Ballpark Collecting Time is Here, NOW.
It’s never too late to start something that will take the rest of your life to accomplish.
I wanna hit every MLB ballpark. Lots of people go on or have completed this quest. It’s absurd, really, how many of them I’ve not been to. I get jealous when I see tweets like this from friend and colleague Chris Tannehill:
Cheers to Ballpark #20 @PetcoPark @BallastPoint pic.twitter.com/XU07fPV21R
— Chris Tannehill (@ChrisTannehill) June 30, 2018
20! The man is barely in his mid-30’s. His ballpark list is incredibly impressive, like a Bert Blyleven curve. Plus, he seems to have had very pure, solid fan experiences at the parks, with beers and snacks and friends and such. I’ve so often been working; upstairs with snooty, carefully detached media, unable to hang out where the real people are and fully feel the building.
“Other than hanging with family, the ballpark visits are probably my favorite thing,” says Tannehill. “Obviously I love to travel but don’t have the time or money to see the world; seeing ballparks allows me to explore the country.”
You’d think I, a baseball romantic bred into this passion essentially from the womb, would have been one of the many who collect ballparks. I am a man whose pronunciation of “#baahhhhseballl” was so lampooned on the radio that it turned itself from insult to compliment almost daily. A Twitter account was born just to keep the ridicule flowing.
And yet, my ballpark list feels meek and inadequate, like a Doug Jones fastball.
Last Friday night, amid accompanying my wife on a work trip to Dallas (I have some free time these days), we decided to hit the stadium in Arlington. An insurance company I’d never heard of has the rights, so “Globe Life” isn’t just what all us Earthlings are living every day, it’s the home of the Texas Rangers.
The teams were bad. Hell, one of them was the White Sox. Dylan Covey got absolutely destroyed, the Sox played like the clowns Reynaldo Lopez accused them of being a couple weeks ago, and it was 10-0 Rangers by the 3rd. But hey, Matt Davidson pitched in the 8th!
Secret weapon. pic.twitter.com/i6Xdqjbr2e
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) June 30, 2018
That was awesome….the man showed a legit curve and splitter. He said afterwards it was a dream come true.
StubHub got us great seats behind the plate for under a hundred bucks, and we stayed all night until the postgame fireworks, accompanied by a well-crafted Beatles medley. This was my kind of night. Adrian Beltre didn’t do anything special, but I’m still glad I saw him. And maybe it was the weird 17% alcohol drinks in mini-baseball shaped cans, but I enjoyed watching the teams have to go through the motions of playing out the game because they must. It reminded me of times I have sung at terrible, corporate parties. The band knows the gig absolutely sucks by the middle of the first set….the crowd barely pays attention, we are sonic wallpaper. But you play your best. You finish the night with professionalism. It’s a job.
This column appears in full on the Score’s website, here.
BUT…here, you can comment, let’s get a thread going. What’s your ballpark count at right now? What traditions do you do at each new park? Talk to me.
Homegirl wore the Rangers hat, just so her White Sox loathing was clear. True Story.
I love this! A college friend and I are at 13! I buy a hat that I like and will actually wear at each stadium and a stadium-style(d) magnet for my work cabinet Baasssseeeebaaaaalllllll
My wife and I are stuck on 10. We set a blistering pace the first couple of years of marriage, but now that we have a little one we had to put that on hold for a while.
We always get there before the gates open and walk around the outside of the stadium then walk both levels of the inside once BP is over. I always get a hat for the home team (yes even in St. Louis but I wore it backwards all game so there was no picture of my face and the STL logo) and a panoramic shot of where we sit. When I’m old I want my man cave to be lined with the hats and panoramic shots. I keep a hand written list of stadiums we’ve visited and ones remaining under my keyboard at work for daydreaming purposes.
Have to get a taste of the local food specialty and local beer. My wife always gets a hotdog with grilled onions no matter how many times I tell her it’ll taste the same as in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, etc.
My GF kids and I are doing as many minor league and independent league parks as we can do. It’s cheaper and tend to focus on fun more than anything. I love all the crazy team names and logos.
Great article, thanks for sharing. It has been a life long dream to attend all stadiums. I’ve really only have a few traditions, which you’ve covered. I always take a lap in the second or third inning to see how the park is from different places. As a devout craft beer fan, I will get a local-only beer. Chatting with some random fans makes the situation better to get to the soul of the crowd. It’s basssssseeeeeeballll at it’s finest.
For the past few years, I’ve tried to make it to a new stadium a year. The list – Busch Stadium, Target Field, Tropicana Field, PNC Park, Fenway Pawk, Bank One Ballpark, ATT Park, Angel Stadium, Miller Park, GSpot, Wrigley. Great American Ballpark. Removing any fandom, PNC was my favorite (ATT a close second) with Tropicana the worst (no contest, like being at Costco).
All this is inspiring me to make an app to track stadium visits, removing the MLB corporate entity piece. Pure baseball fan app tracking the pictures, sights, sounds and suggestions for new places.
I love this article, and I love visiting ballparks. I agree wholeheartedly with your rule that different parks for the same team count individually. I have been lucky enough to pull off the double in Chicago (AL), Milwaukee, Minnesota, Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Texas. My visit to Kaufman Stadium in August will be my 33rd ballpark visited. I’m so fortunate to have visited 16 parks with my son. We just went to Fenway in June, the second visit for me and the first for him. We hadn’t visited a new park together since 2013. Man, it was great talking baseball with him at a new place, again.
I agree with Chris and Matt that you should get there early and walk around the entire park. I like to get a local beer too, and I find that it’s very easy to strike up a conversation with fellow fans. Telling them how much you love visiting ballparks is a great conversation starter. I have kept a ballpark diary and ranking that I’ve shared with friends. It’s a great way for me to hold onto the memories.
Wrigley will always be my favorite, and it is probably biased. I also mark down Busch and Miller because of bias. I do think Miller Park is overrated, but I must admit that Busch is pretty nice. Their standing room only opportunities are the best I’ve seen in any park. PNC, without question, is my second favorite park. The view is spectacular, and it reminds of my Wrigley in the sense that it’s the only other stadium that doesn’t have more than two decks. The people and the ushers are very friendly, there. Crossing the Clemente bridge is the best walkup to any park I’ve visited. I could go on and on, but I will end by adding the Metrodome is last in my ranking.