East Coast Baseball Fever

In early June, the blood started boiling in anticipation of summer, and I started to experience what a certain ESPN.com sports writer refers to as the “Tingly Ball Feeling.” I was getting a little stir-crazy in Boston and needed to get out and travel around this great country of ours. It was time for a road trip.

The road trip was actually planned on a much grander scale back during high school baseball practice, ten or so years ago. Anyone who ever played baseball knows how there is an awful lot of time to kill, especially while doing endless soft toss drills and hitting off the tee. So we made up a continuous array of diversions such as the Name Game and the Word Game to pass the time during practice and especially on seemingly interminable bus rides to places like Dartmouth and Fall River. We also used to fantasize about the ultimate road trip, a summer-long expedition worthy of great road trippers of the past such as Magellan, Jack Kerouac, or Seann William Scott. On this road trip, we would drive all over the country (and take a swing into Canada), attending a game at every major league ballpark along the way.

It was an endeavor that, at sixteen, we all assumed would definitely happen some day. However, reality being what it is, the dream of the cross-country baseball road trip has died down somewhat over the past decade. But it’s not dead. Far from it. In fact, two weeks ago, in the spirit of my old high school baseball buddies, I set off on a miniature version of the Great Ballpark Road Trip, East Coast-style.

Seeing how pretty much everyone I know works for a living except for me, and those that have vacation time want to spend it with their significant others and not eating hot dogs and peanuts with me in a random ballpark 500 miles away, I was having a hard time recruiting partners for the trip. I had one automatic partner lined up, a guy named Curley who was so dedicated to the road tripping culture that one summer in college, he drove from his parents’ house in Westchester County, NY, to Foxboro Stadium at midnight for no other reason that he realized he had never been there and wanted to change that fact. So Curley was an easy choice. When no one else surfaced with any interest in the East Coast baseball road trip, we decided it would be a two-man affair. Think of it as a modern-day Lewis and Clark, without the coonskin caps and with fewer skirmishes with Native Americans.

The road trip started out just as any great venture, with a trip to the casino. On my way to New York to meet up with Curley, I stopped at Foxwoods to play a couple hours of poker. Unable to get on a $4/$8 table, I settled for a $2/$4 table and was frustrated for a few hours until I decided to walk after my next hand. Pulling an 8-9 of spades, I called the blinds and then flopped three 9’s, and then got a fourth 9 on the turn. Surprisingly, people were betting into me and re-raising me, and when I flipped over my four of a kind, I calmly raked in about a $90 pot and walked away, leaving me at plus-$50 for the trip. A good start; it would at least pay for a couple of gallons of gas.

I met Curley and his house and we proceeded to the first leg of the road trip, Shea Stadium. It was the second time I’d been to Shea, and I am happy to report that the stadium is just as gross and worthless as it was the first time I went there. This was easily the worst ballpark of the four we ended up going to. The upper-tier sightlines are terrible; you need to have Superman’s eyesight to be able to make out the numbers on the batter’s jersey. The atmosphere around the park is awful as well; it doesn’t help when you have planes flying over every four or five minutes. Just a painfully poor ballpark experience. The good news was that, being a promotion night, the tickets only cost $6 each, we got to see an extra inning game, and the Mets lost.

The next day we drove down to Philadelphia and checked into the Holiday Inn at City Line Avenue. Lovely city, that Philly. One positive about Philly is that the new ballpark, Citizens Bank Park, is beautiful. This was probably my favorite of the four. Except for its unfortunate location in the “Sports Complex” amid an ocean of concrete parking lots and all the other major Philly stadiums, CBP was a great baseball experience. The upper-tier seats were great, there is easy access to concession stands and bathrooms, and there is a pretty cool outfield plaza section with a Phillies Hall of Fame wall and a number of eateries, including the famous Geno’s cheesesteaks (of which I am still torn between them and Pat’s as to which is better).

My favorite part of the Philly leg of the trip was that as we left the stadium after a Phillies walk-off home run against the Brewers, we noticed an inordinate number of fans honking their horns and whooping it up in the parking lots. It seemed like they were celebrating this random June game over the Brewers as if they just won the World Series. Then we saw them: an army of purple-clad fans coming from the direction of the Spectrum and the First Union Center. Since we would be stuck in traffic anyway, Curley and I decided to walk over there to figure out what was going on. What we saw was priceless.

Apparently, we were lucky enough to be in Philly on the night that the Philadelphia Phantoms minor league hockey team clinched the Calder Cup. The pandemonium that we had seen was not for the Phillies’ walk-off homer, but rather for the local minor league team winning the AHL title. The whole incident solidified my belief that Philadelphia fans are easily the craziest fan base on the planet, way ahead of Boston or New York or any other city. Could you picture fans in any other big-league city getting so fired up over a minor-league title? The Philly fans were genuinely psyched, all decked out in “Purple Reign” Phantoms gear. So what did we do? We joined the party. We danced around, high-fived people, made calls on our cell phone and had other crazed fans join us in chanting and yelling. I wonder if they could tell we were posers? They seemed too fired up with Calder Cup fever to notice. Gotta love Philly.

Next it was on to our nation’s capital, and the newest addition to the Major League Baseball landscape, the Washington Expos/Nationals, who are inexplicably in first place. Somehow, Curley and I landed a penthouse hotel room at the Alexandria Hilton with a panoramic view of D.C. that reminded me of the view from the Jedi Council room on Coruscant. Or if that image doesn’t work for you, think of Ferris Bueller leaning on the window on the top floor of the Sears Tower, only not quite as high. Either way, we had a fantastic view.

Over the winter I was skeptical when I heard about baseball returning to D.C. Although I figured playing home games at Rogers Park in Brighton would be an upgrade over Le Stade Olympique, I was convinced that there had to be a reason why two previous attempts to have the Senators by the shores of the Potomac resulted in one mass exodus to Minnesota and another to Texas. I thought the population of DC is too transient and distracted by other things; too many government types who aren’t from the Beltway area and who probably have allegiances to other teams anyway. All the Texans that W imported to the District would probably just as soon play chess with Ted Kennedy than turn their backs on the Rangers or Astros. Plus, the Orioles, with their still-gorgeous jewel of a ballpark 40 miles away, would pummel them in attendance.

I have to admit I was wrong about the Nationals, at least in the short term. Although their ballpark is in the running for worst in MLB (Shea and Tropicana Field are battling for that nod as well), their fans were great, especially for a franchise in its inaugural season whose sense of history (besides the obligatory Andre Dawson, Terry Francona, and Randy Johnson in a late-80’s mullet memories) is serving as a farm club to the big market teams for the past fifteen years. (Thanks for Pedro, by the way.) RFK Stadium is a joke, so it’s good to hear the Nats have a new ballpark on the way for ‘08. Sitting in the upper deck at RFK felt like being an ant perched on the inside of a giant jelly doughnut. That’s the best way I can describe it; the place has an ugliness to it that is hard to put into words. Still, the fans were tremendously supportive. Four out of five fans had on some kind of Nats apparel, from the hats with the hideous swirling “W” to the red Jose Guillen jerseys. (I myself couldn’t resist the urge and purchased a Nats t-shirt with “ARMAS 36” on the back. Once again, thanks for Pedro.)

After the weekend at two Nationals games we headed up to Baltimore. If you’ve never been to Camden Yards and you’re a baseball fan, I would highly recommend it for a road trip. Most of the time when there’s a Sox series, Red Sox Nation takes over the Inner Harbor by storm; it is definitely an experience that all Sox fans should have at some point.

My impression of Baltimore is that it is a dingy, grubby, rather boring town with a beautiful six or seven blocks of waterfront and a killer baseball stadium. Hey, a lot of cities are worse. (See: Houston, TX, Detroit, MI, and Jacksonwafflehouse, FL, coincidentally the current three consecutive Super Bowl sites.) But Camden Yards is great. The sightlines are incredible, the Eutaw St. area is one of the best urban spaces I’ve ever seen in America, and there is plenty of space to roam around and check out some of the plaques commemorating some of the longest home runs in Camden history (including one I saw by Troy O’Leary, and the famous one that Ken Griffey, Jr. hit off the warehouse in the 1993 Home Run Derby). Ticket prices aren’t too bad either; we were lucky enough to be there on a promotion night where we got four tickets, four hats, and a program for $44. That’s not even enough to get you one grandstand ticket on Yawkey Way.

I love Fenway, and I still think the Fenway Experience (minus the leg room difficulties) is the best in the game. However, if you can’t get tickets or if you want to travel around a little bit, the baseball road trip is the way to go. For any Stoolies (or even non-Stoolies, though BSR staff is definitely not invited) who are interested, we are making preliminary plans for a Midwest roadie next year. I am thinking Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee. (We’re always open for suggestions, though.) Even if I might never be able to fulfill my high school dream of the Great Cross Country Ballpark Tour, the least I can do is honor its memory by tackling parts of it at a time.