Random thoughts about our SBT (Super Baseball Trip) . . .

I am getting very excited about our SBT and reading everything I can get my hands on, both online and in—Gasp!—print, about baseball and the fields and the cities and and and . . . . I’m creating a baseball folder which has grown to two folders (Tickets and Reservations in one and Baseball Schedules in the other) and will probably grow to a ring binder (good thing we’re traveling by motorhome!) before long.

In the Tickets and Reservations folder I have our opening day tickets to the Diamondbacks vs Giants, April 6 and reservations at the Marriott in PHX so we don’t have to drive 2 hours home late at night; tickets to the Lincoln Center performance of Bugs Bunny at the Symphony with the NY Philharmonic (we saw a previous version in Tucson, courtesy of the conductor); reservations at the Marriott in Toronto which is actually part of the ballpark. You can reserve a room that overlooks the game but what fun is it to watch the game by ourselves? Actually being there, in the ballpark with thousands of other fans, is more than half the fun!

In the Baseball Schedules folder I have my spreadsheet of games and times; a map showing our route; a continually growing list of “stuff to do around the parks”; a scoresheet from www.xtrabasehit.blogspot.com that is offered free by the writer; and a list of ballparks and their addresses, the team that plays there, the surface they play on, the capacity, the date it opened, and the distance to the centerfield fence (why I wanted that particular stat escapes me at the moment!).

Some of my resources so far, and I’m getting more and more every day are:

A book, The Ultimate Baseball Road Trip: A Fan's Guide To Major League Stadiums, available at http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Baseball-Road-Trip-Stadiums/dp/0762773405/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1424365943&sr=1-2

 

A map: Professor Pathfinders Baseball Travel Map. I first wanted to get this direct from the publisher, but they wanted $2.00 “handling and insurance plus $14.77 shipping for a total of an astonishing $25.76—on an $8.99 item! So off to good old amazon.com where I got it for more initial money ($9.99) but only $3.99 shipping.

And tons online: 

http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/article1.htm, Field Trip of Dreams, the planning and itinerary of a trip he took a few years back (2003) quite similar to ours, just later in the year (to minimize rainouts—hmmm!) and starting in Puerto Rico (the Expos, now the Nationals) rather than Phoenix and he did it in 49 days, not 84.

http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/seatingcharts.htm has lots of information, including seating charts of all the MLB parks,; very helpful when we go to buy tickets.

https://mlbballparkpassport.com/shop/ a place to buy a baseball “passport” souvenir to have stamped at each park. Not sure I want to do this. I do want some kind of souvenir from each park, but do I really have to spend $59.95 for that souvenir? Probably not.

We’re going to need tickets and I don’t want to buy them ahead of time (except for opening day!) so there are a bunch of places to get tickets: http://www.onlineseats.com/, www.ticketmonster.com/ (where we got our opening day tickets), www.stubhub.com, and probably a lot more, including the teams themselves for games that aren’t very popular. But, for Fenway and Wrigley we may have to use scalpers at the game. It could be fun to bargain!

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/02/09/which-ballparks-have-wi-fi/ which told me which ballparks have free Wi-Fi (all but eight: Orioles, Tigers, Brewers, Yankees [!], Pirates, Mariners [another !], Cardinals, and Rangers).

http://mlbreports.com/183in2015/travel-advice/ with lots of interesting stuff including a guy who is going to 222 games in 183 days. And you thought OUR trip was a lot!

http://www.ballparkchasers.com/ with lots of info about the parks. I’m getting lots of great info from this site and the facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/ballparkchasers/. 

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/schedule/?partnerId=as_mlb_20140908_31228416&tcid=mm_mlb_schedule#date=04/05/2015 where I got the schedule that I have been planning from. 

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/05/baseball_road_trip_how_to_visit_all_30_mlb_stadiums_in_30_days.html where you can input your start game and it will map out 30 ballparks in 30 days! Whew! For example, I could start at the Diamondbacks on April 11 and end up at the Dodgers 29 days and 7 hours (and 19,402 miles) later. Or the 22 of August at the Diamondbacks, ending at the Padres 29 days, 12 hours and 20,345 miles later. Our trip will take longer in time but not be too much shorter in mileage (approximately 17,000 miles).

You get the idea! Planning is more than half the fun!

Sweet Caroline and other esoteric facts about baseball parks…

We went on a tour of the Diamondbacks’ home, AKA Chase Field, yesterday. Yes it was a sales promotion and yes, we bought tickets, six games, including the Giants in mid-August (Kathy and Ken, you could join us!) after we have recovered from our lengthy SBT (Super Baseball Trip).

It really was a kick to go onto a “real” major league field and see just HOW FAR it is to the window that Mark “steroids” McGuire hit a ball through! And to see the players’ clubhouse. As do most (all?) baseball clubs, the Diamondbacks give their players everything and the visiting team—NOTHING! The D’backs have a beautiful batting cage (indoors—remember, in the summer it’s 110 in the shade here!). The visitors have a room. That’s it, a room to hit in.

In one of the hallways they had an auto tire protruding from the wall. That’s so the players can vent their frustrations on the tire and not on the pipes on the wall, the fixtures in the bathroom, or anything else that will cost a lot of money to fix (which is what they used to do)!

The trip to Phoenix was really just a shakedown cruise for our refurbished motorhome. And we did find a few things that need tweaking. And a lot of stuff that is just plain old and working adequately or some not working very well at all. So we are thinking about a newer motorhome. Our Residency is 18 years old and has about 60,000 miles on it so it is getting a bit long in the tooth. But the minor annoyances are getting to us. The drawers that don’t want to open easily. The switches that don’t want to turn on easily. The satellite antenna that was working in the morning but isn’t working in the afternoon. The showerhead that leaks just a little bit. Nothing earthshaking but for a lengthy period of daily use might start turning into major flaws. So we’re looking.

And why do the Fenway fans sing “Sweet Caroline” in the middle of the 8^th inning? Because, “On Opening Night 2010, Mr. Diamond made a surprise appearance in the Fens in the middle of the eighth. With a microphone in hand, a Red Sox hat on his head, and the words “Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn” scrawled across his blue blazer, he led the sing-along. Then, the Red Sox finished off a 9 – 7 win over the [hated!] Yankees.” (From The Ultimate Baseball Road Trip).

The very tentative baseball schedule...

If you want to see my Baseball Trip schedule spreadsheet, go here. It will be a miracle if this works out, but this is the starting plan. Green are the home games, yellow are the games we plan on attending.

And all the team addresses are here.

We're gearing up for the Baseball Trip...

Our motorhome has been at the RV Hospital, AKA La Mesa RV for over six weeks getting its mechanical parts all in order. Pretty hard to do considering it is about 18 years old! It’s a 1997 Residency by Thor. Thor doesn’t really exist anymore. They went bankrupt I think and have resurrected themselves but they don’t seem to acknowledge our Residency any more. Oh well, I don’t think the motorhome’s feelings have been hurt.

We have added a tow bar to the Jeep so we’ll have our “toad” with us when we embark on our latest adventure. That was about a $4000 addition with the auto-braking option I insisted on. Of course I think there is a law that we HAVE to have an auto-braking thingy (that’s a technical term that you non-motorhomers probably wouldn’t understand) on the car when it’s towed.

There’s lots more than that to do to get ready. We fueled it this morning, it took 74 gallons ($132, not bad!) so it was running on fumes! It has an 80 gallon tank and gets about 6 miles to the gallon so it probably would have run out in not too many miles!

We’re taking it back to La Mesa because the sink has a major leak. Considering they were supposed to fix that and did add a new faucet, that should be a freebie. We need new windshield wipers. I spent about 3 hours cleaning the refrigerator yesterday. This morning I’ll clean and dust and vacuum—after all, it’s been almost exactly 5 years since we drove it! Because we’ve had other trips to do, we stopped the insurance and the registration about 4 years ago. Arizona’s pretty good, all we had to do was pay for this past year and $1 for a 3-day temporary permit.

I have to make a checklist for the Jeep to put it in the mode to be towed. We got a demo from the Jeep dealer yesterday just as a double check. This car isn’t even as simple as the 02Trailblazer let alone our previous Jeep. That one was a three or four step process; this is about eight steps. Luckily we both love checklists. We have checklists of our checklists!

Next week we’re going to PHX for a VIP tour of the baseball park and we’ll take the motorhome as a shakedown “cruise” before we start the Baseball Trip. I think we’re going to need it after five years! The motorhome seems to run fine but I’m learning that finding RV parks isn’t going to be as easy as it used to be.

Used to be there was a paper (THICK!) book (Woodalls) listing all the RV parks in the US. There were also smaller books that covered just the eastern or western US but it apparently doesn’t exist anymore. To find an RV park now in, for instance, PHX, I did a google search on “rv parks in phoenix.” That gave me 5, 790,000 hits. OK, not so simple anymore! Top of the list: RV Camping and RV Parks –Good Sam Club. Filled in the box with Arizona and Phoenix and I got 54 results with a park in Kelso, WA, at the top of the list (?)! Moving down the list I found #2 was Desert Shadows RV Resort in Phoenix with lots of info, but no prices. For that I had to go to the website. Expensive to my mind, $45.90 + tax. To find out if they have room, I have to call or make an online reservation. But if I make the reservation and can’t use it for whatever reason, there is a cancellation fee! So unless I call them, I don’t know if they have room. So back to the search.

But they all are like that. And very few have maps so I don’t know if Goodyear is anywhere near the baseball stadium in Phoenix or Mesa or Tempe. Very frustrating and time consuming! I thought computers and the internet would make life easier! It’s going to be really frustrating on our trip unless I can find a more efficient way to research RV parks! And a lot more expensive that we thought! We can get a Marriott hotel room for $100+/- most of the time. Several of the RV parks in the PHX area are $70+!

Ah well, in a hundred years we’ll look back at this and laugh!