This site describes ballparks to
some extent, but not in tremendous detail. If you want that, Ballparks.com
is easily the best site out there for you. My site talks about
baseball's games, personalities, and events in some detail, but only
games, personalities, and events I was present for. The writing is
admittedly self-centered here, but I think we remember parks not so much
for their amenities and for history we haven't seen, but for what we were seeing and doing there. If you want
a historic look at what has happened through the park's history on
occasions other than when I was there, again, Ballparks.com
is your place, or else a few other good links
(including links to others on quests to get to all the ballparks).
I'm also not terribly big on ranking the
stadiums, but I bet a good number of you, if you email me, will want to
know "Which is your favorite?" Well, if you put a gun to
my head and forced me to rank them, I would make this
list.
Introduction
aka The Genesis and Legend of
the "Erotic Love and Baseball Stadium Tours"
I'd been
to only three ballparks by the summer of 1993, when I decided to spend
the summer driving around the Midwest in my Subaru, attending baseball
games in every ballpark I could. Actually, I'd planned to spend
the summer living in sin with my girlfriend in Pennsylvania, but our
relationship's sudden demise prevented that, and I needed something to
occupy my mind more than staying at home (which, at the time, was
Leesville, Louisiana) would. So I spent a month in the summer of
1993 alternately attending major league games and sleeping on (usually
female) friends' floors. My good friend and long-ago prom date
Jennifer, when she heard of my plans, named this endeavor the Erotic Love and Baseball Stadium Tour. She even made
me a poster listing cities, baseball teams, and women together.
For example: "June 16: Chicago. Chicago Cubs.
Jennifer." I've still got that poster somewhere...this is the
expanded on-line version of the poster. Thanks to Jennifer for
giving me such a catchy name to that tour, and for letting me sleep on
her couch for a couple of nights.
Many things have changed since then--I've gone from being a lonely
single guy barely out of college to a happily married guy on a serious
collision course with middle age, but the tours have not. I have done
many similar tours since, which have taken me all over the country.
Me, in a posed (but typical) moment
at Safeco Field.
Some things I
have learned going to so many stadiums:
Scoring games gets people to talk to me.
Frequently, I am assumed to be the resident expert on the Brewers or
Angels or whatever because I happen to be scoring the game. I
get questions like "How many walks for Hilly Hathaway?",
which I can answer--which makes me the Section Information
Source. Also, however, I get questions like "When is Andy Van Slyke due to come off the DL?", which I cannot answer.
When scoring games, include the player's first initial
as well as his last name, as shown here, in my actual scorebook in my
actual lap during an actual game:
Eight years later, I'll be damned if I
remember who some random "Johnson," "Martinez," or
"Williams" is. Adding the initial will make it simple
enough to look them up in the Baseball Encyclopedia if ever I
suddenly need to know the pinch-hitter whom I saw ground to short in the
eighth inning some night in June 1993.
If you're going to buy single seats to meaningless
games way in advance, sometimes you can get really, really lucky, even
at parks that sell out all the time. I sat in the front row
behind home plate at PacBell Park
in August 2000. I sat in the
second row behind home plate at the Metrodome
in the first game of the 1993 Tour, as well as at The
Ballpark in Arlington in 2004.
It's easier to catch a ball, batted or thrown, in
batting practice than you might think. You have to be aggressive
if you're competing with adults. Don't compete with kids for
batting practice balls (meaning don't step in front of them; just
catch what comes to you).
Single guys take note: The two best kinds of dates to take to a baseball
game, at least for my ego, are: (1) An incredibly intelligent woman who
doesn't know too much about baseball, but is willing to learn.
(This puts me in position of being the wise and sage teacher, which I admit I like.) (2)
An incredibly intelligent woman who is a big fan, and wows the studly men around her with her knowledge while hanging onto my
arm. Yeah, that's a little possessive, but whatever.
Worst three things
a date can do at a baseball
game: 1. Read a book. 2. Say and do
nothing. 3. Fake interest.
The song that teams play after "Take Me Out To
The Ballgame" after the 7th inning stretch is one of the most
critical factors in establishing local color. They play
"Mountain Music" at Coors
Field.
"Louie
Louie" at Safeco. "Roll
Out The Barrel" at Miller
Park.
In
the realm of the incongruous, "Thank God I'm A Country Boy"
is the song at Camden Yards
(and, if I recall, was also played during the fifth inning at Tiger
Stadium). (This changed for a while after the September 11, 2001 attacks. I liked the way
stadiums played patriotic songs for a while, and especially how
the players and umpires paused to look at the flag.)
People everywhere, as a rule, are very nice.
When people talk to me (because I'm scoring the game), they find out
what I'm doing and that I'm from out of town, and without fail,
they'll tell me stories about the stadium and the team only locals
will know. Nicest people so far were in Kansas
City,
Florida,
and San Juan. Special mention goes to the incredibly kind and
giving stranger sitting next to me at Dodger Stadium.
The people at Yankee Stadium
might be an exception to
the above rule.
The joy of sports, and especially baseball, for me
mostly derives from witnessing a moment in countless simultaneous
stories. The game itself is a story, with conflict, characters,
climax, and a beginning, middle, and end. Simultaneously, a game
is a part of a story called a season, and the greater stories of the
history of the game and the history of our culture. Plus, each
player and manager is enacting his own story. I love hearing and telling
those stories, and especially the rich interplay between them.
Beyond that, for reasons I cannot explain, baseball
encourages people (or maybe it's just me) to reflect on where they are in their own
stories. I think it may be because there's time to think at the
game. I think this is why memories of baseball games are inevitably couched in "That was the summer when..." or
"That was the game I saw with...". I have no evidence
to back me on this, but I don't think this happens as intensely in other
sports. So the multiple stories of the game, season, and players
are superimposed over our own stories every time we go to the ballpark.
This is what I've tried to capture in these pieces.
