An early start to baseball season

February 4, 2024 / 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

Continue reading →

Take me out to 5 ballgames

November 2, 2018November 1, 2018 / Greg / Leave a comment

I aim to take full advantage of my solo trips. When I’m traveling alone, I make the kind of plans that I couldn’t get away with if I was traveling with others. My favourite solo trip plan, something I’ve been doing the past few years in an annual tradition of sorts, is to camp out in a big American city for 4-5 days, and spend most of that in a ballpark nerding out over baseball. The last few years I’ve pulled this off in Baltimore, Minneapolis and Chicago. This year… Philadelphia.

Five nights, five baseball games. After arriving in Philly via a red-eye and fortified by a brief nap at my downtown hotel, I hopped on the Broadway subway line and made my way out for night one at Citizens Bank Park in south Philadelphia. I treated myself to what would be the best seat of my visit a mere ten rows off the field. Here’s the first pitch from that glorious seat.

Continue reading →

Root, root, root for the home team

August 8, 2015 / Greg / 5 Comments

How’s this for a laid back Sunday on the west coast – sleep in, go for a long beach walk (with a delicious mid-stroll stop for a feed of crab), then an early evening baseball game… pretty good vacation day eh? I’m always excited to visit a new stadium, and Petco Park in San Diego is one of the nicest I’ve been to. Like usual, we arrived early to wander around, but unfortunately, there was no batting practice to watch. As you can see by my face, that didn’t faze me too much.

Like most of the newer ballparks, Petco doesn’t really have a bad seat anywhere. At least on our exploring, we didn’t come across one. Deep down the first base line, these seats would be ok by me: