I remember all of our windows rolled down and the warm, fresh April wind tossing our hair somewhere on the stretch of Jersey Turnpike between Philadelphia and New York City. After months of planning and prepping, raising funds and solving logistics, departure day had finally arrived and we were diving head first into an adventure we would never forget - over the next 30 days, we would drive 18,000 miles across 38 states to see a game in all 30 Major League ballparks.
One of the questions we were and still are asked more than anything else is this - "How?"
I wish I could say, "simple." But I can't.
In all honesty, the driving was the easy part - the 1,000+ mile legs between some ballparks, the sleepless nights in the back of the Vanbino or in the parking lot of a rest stop... yeah, that was all cake. The hard part, the part that took three times longer than the trip itself, was the planning and therein lies the key to the trip's success.
In early January 2009, I sat down in front of my computer and opened up two windows in my internet browser. In one window was the MLB schedule, in the other, Google Maps. The trick here was to find home games between ballparks that were reachable by car in under a day. I checked the schedule, mapped the mileage... checked the schedule, mapped the mileage… checked the schedule, mapped the mileage… and so on and on, back and forth, back and forth...
At this point in the early stages of planning (when I must admit I had no intentions of actually doing a trip like this, I was just intrigued by the notion of if it was possible or not) I was trying to schedule, literally, ONE ballpark EVERY day for 30 STRAIGHT days. Nothing was working because I'd eventually work myself into a corner and the remaining ballparks were just too far to drive to.
By now, days had passed. Trial and error had yielded zero luck. Maybe a trip like this wasn’t possible… But I had been looking at a baseball map for a while now and I started seeing the ballparks not as stand-alone structures but as groups arranged geographically. There are the ones in the Northeast - Fenway, Yankee, Citi, Citizens Bank, Camden Yards and Nationals Park that are all within a six hours drive of each other.
My eyes scanned the map and headed west.
There's the Great Lakes region where you can hit Miller Park, Comerica, both parks in Chicago and Progressive in Cleveland all within a seven hours drive. (Also, Dyersville, Iowa, where the Field of Dreams is, is just a 3-hour ride from Milwaukee).
My eyes lowered southward.
There's the Show Me Stretch, where Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City and Busch Stadium in St. Louis are separated by just a four-hour stretch of I-70 across Missouri.
I realized that all those parks, if home games are timed appropriately, could be reached not only in successive days but two could even be seen on the SAME day, like, possibly, in Chicago or New York.
And then you have the other cities with two parks - the Dodgers and Angels play just 30 minutes away from each other down the Orange Freeway; likewise, the Giants and A's play just 40 minutes away across the Bay Bridge. And that's where I started, in San Fran and Oakland because I saw that on May 13, the Giants were playing at 1:05 and the A's at 7:05. We could easily make those two games in one day.
So I chalked it up.
What about the other cities with two parks? On the weekend of April 17, the Yankees and Mets were both home, but all their game times were the same. However, I saw that the Phillies were home, too, and they had a 7:05 game on Saturday while the Mets had a 1:35 game. Those parks are just two hours apart... we can do it.
So I chalked it up.
I continued like this the rest of the way, finding more doubleheader days in Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Baltimore and DC, set them as tent poles in our schedule, then after I maxed out my doubleheader days I filled in the remaining days with ones that were dedicated just to driving or to visiting the other ballparks that aren't clustered (like Safeco, like Coors, like Dolphin). Those doubleheader days turned out to be the key that made the whole trip work. They freed up full days where we could just drive the long, cross-country distances (that turned out to be our longest drives between Miami and Houston, Houston and LA, Seattle and San Diego).
So that's how it worked. To this day, four baseball seasons later, the whole thing still feels as surreal as it felt than when we were out on the road doing it. What’s funny is that, despite us having snapped over 5,000 pictures, captured over 300 hours of video and having kept a journal, it’s the feeling of being out there on a baseball road trip that is my fondest memory. It’s a feeling that’s impossible to describe through words and pictures but for all of you out there who have taken to the road to catch a ballgame or two, you know what I mean.
Oh, and one more thing I should tell you - always have an emergency gallon of gas somewhere on board, especially if you're driving through the middle of Wyoming at 2:30 in the morning....
Good luck on all your baseball adventures,
Travis
30ballparks30days.com