Tag: MLB

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

Post author By Jason Winston
Post date June 22, 2026
No Comments on Baseball Trip 2026 – Day 3 – All You Can Eat and the St. Louis Arch

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

Baseball Baseball Trip MLB

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

Post author By Jason Winston
Post date June 22, 2026
No Comments on Baseball Trip 2026 – Day 2 – Kansas City to St. Louis

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

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

Baseball MLB Sim Baseball

One Game Short

Despite winning our final 7 games of the season, my 1997 New York Mets fell one game short of the playoffs in the Cooperstown Historical Replay season. The Marlins held us off 92-70 to 91-71 to wrap up the wild card, and now they’ll try to duplicate the magic that led to a World Series win that year.

It was a good run and I don’t feel like I could have gotten much more out of this team. I drafted 9th last season, and 7 of the 8 playoff teams were ones drafted ahead of me. The only one that wasn’t: the Marlins, of course, who went one pick after mine.

We are waiting now for the lottery to determine our draft order for picking 1998 teams. By finishing 3 games above the Mets’ real-life win total, I’ll probably be somewhere around the 9th-10th pick again unless I’m fortunate enough to jump into the top 3.

The 1998 season has a lot of great storyline options and teams that would be fun to manage. Start with the Cardinals and Cubs for the Mark McGwire–Sammy Sosa record home run race and the 114-win Yankees, but there are certainly a few more that would be worthy to take. I have no idea who I’d take if I got a top-three pick, but I hope to have that problem.

Tags baseball, MLB, playoff race, sim baseball, wild card

Baseball MLB Sim Baseball

Another Exciting Finish

I have other Sim League Baseball teams going, of course. Thirteen active seasons going right now, in fact.

One of them is my favorite ongoing league, Cooperstown Historical Replay. This league had a couple seasons going before I joined, but it works very simply and appeals to my old board-game mentality immensely.

The league replays major-league seasons one after another, with each owner drafting a real team and using only the players from that team. It’s as pure a replay as you can get in this sim, but it also somewhat exposes where it can be a little flawed. The hitters tend to feast on the weaker pitching, and the bad teams tend to do really poorly.

But to keep owners motivated even when stuck with a lousy real team, we have a lottery where your chances are based on how close you came to managing your team to a record as good as real life. If you outshine the team’s actual performance, you’re likely to draft in the top few teams for the following season, regardless of how good or bad you were.

We are in 1997 right now, and for the second straight season I’m managing the New York Mets. Just the way it worked out. We are one game from the end of the season, and I’ve managed the Mets to a 90-71 mark and just one game behind the wild card-leading Florida Marlins.

The actual 1997 Mets went 88-74, so I’m on the good side of the ledger. That should get me a top-10 pick for 1998, but right now I’m fighting for that final playoff spot. We’ve won 6 straight to get a chance at forcing a tiebreaker game 163. We’ll have to beat Houston while the Marlins lose to Pittsburgh in the finale for that to happen, but it’s fun to have a chance.

My history in this league is decent enough. I had a great run in somehow managing the Pirates to a World Series title in 1987 and then taking the 1988 Dodgers to the World Series the following season but losing in seven games. As a Dodgers fan, it was special to try to get that team the trophy, since it remains the last time the team won.

I’ve gotten one team to a World Series since, but these Mets aren’t really a championship contender. We’d still have to win a one-game tiebreaker just to get to the division series, and the team is already pretty fatigued trying to get there at all. Had to go for it, though. We’ll soon find out if our season continues for one more game.

Tags baseball, MLB, playoff race, sim baseball, wild card

Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball Sim Dynasty

Quick Updates

Dear Reader, I apologize for a few days’ hiatus in posts as my work schedule and other responsibilities took me away. Here are a few highlights and I’ll try to get us caught up soon.

As of this writing, my Jack Bauer Squared team that I’d basically left for dead early in the second half has somehow managed to crawl within 2 games of first place with 31 games to go. Our division leader is under .500, so that certainly helps!

Another Sim Dynasty season recently wrapped up. We had a furious wild-card race in the National League, and I held off Montreal by just 1 game to make the playoffs.

But a return to the World Series was not in the cards, as the Chicago Street Hounds showed why they were the better regular-season team and survived a 7-game series to beat us and then went on to win the World Series. We’ve made a big offseason trade to try to make up some ground and get revenge on the Hounds next season, though.

And today is the MLB trade deadline. The Padres are making huge moves to give the Dodgers reason to worry in the NL West. Could we have an all-SoCal championship series played in Texas? Oh, we have to talk about that!

More to come soon!

Tags baseball, MLB, sim baseball, sim dynasty

Baseball MLB Sim Baseball Tournament

My “Juice” Tournament Teams

Post author By Jason Winston
Post date August 22, 2020
No Comments on My “Juice” Tournament Teams

I’m taking a look at the teams I drafted for Round 3 of thejuice6’s annual tournament for Sim League Baseball. I had seven teams advance to this round of eight leagues, so I had one pick in seven of the leagues, three in the National League and three in the American. Each league includes 15 seasons of baseball history, so this round covers 120 seasons in all from 1899 to 2019.

These are the years and teams I drafted. I can build my 25-man roster out of anyone from these three teams for that season:

League 1: 1906 Chicago White Sox / New York Highlanders / Cleveland Naps
League 2: 1920 Cleveland Indians / Chicago White Sox / New York Yankees
League 3: No team
League 4: 1950 Philadelphia Phillies / Brooklyn Dodgers / New York Giants
League 5: 1966 Los Angeles Dodgers / San Francisco Giants / Pittsburgh Pirates
League 6: 1985 St. Louis Cardinals / New York Mets / Los Angeles Dodgers
League 7: 1993 Toronto Blue Jays / Chicago White Sox / New York Yankees
League 8: 2013 Boston Red Sox / Oakland Athletics / Detroit Tigers

I picked 9th out of 12 in League 1’s American League draft (1899-1914) and went with 1906 for a strong combination of starting pitchers in Doc White, Addie Joss, and Ed Walsh along with the best lineup combination among the remaining teams when it came my turn to pick. My hitting star will be 2B Nap Lajoie (as in, they named the team for him in Cleveland back then). Don’t expect many home runs on this team, as no one hit more than 3, and the whole league is deadball-era pitching.

I picked 2nd in League 2’s American League draft (1915-1929) and had a very difficult time selecting. The only team off the board was 1927 (of the famed Murderer’s Row Yankees), and the trick is that the league divides between one division of deadball teams (1915-1919) and two once Babe Ruth showed how to excite crowds with home runs (1920-1924 and 1925-1929).

Though some excellent pitching could be found in those teen years, those offenses really were painfully weak. In 1920, I landed a lineup with four sensational hitters: Ruth, Tris Speaker, Joe Jackson, and Eddie Collins, all of whom hit at least .370 that year. Ruth hit 54 home runs, about as many as the rest of my team combined, and it’s hard to turn down that firepower. There’s a bit of decent pitching to go with them, but offensive numbers will be big for most of this league.

I picked 4th in League 4’s National League draft (1945-1959) and narrowed it down to a few times pretty quickly. The 1950s were pretty awful for pitching, and some of the 1940s hitting was nothing to get excited about either. In this draft, it seemed the teams with a few decent arms lacked any good bats.

My 1950 group will have good power throughout the lineup, though it slants too far to right-handed hitting and lacks speed. Fortunately this league uses a DH, because I have two second basemen worth putting atop the lineup in Jackie Robinson and Eddie Stanky.

I had the 5th choice in League 5’s National League draft (1960-1974) and had some very good pitching seasons to choose from in 1966, 1968, and 1969. I went with ‘66 for the twin ace starters in Sandy Koufax and Juan Marichal, which should be as good or better than anyone else can field in the league.

That was not a great era for baseball offenses, and few of the teams will have even one truly elite hitter in their lineups. So for me the ‘66 group will have some depth with sluggers Willie Mays, Willie Stargell, Willie McCovey, and Roberto Clemente. My coworker once told me to name my son Willie because it’s the best way to end up with a baseball star in the family, and maybe he was onto something.

For League 6’s National League draft (1975-1989), I had the top choice. In fact, I initially had the top choice of which of all the 16 drafts I wanted to pick first in, essentially making this the top pick of the entire round. That’s actually a lot of pressure, and I didn’t have time to analyze every draft before I made it.

I did look through historical ranges of pitching excellence and found that the three teams offered in this 1985 grouping (Cardinals, Mets, Dodgers) allowed me to put together a significantly better pitching rotation than anyone else in the era. With Dwight Gooden, John Tudor, and Orel Hershiser, I have three of the four best starters available in the entire range of years. I’d almost call it unfair, but I still have to find a way to build a team around them and win with the burden of expectations. That said, anything less than a World Series with this team would be disappointing.

I traded leagues with another owner who wanted to be in the AL, so I picked third in the League 7 NL draft (1990-2004). This was a really difficult choice, because the great temptation is to take one of Greg Maddux’s insanely great seasons from 1994 or 1995 even if the rest of the team were weaker. I went with 1993, however, because I still get a solid Maddux season to top the rotation along with several good arms right behind him for depth.

With ‘93 I also get a solid lineup top to bottom that stars Mr. Barry Lamar Bonds in his smaller head phase, when he was “just” an MVP but not yet shattering records. We can back up his power with the likes of Fred McGriff, Matt Williams, and Ron Gant to give the lineup plenty of strength.

For my final team in the League 8 AL (2005-2019), I had the 10th pick out of 12, which meant only six possible groupings left by my turn. I went with 2013 because it had the best single SP available in Max Scherzer and a super closer season with Koji Uehara. I also got the best remaining offensive season with Miguel Cabrera, who was actually a little better in 2013 than in his Triple Crown season the year before.

Overall, though, it’s not a great team. Drafting low means if you wind up being competitive that’s a bonus. My hope is just to steer this team to enough wins to advance to Round 4. The more teams I move on, the more chances I have at getting to the final Round 7 where the prizes are. I managed to get one team there last year and made the LCS, so I’d really like to have two shots at least this year.

Tags baseball, MLB, sim baseball, tournament

Baseball Covid MLB

MLB Stat of the Day

After 18 games of the 2020 MLB season, outfielder Charlie Blackmon of the Colorado Rockies has 34 hits. He actually had 34 after 17 games but went 0-for-4 Wednesday to drop his average from .500 to .472.

But the most 2020 stat you can imagine (at least so far) has to be this:

Those 34 hits tie Blackmon with the St. Louis Cardinals. The whole team. For the whole season.

Of course, that’s only possible because the Cardinals have played only 5 games due to Covid-19 suspensions. Thursday’s game is suspended as well. By then six teams will have played 20 games. There is no clear plan for how many games the Cardinals will get to play, but they’ll finish way below the target 60 for all teams.

Still, just wrap your head around one player outhitting an entire team any point past maybe opening day, and it just could never happen except like this. Blackmon is crushing the ball, and the Cardinals are sitting around waiting for clearance.

2020 is just off the charts.

Tags baseball, covid, MLB

Baseball MLB

Two Baseball Treasures

Over the years I have managed to pick up a few items at yard sales, swap meets, and the like that became some of my favorite treasures. Two of them feature famous baseball players and sit on my bookshelves.

One is from 1946 and I believe is a page from Life magazine. I found it in one of those bins filled with old magazine pages, and only recently did it take on an added baseball significance.

The page shows a “BASEBALL SHIFT” in which the Cleveland Indians employed a novel defensive alignment against Ted Williams, with the subhead, “Indians try to stop Ted Williams by placing six men in right field.”

The page describes how Williams tormented the Indians in the opener of a July 14, 1946, doubleheader, so they went to the extreme shift in the second game. Amazingly, thanks to Baseball Reference, we actually have these full box scores online, and they confirm the facts of the magazine.

Fans of today’s MLB will no doubt recall that such defensive shifts were virtually unknown until just a few years ago, but today they are extremely common. Pull hitters like Williams would face them virtually every time up today, but it was not a normal strategy in 1946 in the least.

Take a look at that photo and note that Williams still managed to hit a double to right anyway!

The second baseball treasure is from The Sporting News and dates to 1933, when an 18-year-old phenom showed up for the old San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. His name was Joe DiMaggio.

Not that The Sporting News got that right. Their “Minors Worth Watching” feature correctly identified the hitting prowess of the 18-year-old outfielder who set a record for the longest hitting streak in PCL history, 61 games. DiMaggio, of course, would later embark on what remains by far the greatest such streak in major-league history, 56 games in 1941. TSN certainly foreshadowed the skills that would make DiMaggio a Hall of Famer for the Yankees in years to come.

But they didn’t quite get his name right, just a little detail that leaped out at this longtime copy editor. They called him “Joe De Maggio.”

Some good history in this article from MiLB.com on DiMaggio’s amazing minor-league career. Give it a read.

Tags baseball, MLB

Baseball Covid MLB

MLB Suspends Wrong Guys

Major League Baseball hasn’t had a banner week, despite managing to open its shortened season three-plus months into a worldwide pandemic. The strategy of trying to play games while covid-19 cases and deaths continue to mount in the United States remains to be fully tested, but a major outbreak among the Miami Marlins forced games to be postponed and schedule shuffled.

The worst case scenario didn’t unfold, yet. There hasn’t been a player or coach to suffer severe illness from covid, and if other teams aren’t affected by the virus spreading, the protocols might even hold.

So while MLB waits for the tests to show if the damage has been contained, they found a way to remind us how much potential they still have to mess things up somehow. Today’s suspensions of Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly for eight games and manager Dave Roberts for one game took a bad decision and compounded it with a worse one.

To recap, the league found that the Houston Astros cheated throughout their 2017 championship season, which culminated in a World Series victory over the Dodgers. MLB issued harsh punishments to the Astros’ front office and manager, one-year suspensions that essentially could end careers.

But they promised all the players immunity in exchange for revealing the details of the cheating program. So no player received any kind of punishment, and the team kept its title. The Dodgers, among other teams, were decidedly less than thrilled with that outcome.

Cut to the much-delayed 2020 season, in which the Dodgers and Astros were not scheduled to face each other originally but had to under the new regionalized schedule that reduced travel. In Tuesday’s 6th inning, relief pitcher Kelly appeared to struggle with his control and threw several pitches that missed their targets. He threw a few pitches that came close to hitting Astros but didn’t, and he also threw a few that didn’t come close to anything.

Let’s note this is the same Joe Kelly whose April video on Twitter showed him breaking windows in his house because his backyard pitching was so inaccurate. Do we know if he was just wild or if he intended to put a scare into the Astros? No. Did he hit anyone? No. Did he come really close to ending anyone’s career? No again.

So of course MLB slapped him with a suspension for 13% of the season, something totally out of proportion with the alleged crime. A few years ago Kelly was suspended for hitting a player with a pitch and then hitting him again in the ensuing brawl … and for that he received a six-game suspension. Hmmm.

Maybe you’ll recall in 1965 when the Giants’ Juan Marichal hit the Dodgers’ John Roseboro over the head with a bat? Marichal got 10 games for that.

Also, let’s remember once again that no Astro received as much as a single-game suspension for participating in a cheating scandal for at least a season. Does any of this feel appropriate?

Had Kelly actually hit anyone with a pitch or a fist or a piece of equipment, he would have earned a suspension. Maybe even a longer one. Kelly will appeal, the suspension will probably get cut down a few games, but no one will forget that MLB whiffed on this pitch and hit itself in the head in the process.

Tags baseball, covid, MLB, suspensions