Month: June 2026

Baseball Trip 2026 – Day 3 – All You Can Eat and the St. Louis Arch

Post author By Jason Winston
Post date June 22, 2026
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Wearing our Negro Leagues jerseys to the game in Busch Stadium

The 9-9-9 Experiment

A significant amount of the planning for this sunny Thursday in St. Louis revolved around part of the ticket purchase I had made for the game that day. Namely, we would be sitting in the All You Can Eat section in the upper left field bleachers at Busch Stadium and seeing how much of the Cardinals’ included fare we could (never mind should) pack away. We ate a late dinner the night before – though that was hardly the plan. By the time we left the book event, it was closing in on 10 pm and all the restaurants we could find in the vicinity were closed or closing by then. We wound up getting pizza and wings, which was at least a good bit of ballast to hold us over until the AYCE festivities began. No need to pay for the not-included hotel breakfast buffet!

Inside Busch Stadium — The view from our upper left-field bleacher seats at Busch Stadium

Let’s start off, though, by talking about the price of these tickets. $39. No, that’s not the convenience fee. That’s not 78% of parking (as it would be at Dodger Stadium). That’s the whole ticket price. And it includes all the hot dogs, bratwurst, popcorn, chicken tenders, fries, nachos, peanuts, ice cream and fountain drinks you can knock down. Possibly even a couple more items I’ve forgotten. I once sat in the AYCE seats at Dodger Stadium and found the food pretty disappointing. Tiny drink cups that did little on a hot day. Only basic condiments for hot dogs. Not much else, as I recall. I read a couple reviews of the Busch Stadium offerings in advance and had a much more optimistic outlook on what we were going to get. And, let’s be honest, anything you get for $39 – which included a seat to the game, mind you! – is gravy. Or ketchup, I suppose.

With the hot dogs covered and beer plentiful and relatively inexpensive at a ballpark named for it, Daniel decided this was a good time to find out if he could complete a 9-9-9 challenge. As in 9 beers and 9 hot dogs in 9 innings. He set a good early pace thanks to finding a place that sold half-price beers before the game started, so he was well stocked to begin the pursuit of, uh, glory?

Reader, I’m going to cut to the chase and leave out all the bad hot dog puns. He stayed on target for about four innings but petered out around the 6th inning with somewhere between 5 and 6 of each down the chute. But you know even the 23-year-old body is subject to certain limitations, and he was really feeling the effects of the booze, food and sun. I could tell he really was quitting the challenge when he gave away an unopened beer to someone in the neighboring seats.

Personally, I went for the bratwurst instead of hot dogs and was perfectly content with two of them. Plus some nachos, peanuts and cold lemonade and water. Oh, and one ice cream. I’d guess if you added up the cost of those items at a standard stadium concession stand, you’d well exceed $39. Plus, you know, we also got to see a ballgame. From the front row of the section, no less.

So, oh yeah, there was a game, too. The Pittsburgh Pirates were in town to face the hometown Cardinals, and I was excited to see some of the talent on the field. Pittsburgh’s wunderkind young shortstop Konnor Griffin had been called up a few weeks earlier and was in the lineup, as was electric center fielder O’Neil Cruz (we were fortunate in our timing, as both got hurt within a week or two). We also saw the Cardinals’ smooth-fielding rookie second baseman J.J. Wetherholt, who also got off to a productive start to the season as a leadoff hitter, and the imposing right fielder Jordan Walker, who was among the NL’s best hitters to start the season. Plus the Cardinals’ starting pitcher was a very familiar face, and head of flowing red hair, longtime Dodger Dustin May.

The second batter of the game, Brandon Lowe of the Pirates, hit a ball into the corner below our seats, and our angle limited our view of the play. Lowe appeared to hit an inside-the-park home run after the ball hit the wall in left field and bounced far away from the left fielder. I could see the home-plate umpire waving a finger in a circle, signaling the ball was a home run, but Lowe kept running as if the ball were in play. Only later did the league officially rule the play a homer of the outside-the-park variety.

Statues outside Busch Stadium — Statues of Hall of Famers outside Busch Stadium

The Pirates roughed May up for four runs in 5 ⅓ innings and rolled to a 6-2 victory. Both Griffin and Cruz doubled, so we got to see plenty of excitement. Busch Stadium is also a great place to see a game, with red seats everywhere you look. Though I’m not usually a bleacher bum when I go to games, being in the front row of the section definitely added a fun element to sitting out in Big Mac Land, so named because Mark McGwire frequently blasted homers up there. Of the two Missouri parks we’d now visited, I’d still favor KC as the more aesthetically pleasing of the two with its fountains and giant crown-capped centerfield scoreboard. No knock on the “new” Busch Stadium, though.

Also, I have to throw out a special mention to the staff at both parks. There must be some sort of Missouri nice that just comes with living there, because everyone we encountered was just great to us. I’d swear there was a Cardinals staff member for every 3 fans, because they were ubiquitous. Great attention to the fan experience at both parks, and I definitely hope to visit them again sometime.

The St. Louis Gateway Arch

The “tarps off” contingent found its way to Busch Stadium

The view from our upper left-field bleacher seats at Busch Stadium

Wearing our Negro Leagues jerseys to the game in Busch Stadium

The view from our upper left-field bleacher seats at Busch Stadium

Outside Busch Stadium

Daniel’s sushi dish arrives in flames (intentionally) in Springfield, Illinois

Statues of Hall of Famers outside Busch Stadium

A wall celebrates the Cardinals’ championship history

St. Louis’ Old Courthouse, adjacent to the Arch

Posing inside atop the Gateway Arch

The view from the Gateway Arch

Inside the Gateway Arch

The view from the Gateway Arch

The view from the Gateway Arch, with Busch Stadium to the left

Inside the Gateway Arch

The view from the Gateway Arch

Getting Our Arch On

The advantage of a day game is that we had time to do something afterwards before beginning our next driving stage to get us heading toward Chicago. This trip didn’t have a lot of leeway, so we were aiming to meet up with the LG community before another day game on Friday. But also, I didn’t necessarily want to drive all the way from St. Louis to Chicago that evening after potentially overeating at the ballpark and touring some of the city. That meant a plan to drive about 190 miles on Thursday night and the final 100 or so to Chicago on Friday morning.

The excessively obvious and certainly hard-to-miss thing to see when one is in downtown St. Louis is the Gateway Arch. Situated just a few (fairly long) blocks from Busch Stadium along the Mississippi River, the Arch is actually in its own (particularly small) national park. And if one is going to visit the Arch, one might as well buy the (excessively expensive) ticket to ride to the top for a chance to enjoy the (exceedingly brief) time allotted to take in the views. But it’s worth doing anyway!

You have to go through TSA-like security to go into the museum and the Arch itself, but fortunately we weren’t trying to pass through with a large suitcase this time. Also, you can keep your water. Tickets to ride to the top assign you to a specific time slot, and you have to squeeze into one of eight tiny pod cabins that hold up to five passengers each. Thankfully, we aren’t claustrophobic. Then you get about 10 minutes at the top, where you can look out the west across St. Louis and the east across the Mississippi into Illinois.

At 630 feet the tallest man-made monument in the U.S., the Arch provides excellent views on what was fortunately a clear sunny day for us. The 10 minutes go by fast, but it’s still enough time to take plenty of photos and enjoy the scenery. Honestly, I’m not sure you’d want to stay up there too much longer. If it’s windy (they built the Arch to sway up to 18 inches), you’d probably be ready to head down sooner, I suspect.

On the Road Again

The most interesting place historically along the road north from St. Louis to Chicago would probably be the state capital, Springfield, and the great many Abraham Lincoln-related sights – his restored birth home, his presidential library, his tomb. It’s also part of historic Route 66. But we drove through in the middle of the evening and didn’t see any of it. Instead, we ate sushi.

AYCE lunch wasn’t quite going to get us through for the rest of the day, but we weren’t hungry enough when we were pulling out of St. Louis. Thanks to Yelp, however, we targeted a place with good reviews a couple hours up the road … and it was surprisingly good. A bit of a quirky place, and potentially a daring choice considering how far we were from an ocean. But it’s 2026 and it didn’t feel especially risky. Daniel even got one roll that arrived on fire, which was a fun bonus.

From there we made our way to the overnight destination I’d selected for exactly one reason … distance. Chenoa, Illinois, is not a remotely interesting place to stay. But for a clean room with a decent shower and something resembling breakfast in the morning, it fit the bill just fine. Daniel was determined to find whatever constituted nightlife in this very snoozy little roadside nook, and he walked down the road to a local bar. The local bar, to be precise.

I watched the final episode of Stephen Colbert’s run on CBS after catching the end of the local news from Peoria. A side note on that news broadcast, if I may. Peoria has a population of about 113,000 as of 2020 and is the largest town in its section of central Illinois. I think it would be generous to say the broader area includes more than a couple hundred thousand residents. Yet, it passes for an urban center in these parts and therefore gets a fully local news broadcast plus a full slate of very local and mostly amateurish commercials. The sports report included video from several high school baseball and softball games and a track meet. I say all this because I live in a city three times as large as Peoria that is just one of dozens of extension cities surrounding Los Angeles and therefore has nothing close to its own local TV channel with that kind of hyper-local coverage. The math would suggest the greater Inland Empire with a few million residents could amply support being its own media market, but for some reason Peoria gets that privilege instead. As do, I suspect quite a lot of other towns we dwarf in size sprinkled across the country. Perspective gained, that’s for sure.

As I prepared to go to sleep, the following text message chain ensued:

Daniel: I’ve been offered to go shoot guns in a field.

Me: Um … maybe not a great plan. We are far from a hospital.

Daniel: This guy is actually a paramedic. So …

Me: And I’d rather not have the trip end here.

You probably guessed that the trip didn’t end that night, nor were any shots fired. I’m such a spoilsport.

Tags baseball, baseball trip, MLB, St. Louis, stadiums and ballparks

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Baseball Trip 2026 – Day 2 – Kansas City to St. Louis

Post author By Jason Winston
Post date June 22, 2026
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Outside sign at the museums — A sign outside the site in Kansas City that houses the Negro Leagues and American Jazz museums

Negro Leagues Museum

Our house out of danger, a bit of sleep secured, and a large free buffet breakfast in our bellies, we checked out of our hotel and embarked on another ambitious vacation day. The plan entailed a morning visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in KC, followed by a roughly 230-mile drive to St. Louis, and a book tour event in the evening.

We arrived at the museum shortly after its 10 am opening and right as a group on a baseball tour disembarked from a bus and made their way in. The museum shares a building with the American Jazz Museum, which would have been worthwhile if we’d had time. I couldn’t take too big a chance on the drive east being fast and easy, though, so we stuck with just one.

I could go on and on about the Negro Leagues museum, and I just might. A few weeks before the trip, I watched our meetup host Molly Knight and former player/ESPN broadcaster Doug Glanville (who, side note, was in my class at Penn though I never met him – it’s a big school!) interview museum president Bob Kendrick on a Substack live for Jackie Robinson Day. (Fun fact: Kendrick shares my birthday. And a shared birthday came up later in the trip, too.)

I knew I couldn’t go to KC without seeing the museum or having some authentic BBQ, and the interview with Kendrick solidified it. He even mentioned that Jackie Robinson’s favorite BBQ in town was a place called Gates, and that was on my initial itinerary for a meal before a local told us Arthur Bryant’s was better. Had we not eaten so much at the hotel, we might have stopped by Gates BBQ after the museum, but we had to miss it this trip. For those who don’t know, Jackie played for the famous Kansas City Monarchs before signing with Brooklyn to make his way to the major leagues.

Satchel Paige exhibit — Part of the exhibit on Satchel Paige at the Negro Leagues museum

In the past year, I had read Joe Posnanski’s book The Soul of Baseball, where he spent months hitting the road with legendary Negro Leagues player and coach Buck O’Neil (made famous in Ken Burns’ PBS Baseball documentary). Buck’s stories illuminated the Negro Leagues experience, and Joe’s long tenure writing for the Kansas City Star ensured that KC was very much central in my notions about the segregated game. So, yeah, I had to make a pilgrimage to the museum. It did not disappoint.

A Negro Leagues museum exhibit on the Latin influence.

I think it’s very much possible to feel somewhat melancholy when reviewing the history of legendary players who never had the chance to showcase their talents in the “white” major leagues. MLB has designated the Negro Leagues as major leagues now, so I want to be careful with terminology, but the reality of segregation was that the best in the game didn’t take the same fields for far too many decades. It’s sad on one level to know that Josh Gibson didn’t get to compete for home run titles with Babe Ruth, and Oscar Charleston wasn’t fighting for batting titles against Rogers Hornsby. What should have been and what was … they rarely come within a mile of each other, alas.

Me and a Satchel statue — Me with a statue of Satchel Paige, whose jersey I would soon purchase in the gift shop

The museum celebrates the history, however, and doesn’t much lament the system that made the Negro Leagues necessary at all. You feel the joy and style that characterized the leagues throughout the museum. The exhibits cover every aspect of Black baseball across several decades, including ownership and league formation, touring teams, the pioneering role of women, the fan experience, and so much more. I’d go back again to spend more time poring over every exhibit thoroughly sometime, and to check out the jazz museum, too.

As foreshadowed, the self-guided museum tour exits into …of course … the gift shop. I’ll acknowledge that I spent a bit of time perusing the museum’s online catalog in advance to get a flavor for what they sold and definitely anticipated making a significant purchase there. We both bought jerseys, and I definitely wanted one that didn’t just have a city name on it that could easily be mistaken for something else. So I went with Satchel Paige’s Kansas City Monarchs jersey, and I couldn’t be happier with the choice. It’s a cream-colored shirt with red sleeves and Monarchs in red across the front and Paige’s number 25 on the back. I’ll be looking for many good excuses to wear it now. Daniel went with the Indianapolis Clowns jersey and matching hat, red with blue sleeves and trim. It looks really great, too.

There were other barnstorming teams besides those made up of Negro Leaguers, including this House of David team with long hair and beards.

An exhibit at the Negro Leagues museum shows players from a 1927 barnstorming trip to Japan. The height disparities from the two teams are hard to miss.

A Negro Leagues museum exhibit on the Latin influence.

One of the Negro Leagues museum exhibits

Our hotel was right next door to this Rawlings building in St. Louis, complete with a giant gold glove on top. So appropriate! (Check the Day 1 post for a Rawlings exhibit in Kansas City celebrating Frank White’s Gold Gloves)

Daniel and I with Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski

Michael Schur (left) and Joe Posnanski smile one more time near the end of the autograph line, and we appreciate them for it.

My new signed copy of Big Fan

Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski and Gerald Early on stage at the book tour event in St. Louis

A sign outside the site in Kansas City that houses the Negro Leagues and American Jazz museums

Me with a statue of Satchel Paige, whose jersey I would soon purchase in the gift shop

Part of the exhibit on Satchel Paige at the Negro Leagues museum

Crossing Missouri

It was time to depart KC after a fulfilling 24 hours, into which we’d packed quite a good bit of activity. We weren’t hungry yet, so we started the drive east to St. Louis figuring we’d find somewhere to stop along the way. Joe Posnanski called it “what I honestly believe to be the most boring four-hour drive in America.” Well, he wrote that the next day, because as it happened he was on a book tour with Michael Schur for their new book Big Fan and happened to be in St. Louis the night we were arriving. Then they were driving west to Kansas City the next day for another tour stop. So our mission was to arrive in St. Louis on time for the book event, and anything else we got to do would be gravy.

Joe wrote in his blog: “I’ve probably made this drive, I don’t know, 40 or 50 times, I would guess. That means I’ve spent roughly 200 hours of my life on I-70, driving by adult store and personal injury lawyer billboards and, so often, telling passengers (especially kids), “We’ll stop for food in Columbia!”

I will dispute Joe’s characterization as to how boring it is, however. I had, just a couple days before, made the drive yet again from Southern California to Las Vegas. It is the very definition of boring, with very little but empty desert and the occasional rising hill for the vast majority of the 200+ miles. I’m used to it and don’t think much about it, but I cannot say there’s anything the least bit inspiring or exciting about it.

On the other hand, Missouri is a beautiful state to cross, sparklingly green with trees all along the route. Yes, the billboards and fireworks stores and the apparently never-ending construction wear you down a bit, but at least there’s something to look at. And we did in fact stop for food in Columbia, home of the University of Missouri and a couple other colleges.

I should squeeze in somewhere that part of what made the ride along I-70 go by fast (aside from my slightly lead foot on the Jeep) was Daniel’s role as trip navigator and musicologist. Since he’s under 25, I had to do all the driving (a silly rental car rule, but I’m not in charge) and he did all the music selecting. We don’t always share the same tastes, but he acquiesced if I found a playlist less than appealing here and there. For a good chunk of this drive in particular, he shared Afroman’s Freedom of Speech album in its entirety. If you aren’t familiar with the background to this album, the short version is that the rapper used the album to get revenge on members of the Ohio sheriff’s department who conducted a raid on his house when he wasn’t home (and found nothing they claimed would be there). One of the officers even took some homemade lemon pound cake (which he recorded a song about, part of a series of events that ended with Afroman winning a civil lawsuit filed by the deputies for defamation). After winning in court, Afroman upped the ante with a full album of funny, often obscene, but quite entertaining songs mocking the department that had made it their mission to ruin him. He had the last laugh, and we had a great time listening to him sing about it all. Not for all audiences, to be sure, so be warned.

Once in Columbia, we had a healthy and delicious lunch at a little artisanal cafe where the menu varies with whatever is fresh and they feel like making. We heard some live music coming from around the neighboring building and wandered over to find an open space with some people milling about and the band blasting out solid cover tunes of 70s and 80s rock. After a few minutes, though, someone came over and told us it was a private event. Apparently, you’re just supposed to know these things? There were no signs or people at the gate, and it was all outside. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

With no further time to dilly-dally in Columbia, we headed the rest of the way to St. Louis and checked into our hotel. Coincidentally, it was right next door to a large business complex with the Rawlings logo on top. As in, one of the major baseball gear manufacturers. I guess they knew we were coming and wanted to ensure the trip theme received ample representation everywhere.

Meeting Great Writers, Vol. I

So you probably caught on by now that I listen to the Poscast, aka the podcast Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur do together, though I am something of a late comer to it in the past couple years. I also have read several of Joe’s books, including the last few – The Baseball 100, Why We Love Baseball and Why We Love Football and now Big Fan.

I remember during my many years working on sports copy desks enjoying Joe’s columns that would come across the sports wire, and then he went to work for The Athletic (where so many great writers I’d both read and worked with wound up) so I got to read him regularly there. His initial versions of the essays that turned into The Baseball 100 came out, I believe, during the Covid year and he was churning one out every day. It was appointment reading for me. Ever since then, I’m firmly in the “big fan” camp and have pre-ordered signed versions of the books (not to mention given them as gifts).

Bringing us to the most recent book, the aforementioned Big Fan, I did indeed pre-order it the day they announced it, which was like 7 months before it actually shipped. Then, while we were planning this trip, the guys unveiled their first week of a book tour … and they just happened to be coming to St. Louis on the same day we’d be arriving. Plus, we didn’t have a game that night either. So, of course I bought two tickets to the book event, which came with … another signed copy of the book! (Don’t tell my dad, but he’s getting it for Father’s Day. In fact, I had them sign his name in it at the tour event.) My copy arrived while I was out of town, and as of this writing I’m about a third of the way through it now and thoroughly enjoying it. I hear the book in their voices even though it’s not an audiobook version, and it’s just delightful.

The tour event was also delightful, with baseball historian and academic Gerald Early (also featured in Ken Burns’ Baseball) leading the conversation and Joe and Mike riffing off each other and telling stories for well over an hour. It was, in many ways, like a live Poscast episode. But it works because both are such funny natural story-tellers. Daniel isn’t a Poscast listener, but he definitely enjoyed the conversation.

(I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but I didn’t know Mike’s work outside of the podcast until more recently. I don’t watch a lot of sitcoms, or much network TV at all for that matter. So even though he’s been associated with some of the biggest hits on TV over the past couple decades, I’ve only seen an episode or two of most of them. There’s only so much entertainment a person can consume, right? Anyway, I didn’t even realize until this year that Mike was a co-founder of the sports blog Fire Joe Morgan, which I am absolutely certain I would have enjoyed if I’d known anything about it in its heyday. And I realized even more recently that I had followed Mike on social media through his nom de plume Ken Tremendous and didn’t connect that he was also the guy I liked on the podcast. Thank you for listening to my shameful confessions. Since Da Pope has a tangential link to this trip – we would be going to see the White Sox, his favorite team – we will claim to be a little bit Catholic now.)

At the end of the evening, we were in the final group to make our way through the autograph and photo line. You could really tell how wiped out the guys were from the combination of travel and having to be “on” through so many signatures and quick greetings. I wore my new Monarchs jersey specifically to impress Joe, but I can’t rightly say whether or not he noticed. I did tell him that I’d be meeting up with Molly and the Long Game community in a couple days, and he perked up as he connected the dots (footnote: Joe made a guest appearance on one of Molly’s Saturday Zoom sessions a few weeks earlier and I had mentioned to him that I would be seeing him in St. Louis. I would be taking a big leap to think he remembered that or me, however.) Then the next morning, I got to read Joe’s blog post about the tour event I’d just been to, and it was all surreal and amusing in the best ways.

I couldn’t be more pleased that this worked out and I got to meet these two writers who have given me so much enjoyment over the years. I really think I get more excited to meet writers than athletes. I don’t know what this says about me. I just know that first it was these two, and then Molly a couple days later, and it’s like meeting my heroes and they don’t let you down.

Tags baseball, baseball trip, Kansas City, MLB, St. Louis

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Baseball Trip 2026 – Day 1 – Las Vegas to Kansas City

Post author By Jason Winston
Post date June 10, 2026
No Comments on Baseball Trip 2026 – Day 1 – Las Vegas to Kansas City

An exhibit at the Kansas City baseball museum at Kauffman Stadium.

TSA, SUV, and BBQ

After driving from Southern California to Las Vegas the afternoon before to meet up with Daniel and enduring a rough night on a regularly deflating air bed, I hoped I hadn’t tried to achieve too much on the first day. We had a morning flight from Las Vegas to Kansas City and a game to get to that evening. Turned out that part was no problem at all.

Our first potential hiccup came when we entered the departure terminal in Las Vegas to print out the luggage tag for Daniel’s suitcase. He really didn’t want to condense everything into a carry-on bag like I had, so we paid for one checked bag. The problem was there had been an enormous music festival in Las Vegas over the weekend and it appeared as though several hundred thousand people planned to fly home the same time we were departing. Though we arrived early enough to get through security before our flight, what we didn’t expect to find (and who would?) was a 3-hour-plus line just to check bags. The math was pretty simple: wait in that line and you’re not making the flight. Heck, it might be landing in Kansas City by the time you check that bag.

There seemed to be only one solution. I mean, we had a plane to catch and a game to get to that night. The itinerary did not make room for flight rescheduling or rainouts. So, we tossed a few larger liquid items into the trash knowing they’d never make it through TSA anyway and decided to get to the gate and take our chances that they’d check the bag when we got there. We didn’t really have a plan B short of buying a carry-on suitcase in the airport and shoving what we could into that. Sometimes a little confidence goes a long way, though. As we approached the TSA officer to enter the security area, he asked us if that bag needed to be checked. We told him we were checking it at the gate. He said as long as it fit on the conveyor belt, that was fine. Long story short, we got through security, found our gate, explained ourselves to the airline staffer at the desk and shortly thereafter watched her wheel his bag away to be checked. I think it was David Letterman who said, it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Or maybe he said, if you don’t have permission, bring hors d’oeuvres. Regardless, we made the flight with ample time to spare even, and just a hair product and body wash short of the original contents of our luggage.

Chiefs and Royals stadiums next to each other

The Kansas City Chiefs and Royals play in adjoining stadiums that share parking, something I probably should have known in advance.

Our first day began in Las Vegas and took us to Kansas City.

A George Brett exhibit at Kauffman Stadium

This artistic depiction of George Brett’s hit total is among the exhibits at Kauffman Stadium’s Hall of Fame.

I had to sit down with the great Buck O’Neil and hope he’d whisper one of his famous stories to me.

An exhibit at the Kansas City baseball museum at Kauffman Stadium.

We found fellow Long Game community member and Kauffman Stadium usher Candy Wolfe in her section in the good seats.

We take our first cheesy photo to establish our location just outside Kauffman Stadium.

Frank White Gold Glove display

Frank White statue

Dick Howser statue

George Brett statue

Lifesize Bobby Witt Jr. bobblehead

Royals banners outside the stadium

Bobby Witt Jr at bat

Kauffman Stadium scoreboard

We got into KC, shuttled to the car rental and found our car easily enough. Though I had reserved an economy car (what with the price of gas and all), they had nothing except SUVs on hand so we climbed into our (fancy for me) new Jeep Compass. I drive a car without any center electronic console or other modern bells and whistles, so there were quite a few things to get used to: lane assist (which went on and off randomly over the ensuing few days), a large center navigation panel (a heckuva lot easier to use than my little phone screen that I’ve become acclimated to), and the sort of engine where you don’t even feel it when you step on it. I definitely didn’t want to add a traffic ticket to the trip expenses, but the car tempted me into the occasional high speeds, I must confess.

By now, we still had about 4 hours until game time and hadn’t eaten much breakfast. It was something like lunch time to our two-hours-earlier stomachs, so we headed to the highly recommended and famous (sometimes famous places are more famous than good, of course) Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque. Like complete out-of-towner newbies, we struggled to figure out how to order at their counter and just stood there for several minutes waiting for someone to acknowledge us. Eventually we managed to get an order in: a sampler of pork ribs, brisket, baked potato salad, cole slaw and mac and cheese. Although as we soon realized, we actually got two types of potato salad and no mac and cheese, but we decided to live with it. Everything was really good, we pigged out in the best way possible, and because I was on vacation I even allowed myself the treat of a soda (!). I kept the name-emblazoned plastic cups from the lunch, not really part of a souvenir plan at that point, but I wound up bringing home items from throughout the trip. Better than letting them go into a landfill, right?

Our First Ballgame

We made our way to our hotel, rested for a while, and then headed to Kauffman Stadium to see the visiting Boston Red Sox take on the Kansas City Royals. A veteran of highly extended and sluggish trips into Dodger Stadium, where it can easily take you an hour to get from the freeway to your parking space, I expected to find, you know, traffic. As the navigation took us off the freeway with no one around, I wondered if we’d done something wrong. And as we took a couple quick turns and found ourselves already through the parking kiosk and headed to the lot, I kept thinking it was too good to be true.

I probably should have known this, but it took me by surprise to realize that the Chiefs’ football stadium (it probably has some corporate sponsor name I’m not bothering to look up) is right next door to Kauffman. As in, if both had to play the same day, there was gonna be a major parking problem. I’m sure they have a plan for that. We made our way in and started exploring the ballpark. KC has a great team hall of fame on the outfield concourse that we toured as well as a big kid zone that no doubt makes trips with a family more like a minor-league experience. We were a little old for a merry-go-round, so we checked out the merch shops instead. I do rather like, against my better judgment about the concept in general, the Royals’ new City Connect logo with the fountain. But (spoiler alert) I knew we had a destination the next day where I definitely would grab some merch and wanted to avoid completely destroying my budget on Day 1.

We also managed to find someone there who I kind of knew. Because I had posted about our pre-meetup trip in the Long Game threads, I received a message from Candy Wolfe, who is a longtime usher at Kauffman. She told me what section to find her in, and sure enough we found her right behind home plate on field level just a tad towards first base. Great section to work in! Candy would be joining the weekend meetup, but I couldn’t miss a chance to say hello and check the box of my first meeting with anyone from the LG family. Very cool! (Candy also brought some Royals swag to the meetup for a special needs member of the group, which was doubly – nay, triply – cool.)

When the game started, rather than make our way up high behind home plate to where our seats were, we settled into a near-empty section between third and home on the lower level. No one cared. With just over 14,000 in the park on this Tuesday, there were plenty of great empty seats. Both teams scored in the first inning, and Boston added another in the 2nd, and we thought it would be a high-scoring affair. But then no one scored again until the 8th and Boston erupted for four runs and seven hits in the 9th to win it going away, 7-1.

Who Asked for This?

There was unfortunately something keeping me from truly enjoying the game. Back home in California, hot windy weather produced an early fire season, with a huge one starting the day before in the Simi Valley area and threatening some homes of family members. And then, on the day we flew into KC, the Bain Fire started in the dry riverbed a couple miles from my house. These happen with some regularity and never come anywhere near us, primarily because the fire would have to jump several neighborhoods and catch overmatched firefighters without the ability to be in all the hotspots at once. In 10+ years at the current location, we’d never come anywhere close to real danger …

Until the first day I had gone on a real vacation since early 2020. Of course. And my youngest son was home by himself with animals and no transportation. Still, the fire may have been large and growing, but it really had to cover a lot of ground to get near us. Thankfully we in the region have the Watch Duty app to give us live updates on fire progress and evacuation orders and warnings. So I had my eye on the app with regular alerts, and I was texting with people in the area, some of whom were under evacuation warning already.

And, yeah, this fire kept moving closer and closer until our house was one zone away from an evacuation warning and two away from orders. That meant I needed to plan a way to get my son and the animals out just in case, and I spent several of the middle innings of the game on the phone making arrangements. The zone just to the north of ours went into an evacuation order, and our neighborhood went into the warning area … which meant at any time the alarm could sound to get out. As you might imagine, this grew more and more stressful as the evening wore on, and we solidified an evacuation plan. Imagine me half a continent away, wondering if the day I flew out of the area would be the day a fire got to our house with me powerless to do anything. Not the best way to start a vacation!

By the time I got back to the hotel, I was looking up return flights for the next morning just in case. And I talked my son through packing up a go bag with essential documents and things in the house and giving him a list of a few things to take. He handled it calmly, thankfully, and did everything I could have hoped for. I’m generally a calm person, but I think I would have been losing my mind a little had I been home. I’m certain, having had time to give this a good bit of thought since, that I would have loaded up the trunk with all sorts of things from around the house as I waited on a possible evacuation order. I would have been pacing around looking for more things to save. …

Yet, because I was nowhere nearby and unable to do any of that, I actually felt surprisingly serene. I wasn’t going to send my son rushing around the house to grab this or that. I just accepted that if we lost things, we lost things, and I couldn’t do anything to change it. I probably should have told him to grab the autographed photo of Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese, though. And my one album of reasonably worthwhile baseball cards. Don’t even get me started on some of the books and assorted keepsakes I would put on the list if I ever had to go through this, because it would be a long list. I’ve had a couple weeks to think about it and can’t believe all the things I didn’t tell him to grab!

Anyway, after a night spent trying to sleep while having my phone volume turned up to hear any updates, I awoke to learn the crews had made progress on the fire overnight. Soon they lifted the evacuation warning for our neighborhood and started lifting the outright evacuations in some nearby zones as well. The fire never got super close to us, but we had all seen the previous January in Pacific Palisades and Altadena the danger of flying embers sparking new blazes in multiple areas at once. It will be hard for anyone in SoCal to assume they’ll be fine ever again.

Tags baseball, baseball trip, Kansas City, Kauffman Stadium, stadiums and ballparks

Baseball Baseball Trip MLB

Baseball Trip 2026: Prologue

Post author By Jason Winston
Post date June 10, 2026
No Comments on Baseball Trip 2026: Prologue

Daniel and Jason at Busch Stadium in St. Louis — About to take in a game in St. Louis while wearing our new Negro Leagues jerseys.

The Long Game

Sometime around June of 2024, after hearing baseball writer Molly Knight appear as a guest on writer Joe Posnanski’s podcast, I decided to subscribe to Molly’s Substack. Over the ensuing two years participating in The Long Game community, I learned that:

It’s possible for a bunch of random people on the internet to come together and support each other and their baseball fandom without being negative.
You learn a lot about what’s going on with more teams when you listen to the people who follow them closely.
Group chats during games (especially playoffs) are incredibly entertaining.
There is no shortage of smart, interesting people out there, and your life becomes richer when you engage with them.

(Before I proceed with this Baseball Trip Prologue, though, can we take a minute to discuss how rare a thing item #1 on that list is? We are talking about a platform where you aren’t required to reveal who you are, in an era in which social media grew so toxic that I stopped using almost all of it, in which people who in most cases do not know each other outside of this group choose to be kind, positive, and nearly apolitical. I don’t love that Substack is trying to be social media instead of a safe creator space, but The Long Game still swims mightily against the tide. During the 2025 ALCS between the Mariners and Blue Jays, I felt so badly that one of our rooting communities had to wind up disappointed that I just wanted the series to keep going so no one had to lose out. And even as the team I have always followed, the Dodgers, pulled off the World Series comeback, I felt genuinely heartbroken for our Jays fans who came so close to seeing a great team achieve a glorious finish.)

OK, on with the story at hand … I found out that Molly had the idea to organize meetups for her community at ballgames, but the one she proposed in 2025 didn’t fit in my budget or calendar. Over the course of the next few months and particularly during the playoffs last season, I became much more engaged with the group. I participated in many of the weekly Saturday zoom chats and became one of the leading “yappers” in the Substack chats. I started to connect with individual people in the group along the way.

So when Molly announced that this year she planned a Memorial Day weekend meetup that would include three games in two cities, I realized I had to give some serious thought to trying to go. I brought it up with my 23yo son Daniel, who really liked the idea. He’s a big baseball fan, and it’s something we bond over. Plus we haven’t lived near each other for a few years, so it was a great opportunity to spend quality time together.

I’ve reached a point where experiences outweigh things, and this felt like an experience we needed to have. Call it YOLO or FOMO or whatever, but the meetup felt like something I couldn’t miss this time.

At Milwaukee's American Family Field — Heading into American Family Field to watch the Dodgers take on the Milwaukee Brewers

Planning the Trip

The meetup schedule included games at Chicago’s historic Wrigley Field on Friday and significantly less historic Rate Park on Monday, with a jaunt to Milwaukee to see the Dodgers play a National League Championship Series rematch on Saturday in between. (I once walked around Wrigley Field when I was in Chicago and the team wasn’t in town, just as I once stood on the other side of Fenway Park’s Green Monster in Boston. But that was as close as I’d gotten to seeing a game at either legendary stadium.) When Molly sent out an interest form in February, I signed us up. And then when she started buying tickets and I had to start paying for them, well then it became entirely real.

Along the way, I started doing some thinking about whether it might be possible to extend the trip a few extra days and see more games in more cities. I became a deep student of the MLB calendar and opened up Google Maps on another tab to try to figure out what was possible. I mean, as long as we were flying to the Midwest for a few games, tacking on to the experience made sense. Who knows when we’ll get another chance?

(This wasn’t actually my first time studying the MLB calendar, because before Molly introduced the meetup plan I had been trying to figure out whether an East Coast trip that included a stop at the Hall of Fame might be possible. I found a couple of possible stretches where we could get to games in places along the Baltimore/DC-Philadelphia-New York corridor, and I still think that’s a trip we need to try to do in a year or two.)

My initial trip extension would have been on the back end, when it was possible to see games on successive days in Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. But Daniel had commitments in the week after, so I reversed direction and looked at what we could do pre-meetup. I landed on a plan to fly into Kansas City and see a game there, drive to St. Louis for another game and then drive to Chicago to meet up with the Long Game crowd.

The end result was a plan for five games in seven days in four cities, all in ballparks we’d never been to. (As it turned out, we audibled and added a sixth game! Is there a baseball term for audible I could have used there? It’s bad form to mix sports metaphors, alas.) Before the trip, I had attended major-league games only at these current parks:

Dodger Stadium
Angel Stadium (nee Anaheim Stadium and Edison Field)
Petco Park in San Diego
AT&T Park in San Francisco

Plus, I had been to these now-defunct parks:

Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium
Metrodome in Minneapolis
Candlestick Park in San Francisco
Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego

I once had tickets for a game at the Oakland Coliseum, but we decided to do something else that day. I always figured I’d have another chance for that one. I’ve been to New York several times but never made it to old Yankee Stadium (let alone the new one) or Shea Stadium. I was in Montreal about 20 years after they killed the Expos, though Olympic Stadium still stands. I was in a long line across the street from Phoenix’s Chase Field to go see Bernie Sanders hold a rally. I drove past Milwaukee’s old County Stadium. I lived right near where LA’s old Wrigley Field once stood. I went to football games at the LA Coliseum, long after its baseball days were done. Alas, none of that counts.

It really isn’t all that impressive a list for a lifelong fan. But within a week, I would boost my current park list from 4 to 9!

At Chicago's Wrigley Field — From our seats in Chicago’s Wrigley Field, surrounded by members of the Long Game community.

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

Ambitious but carefully thought out, the trip was on. As game ticket purchases, hotel reservations and airline tickets started to stack up, I felt the anticipation building. And then I just had to wait two months for it all to take place.

The trip turned out to be everything I hoped for. It was my first vacation in seven years that involved an airplane and the first time I took more than a week off work in so long I can’t remember.

I realized after returning that I ought to record the memories of the trip while they’re still fresh and turn this blog into a bit of a keepsake. For both of us, at minimum. For anyone else, if they’re interested. Mostly, though, to give me the chance to relive all of it and try to capture the details that mattered to me.

I can’t wait for next year’s trip. Please kindly tell the masters of the baseball universe not to impose a long lockout so we can have games.

Tags baseball, baseball trip, MLB, prologue, stadiums and ballparks