The first three weeks of June in 2024 have gotten me back to one of my bucket list items and that is to visit all 30 current major league baseball stadiums. Someone asked me two nights ago how this quest got started. Well, like a lot of things in life it didn't start out as a "bucket list" item per se. It evolved from my love of this game. My "first' ballpark would be Shea Stadium. It was geographically the closest to my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut. My estimate would be that my first game was there in 1965 at the age of 3. I have a ticket stub from a game from that season and I'm linking it to my first game ever. Shea is important to me for a couple of reasons. Not only was it the second home of my favorite baseball team but I found out an interesting fact when I was about 12 years old. My aunt Bea had collected every Met yearbook to that point and while flipping through the pages I saw a black & white photo of the groundbreaking ceremony for what was going to be called Flushing Meadow Park. The date of the photo was October 28, 1961. I was born just across the border in Stamford probably 10 hours later. So that was "a sign" to myself about what team I should follow. That and my aunt would have not tolerated any other team, period.
So it's a case of realizing that I had seen games in a good number of ballparks before I'd thought about "completing the set" so to speak. The second and now earliest park is Fenway in Boston. My brother Rudy took me to a game in 1978. I still have the yearbook and program from that day. My number was at 4 when I met my future wife Bryn in 1984. I told her early on that the best she could do with my heart was be in third place behind my mother and baseball. Somehow she decided that just being on the medal stand would be great with her. And so the ballparks began to add up. We married in 1991 and the ballpark number went up fairly quickly. We saw games together at 17 current parks and 8 that are no longer. Her breathing issues later in life forced her to leave the games to myself. Before her passing in April 2022 she told me that she wanted me to "complete the set" for us and that she would be with me in any case.
When 2024 began I had just five more parks to visit. After perusing the schedule for months I laid out a plan to "run the table" this year. The schedule for the following year is now released before the end of the current season, which was not the way it was done until the past few years. I set my start point to be a one day out-and-back to the Bronx, NY to see the home team play, ironically, my former employers the Minnesota Twins. Here's my assessment of Yankee Stadium.
The Yankees are all business. They barely acknowledge that there may be fans under the age of 18 in the crowd. There's no mascot (although there was one named Dandy back in the 70's- google it), there are no dancers on top of the dugout, no dot races, no racing snacks, hardware store items, no masked sprinters, no random meat sprints, no giant dead presidents and no gargantuan former players. The closest thing they have to that is the grounds crew who during the second field drag and base change drop their rakes and dance to "YMCA" while it plays on the sound system. People dig that and I kinda enjoyed it myself. The soon-to-be-intoxicated revelers in the right field stand shout out the starting lineup for the local nine in the top of the first inning. I rather enjoyed that choreographed fan behavior. They had one trivia game where they asked fans to name the last 16 players to wear a particular uniform number. I thought that to be clever as well. There was the obligatory "find the ball under the hat" game which probably started as the shell game on the streets of New York. But the bottom line is they are "all bidness" at the place on 161st Street. They don't do the ridiculous City Connect jerseys because they don't have to. Their jerseys are pinstriped. "Crisp and clean with no caffeine" even though the logo on their caps does not match the logo on their uniforms. But I left the park having enjoyed the game and the stadium. I didn't wish to wear anything offensive like one of my Mets jerseys so I opted for my Roy Hobbs New York Knights jersey from "The Natural". Better safe than sorry, right? On the Sun Country flight back home I began thinking out the next trip. Just 12 days away before heading off to Dallas AND Atlanta. For the scoop on THAT trip tune in tomorrow. (Or later today if you're so inclined. I'm just glad you read it this far.)
I'm just sayin'
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