Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

  Tonight we’re at Smith’s Ballpark in Salt Lake City. A prime reason to do this one-off trip now (more about logistics later) is that, like Oakland Coliseum, Smith’s Ballpark is in its last year qualifying for our list, because the Salt Lake City Bees will be moving to a new stadium next year. So there is lots of talk in Salt Lake City about building new ballparks (yes, plural), and there are all sorts of interesting forces at work. Smith’s Ballpark: Smith’s Ballpark has the largest seating capacity of the 10-team Pacific Coast League , 14,500, and second largest in all of AAA baseball. It’s also the second oldest, built in 1994. Tacoma’s Cheney Stadium, built in 1960, wins easily as the oldest stadium in AAA baseball. There are four stadiums in the other AAA league, the International League , that are older than Smith’s, but the oldest was built in 1988 (that’s Buffalo’s Sahlen Field, which also happens to be the only AAA stadium with a larger seating capacity). In other wo...

    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 include...