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.
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!
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.