel like another trip to Sacramento. Plus, it’s our quest, so we make the rules.
Between now and the 2026 season, we’ve got two other types of baseball we’ll go to. First, we’ve got tickets to the Savannah Bananas, a quirky operation where they play by different (and fun) rules, like the one where the batter is out if a fan catches a foul ball on the fly. Then, our hometown, Tucson, is getting the first Mexican winter league team north of the border, so we’ll be going to their games to see what it’s like.
The last game of our quest for 2025: Arizona Diamondbacks 6, Milwaukee Brewers 4
After I went and bragged on the Brewers, they lost the last two games of the series with the Diamondbacks. Overall, it was a tight, well-played series. Each team won twice, and no game had a margin of more than two runs.
The best single play of the game was by Milwaukee center fielder Blake Perkins, who leaped and reached over the top of the wall to catch what would have been a home run by Arizona’s Tyler Locklear.
The story of the game, though, was Taylor Rashi of the Diamondbacks, who came in to pitch in the 7th inning with a two-run lead. For Rashi, a few months shy of his 30th birthday, it was his major league debut, after pitching in the minors for most of a decade. He got through the 7th and 8th without allowing a run, then took a two-run lead into the 9th inning. The Brewers got two runners on base with two outs. Christian Yelich, the Brewers best hitter, didn’t start today, but they brought him in to pinch-hit. This meant that every pitch Rashi threw to Yelich could be the last pitch of the game with either team winning – if Yelich hits home run, the Brewers win, if he makes an out, the Diamondbacks win. Yelich and Rashi battled until the count was three balls and two strikes, with the dramatic level rising by the pitch. Then Yelich grounded out, so the Diamondbacks won.
I don’t know how long Taylor Rashi’s major league career will last. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the standoff with Yelich turns out to be the highlight of his baseball career.
That might have been the best single moment of the 2025 trips.
Of course you know I love baseball....you've heard me say, " it's God ordained sport"...so it's fun to follow your blog and know how much friends love the game. Keep up the good work
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