The Grand Tour
Baseball is unique among the major American sports in that the playing surface is not uniform from stadium to stadium. I suspect that this is an artifact from the early days of the sport, when stadiums were built into city blocks and the field was crammed in however it could be fit to the available space. Whatever the reason, the end result is that the thirty Major League Baseball stadiums have some fairly significant differences in architecture. The end results is that over the years I've met many people who have made an effort to get to all the ballparks, but I've never met anyone who tried to do the same for the NFL, NBA or NHL. ESPN some years past even ranked all the ballparks. While that rating itself is long out of date, with seven of the parks listed now defunct and one scheduled for replacement and several others renamed, the larger point is that nobody is writing rankings of the stadiums for other sports. Baseball is unique in this.
As long-time readers know, I have spent much of the last decade trying to get to as many ballparks as possible. Sometimes I hit a bunch of parks at once, other times I pick off one or two at a time.
I don't actually recall how I came to start the tour. From the time I was born until the time I started college I went to precisely one Major League Baseball game at The Metrodome in 1990 1992. Then I came to Cleveland for college in 1996. The Indians were at the height of their 1990s success so getting tickets was nigh impossible. My event lists don't run back that far, but I probably went to three or four games at most Jacobs Field. While on co-op in 1998 I caught two Reds games at Riverfront Stadium and I caught a few more in the following years. Throw in a few minor league games and that was it until 2004.
In 2004 I was saving my vacation for a trip to Australia. For no reason that I can specifically remember, I proposed to my friend Mike and my sister (then not yet tigerlily_blue) that we meet in Chicago for a game at Wrigley Field. Some quick perusing schedule found the only weekend of the year when the Cubs, White Sox and Brewers were all home at the same time, which led to the first multi-park stadium tour. My park count doubled to six in one weekend. Later that year I tacked on two more, and the tour was off. Subsequent years saw slow progress until I started the big tours in 2012.
Now I've been to 20 of the 30 active parks and another five that have met the wrecking ball. I'm already booked for three more in 2015 and I'm thinking hard about how best to do the others.
The biggest question that people ask me about the parks is "which one do you like best?" That seems like a good question, so I'm going to try to answer it by going through the parks in the order I visited them. Maybe I'll get a solid answer, maybe it'll just be an exercise in nostalgia, but either way it should fill my Sunday posts for a while.
Coming up first: The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.
As long-time readers know, I have spent much of the last decade trying to get to as many ballparks as possible. Sometimes I hit a bunch of parks at once, other times I pick off one or two at a time.
I don't actually recall how I came to start the tour. From the time I was born until the time I started college I went to precisely one Major League Baseball game at The Metrodome in 1990 1992. Then I came to Cleveland for college in 1996. The Indians were at the height of their 1990s success so getting tickets was nigh impossible. My event lists don't run back that far, but I probably went to three or four games at most Jacobs Field. While on co-op in 1998 I caught two Reds games at Riverfront Stadium and I caught a few more in the following years. Throw in a few minor league games and that was it until 2004.
In 2004 I was saving my vacation for a trip to Australia. For no reason that I can specifically remember, I proposed to my friend Mike and my sister (then not yet tigerlily_blue) that we meet in Chicago for a game at Wrigley Field. Some quick perusing schedule found the only weekend of the year when the Cubs, White Sox and Brewers were all home at the same time, which led to the first multi-park stadium tour. My park count doubled to six in one weekend. Later that year I tacked on two more, and the tour was off. Subsequent years saw slow progress until I started the big tours in 2012.
Now I've been to 20 of the 30 active parks and another five that have met the wrecking ball. I'm already booked for three more in 2015 and I'm thinking hard about how best to do the others.
The biggest question that people ask me about the parks is "which one do you like best?" That seems like a good question, so I'm going to try to answer it by going through the parks in the order I visited them. Maybe I'll get a solid answer, maybe it'll just be an exercise in nostalgia, but either way it should fill my Sunday posts for a while.
Coming up first: The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.