You might be wondering why I would interrupt a perfectly good August for such an exhausting run. The answer is right in the middle: four ballgames and three ballparks.
Like thousands of people around North America (and, as I’ve discovered, around the world), I’ve started to chase ballparks.
But why? Why put 4,000 kilometres on a rental car? (It needed a brake job before I left and really needs one now.)
Why spend a decent amount of money travelling through the Midwest instead of going someplace exotic for likely half the coin?
And why am I on this journey to watch a game in all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums?
This last part is what I’m trying to figure out.
Let’s start at the beginning.
My earliest sporting memory is of a baseball game — Oct. 15, 1988, Game 1 of the World Series. Kirk Gibson steps up to bat and pinch hits himself into the history books with an improbable home run.
I know none of this as a six-year-old, but I know I’m enthralled. My Los Angeles Dodgers fandom is traced to the exact moment.
But I barely know what Dodger Stadium is at this moment, let alone where the other teams play. So that’s not it.
I can’t tell you when my first baseball game was. It was at the SkyDome in Toronto (now called Rogers Centre), that’s for certain. It might have been against Milwaukee, but could have easily been against Texas or Boston or Detroit. Maybe Cleveland or the Yankees? It was the early 1990s and there was a McDonald’s at the stadium. It was heaven on Earth.
That moment isn’t it, either, because, clearly, why would I ever want to go anywhere else?
Nor is it the first time I went to a different stadium. With Boston facing the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup playoffs, I grabbed a pair of tickets to Game 4 in Detroit to cheer on my beloved Bruins.
The night before, my travelling companion texted me to let me know the Tigers had a day game that afternoon against the White Sox. Our departure time just got moved up by about five hours.
But this quest didn’t start April 24, 2014. Nor did it July 24, 2018 (Los Angeles at Philadelphia) or July 12, 2019 (Los Angeles at Boston).
As much as I’m counting those four parks in my tallies, I think I can chalk it all up to a night in Pittsburgh earlier this year.
Once again, my Dodgers were in town. Thanks to the kindness of a good friend and her husband, I was shown remarkable hospitality at PNC Park.
At this game, I had the great fortune of being able to be on the field to watch batting practice. I was 10 to 20 feet away from some of the greatest players in the game today: the incredible Mookie Betts, powerhouse Freddie Freeman (whose parents were both Canadian) and, of course, first-ballot Hall of Famer and arguably the best left-handed pitcher of his generation, Clayton Kershaw.
Once batting practice wrapped up, I began to walk around the stadium, taking in the sights, the sounds, and the smells around me.
There, it hit me, that in all the stadiums I had previously visited, there was something in each one that brought a smile to my face.
In Detroit, it was the stark contrast between this “new” stadium and the re-christened Rogers Centre, which had become less like heaven and more like an echo-y concrete tomb in the 20-plus years since my first visit.
Philadelphia smelled the way I dreamed a ballpark should smell.
And Fenway, well, it’s a dump, but it’s a historic dump and the centre of a neighbourhood and city that lives and dies with its teams.
As George Will said: “Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.”
And that game is found in 30 unique locations, with their own foibles, follies and faults that make them the greatest places on Earth for about three hours a day, 82 times a year.
If the five I’ve seen so far can bring me such joy merely by being there at the same time I am, it stands to reason that the other 25 would do the same.
“I need to see them all,” I thought.
Almost as soon as I got home from Pittsburgh in the spring, I started looking for routes. What had started as another trip to see the Dodgers (in Cleveland this time), turned into four games in three cities – Toronto at Cincinnati (twice), Seattle at the White Sox, and Minnesota at Milwaukee – while trying to make my way up to Thunder Bay to collect my partner from her abbreviated summer vacation and get back to southern Ontario before the school year starts.
It was a whirlwind. But I was right. There was something in each spot.
In Cincinnati, I walked around the stadium a lot in both games finding there isn’t a bad place to watch a game in that park, which, like Pittsburgh, sits adjacent to a river, but sadly without the view PNC has.
On the south side of Chicago, I took advantage of one of the better general admission offerings, sitting in centre field with a comfortable chair I could lean in, while resting my pints on a ledge in front.
With Milwaukee, I found parallels to Toronto, but with a greater appreciation of the team’s history and the history of the sport in the city.
It was over too soon, but I’m already planning next year’s journey.
Will it be the west coast? Will it be along the eastern seaboard? Maybe I should wait until after we get back from our trip to spring training in March.
The world has seemed to be coming apart at the seams the last few years, so many of us are doing what we can to keep the lights on and have some sense of order. Part of that for me is finding things I love and making sure they remain part of my life for as long as they possibly can.
Concerts are obviously a big part of that, but so are ballgames.
And it doesn’t matter if I’m with my partner, my friends or on my own, each game is a chance to turn the world off for a couple of hours and just focus on what’s directly in front of me.
Which is why two days after getting off the road, I’m on my way to the city for another Blue Jays game.
After all, there’s no place like home plate, either.
Patrick Bales is a freelancer reporter whose work often appears on BarrieToday.
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