baseball

Non-stop fun in Cincinnati

/ Greg / Leave a comment

I love my annual baseball trip. Last summer, with eleven stadiums and cities left for me to visit to have seen a major league game everywhere baseball is played, I decided to head to Cincinnati. It was to have been my baseball trip in 2020 on account of a ridiculously cheap plane ticket I had found. I had done just enough looking at the city before the world shut down to know that there would be plenty to keep me interested for a few days there. Cincinnati may not strike you as a “must go” destination, but as a baseball fan, there was plenty to like. A downtown stadium I could walk to, six games in five days on account of one double-header, and some fan apathy due to a number of down years for their team that made my tickets pretty inexpensive.

Cincinnati Reds game at Great American Ballpark
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Seattle two ways

/ Greg / Leave a comment

They were simpler times in so many ways. Crossing the border into the USA wasn’t something that made my stomach churn like it did for a trip I just took to Washington. And while I’m debating with myself how frequently I’ll be back down to the USA for pleasure over the next little while, there was no such hesitation on my last two visits to Seattle. Seattle feels a lot like Vancouver and I’ve been there enough that I have a good sense of the city and a few favourite haunts by now.

The first trip, my wife made the journey there with me while I was attending a conference, and it was fun to both see the city through her eyes and to also experience some new things with her. A tradition we have on all of our trips is some form of Yahtzee championship. We spent a couple of hours at TeKu Tavern + Cafe and while I enjoyed a couple of delicious pints of Washington state beer, I demolished my wife in our Yahtzee matches. She was terribly disappointed at how the games went.

Teku Tavern + Cafe in Seattle
Teku Tavern + Cafe in Seattle
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Cleveland really does rock!

/ Greg / Leave a comment

In my pursuit of seeing a baseball game in every major league stadium, I had paired Cleveland with Detroit on the same trip last summer. A couple of hours after picking up a rental car on the outskirts of Detroit I was in Cleveland, a city I’d otherwise never get to visit. It is a really great city with a picturesque downtown and beautiful architecture. I very quickly got a warm feeling about Cleveland and enjoyed the couple of days I spent there. Some of that had to do with Progressive Field, their beautiful ballpark. On my journeys so far, this stadium is up there with those in San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis and Baltimore as one of my favourites.

Cleveland Guardians game
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Finding the charm in Detroit

/ Greg / 1 Comment

Somewhere along the way of being a baseball fan and someone who loves to travel I had visited enough ballparks that it seemed like an interesting quest to watch a game in each major league city’s stadium. While I’ve knocked off most of the sexy places (Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, New York….) I’m left with some locations that I otherwise may not actively choose to visit. Last summer, the intersection of my work schedule, the ballparks remaining and the baseball schedule pushed me toward a trip to Detroit and then onto Cleveland.

Detroit Tigers game
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An early start to baseball season

/ Greg / 2 Comments

As I get itchy for the start of the 2024 baseball season, I have been thinking back to the jump I got on this past 2023 baseball season by finally taking a long-desired trip to Arizona for a week of spring training baseball. As a lifelong baseball nerd (with a significant pause to recover from the loss of my Montreal Expos in the early 2000s) I had long thought about spending a week of lazy days under the spring sun in Florida or Arizona, going from park to park to get a close up view of the game I love. With my move to Saskatchewan eight years ago, Arizona became a more obvious choice for this trip and last year at long last I made it a reality.

Cubs-Brewers game at Sloan Park in Mesa, AZ
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The tradition continues, kind of…

/ Greg / Leave a comment

One of my favourite travel traditions is taking an annual self-indulgent, solo trip to satisfy my inner baseball nerd. Over the years, that now has me sitting at visiting 16 of the 30 major league ballparks with my brain constantly working on the logistics to tick off the final 14. The pandemic years put a halt to my progress that I’m glad is changing this year as I have plans to visit Detroit and Cleveland later this summer.

Last summer, looking to scratch the itch of live baseball, I decided to take the relatively short trip to Vancouver for a few nights of minor league baseball. The Vancouver Canadians, an affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays, play out of the cozy and idyllic Nat Bailey Stadium. For the low cost of $25 you can have the best seat in the house behind home plate. A beautiful Vancouver summer evening, cold local craft beers and the crack of the bat….. couldn’t be better!

Vancouver Canadians game
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Back from Arizona… finally

/ Greg / Leave a comment

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, there was no way I wasn’t going to be head over heels for finally making it to Spring Training in Arizona. Thanks to the pandemic, my baseball nerd dreams of lounging in the Arizona sun watching baseball got shelved in 2020 and it took until last week to finally make that trip. It was a trip that, truthfully, I’ve wanted to take for a much longer time.

The hook for the trip was spring training baseball – small stadiums, lazy afternoons and getting a close up view of the game I love so much. This year, as scheduling luck would have it, the World Baseball Classic was happening with a round of games in downtown Phoenix at the Diamondbacks stadium. I got the schedules for all of those games, a map, and got to work planning out the kind of visit my baseball loving heart has always dreamed of.

At Rockies-Padres in Scottsdale, AZ
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Ballgame and a ballpark

/ Greg / 1 Comment

With my next sports-related trip south of the border looking to be a very, very long time away in the future, I’m thinking back fondly on a couple of my last sports experiences during a visit to Phoenix late last fall. On account of attending a work-related conference, it gave me an opportunity for my first ever visit to the city, and the timing gave me a chance to take in a Phoenix Suns basketball game.

Just a couple of short blocks away from my downtown hotel, the Talking Stick Resort Arena, designed specifically for basketball, was cozy, with the seats all around the arena right on top of the court. While I didn’t pony up for lower level seats, I spent some time watching the pre-game warm-ups from down there.

Phoenix Suns game

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Playoff baseball, Japan style

/ Greg / 2 Comments

While I have been to lots and lots of baseball games in my life, before this past October, I had never had a chance to see a playoff game in person. My livelong hope was to see my first playoff baseball game in Montreal to see my Expos chase a World Series title, but I was only 7 years old in 1981, and in 1994…. well, we all know how that ended. When I booked my plane tickets to Japan, I knew that I’d land in Tokyo about the same time as their baseball playoffs would be getting underway. I started watching their league standings on a weekly basis to track the likelihood I could catch a game while I was in the country. With a whole lot of good fortune, the Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants finished first and that meant my stay in Tokyo would coincide with playoff games.

How to sum up my first playoff baseball game? Same sport, same rules, but an experience unlike anything I’ve seen before.

I was giddy walking up to the Tokyo Dome, difficult ticket to secure in hand.

Tokyo Dome

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