We had four trips planned: a short one that I was calling the Piedmont trip; yet another Appalachian trip; a Great Plains route; and then the oft-plotted northern California–Nevada finale. I had visions of inviting everyone we’d ever seen a game with to the big closing day, today. Of course, that’s not how things turned out. More reflections over the jump.
In fairness, things might not have turned out quite this way this year anyway—a rainout in Modesto, say, or a Trash Panda fire could have ruined the plan, too—but we didn’t even have a fighting chance because there was no minor-league season at all, plus no major-league games that we would have been allowed to attend. Being able to actually see the games wasn’t ever a major factor before now—but it wasn’t a nonexistent one either.
Throughout our travels, I did have a persistent but admittedly pretty irrational concern that Rob would kill me we would show up in some far-flung small town and for whatever reason we would not be able to get tickets for the game we were there to see. What would be worse than going to, say, Batavia, New York, to see a game, I figured, would be going to Batavia and not see a game—and thus have to go to Batavia again, despite having by then (presumably) seen all the other teams within several hours' drive. I was locked out of a St. Paul Saints game once in 2005 or so, but I lived across town, so the pain wasn’t half as exquisite as it would have been if I had driven across the Dakotas to get there.
Hey, dummy, I hear you say, just buy tickets in advance; what’s the big deal? And indeed, for many years, that is what I advocated. With some regularity—and quite reasonably—Rob would point out that, over the hundreds of games we were going to, this was costing us a fair amount in “convenience fees,” and for nothing: usually there were plenty of seats available, and often enough there was a complete embarrassment of them. Looking at you, Jackson, Tennessee, just for starters.
And so we gradually but all too erratically fell away from the buy-first norm, leading to some awkward moments and one financial penalty that time we bought some expensive Fourth of July tickets at the gate, only to remember that Rob did buy those in advance already.
There were also the other odd times where we would look online a little bit in advance of a game and see that there were practically no tickets left. We’d snatch up a couple, only to arrive at the field to find not just a lot of season-ticket-holder no-shows but entire sections that were completely unoccupied. The Tacoma Rainiers spring to mind. I never could get a good explanation for why that was. (By the by, is it just me or does “Tacoma Rainier” sound like the stage name of a stripper in Alaska? And while we’re on the subject, sort of, is Daytona the female form of Dayton?) In all of these cases, the only close call I can think of is Vancouver, which was genuinely crowded.
My fear was always a bit irrational, and over time I began to realize that it was at odds with a deeper feeling, which is that I didn’t actually want to finish this. What is so bad about going back to Batavia, anyway? That’s partly why I was happy to slow things down in recent years, canceling trips to northern California twice. In a weird way, this illustrates the maxim that the perfect is the enemy of the good: the trips are good; perfecting the list wouldn’t have necessarily ended the trips, but it would have marked the end of some phase.
On the other hand, I think we kind of did want to finish this phase. When we went places purely out of obligation (hello, Princeton, West Virginia!), sometimes we were pleasantly surprised and had good times—but sometimes not. Still, even those were part of parcel of the project we started so idly so long ago.
The country we set out to visit feels like a different place now. Maybe next year we can have some semblance of the old place back, along with a little real baseball. Who’s ready for Reno?
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