He Knew He Was Right

On this date, my second article for 27 Outs Baseball was published. One of the things I really liked about this group was that they keep their posts positive. I always strive for the same. Maybe a little self-deprecation, maybe a wee bit of playful mocking of one or two rival sports teams, etc, but that's about it. These folks operated the same way: No rants, no bashing, no promoting one team over another. Fair, fun, supportive and encouraging stuff. In this post, which I'd thought about writing here and elsewhere, I came close to violating that philosophy, as I took on fans who seem irritated at other fans who enjoy the game differently, who don't watch the game exclusively from their seat. My intention here was a defense—a celebration, really—of the more laid-back baseball fan. Enjoy... A Hat Tip to the Casual Fan Full disclosure: I’ve never filled out a scorecard at a baseball game. I’ve fumbled with them on my softball teams, but they are not something I’m intereste...

It's no secret to anybody who looks at my blog that I love baseball and travel. That said, I was happy to join the 27 Outs crew in 2015 shortly after returning from a ballpark venture down south in June of that year. Mostly helping with their editing, I wrote my first post for them that July. They did a lot to promote Minor League baseball, and I was thrilled to contribute with editing, the occasional article, and even some pictures. The site went down a few years after I joined, but here's the first of three posts I wrote for them, each slightly modified and with dead links removed. Make Minor League Baseball Part of Your Travel Itinerary If you live on either coast, I’ll guess Oklahoma City, Wichita, Omaha, Des Moines and Davenport don’t rank high on your list of must-see vacation spots. Most of us, after all, have limited resources and vacation time, and we’re all too often drawn to beaches, National Parks, mountains and a host of other places that become the focal points...

So, when I visited Hot Springs National Park on my last trip, it kind of rekindled a somewhat dormant desire to see National Parks. Ballparks and football stadiums have been the focal points of my non-ski travel quests lately. When I stitched together this recent trip to some southern ballparks, however, and looked for things to do around Little Rock, Hot Springs jumped out at me. After stopping there (and, yeah, acquiring that Passports to Your National Parks ), I imagined my next couple of vacations with what NPs I might visit as a main focus of them. Bold shows what I've seen to date: Acadia, Maine American Samoa, American Samoa Arches, Utah Badlands, South Dakota Big Bend, Texas Biscayne, Florida Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Colorado Bryce Canyon, Utah Canyonlands, Utah Capitol Reef, Utah Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico Channel Islands, California Congaree, South Carolina Crater Lake, Oregon Cuyahoga Valley, Ohio Death Valley, California  Denali, Alaska Dry...

I first saw it in one of the U.S. National Parks of the Rockies--Glacier, I think, but certainly by the time I reached Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons. It was there that I noticed a few hikers gathered around a National Parks Passport cancellation station. It was 1992, and I was really just getting started with my National Parks obsession. To that point, my visits to any of the places in the National Park System were limited: I had been to Gettysburg and Cape Hatteras when I was younger, I had driven to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands the year before, I toured Civil War battlefields early in 1992 and my Dad and I drove to Acadia earlier in August. That two-week gem, which started in the last week of the month, was my first National Parks focused trip and one of my all-time favorite travel adventures. I drove a large loop that led me first to Rocky Mountain National Park and then north to Little Bighorn Battlefield, before kicking into high gear with stops from Glacier National Park d...

It's still early in the 2015 MiLB season, and I hope to get to a few more ballparks this summer, but I did return from a fun trip down south where I got to four ballgames, four new stadiums, four games in different states (I'm now at 30 states, plus DC) and games in two more leagues. I'll do a summary post at some point of the traveling like I did last year , but when I got back from this trip, I suddenly became curious about where my last three trips have taken me, and what games I've had the good fortune of seeing. I've said before that I'm not really trying to see all of the AAA teams, or all of the teams of a given league (I don't think), but it struck me that I have seen affiliates of teams from all over the country. I saw an A's single-A affiliate in Vermont last year, a Twins AA affiliate in Connecticut a few years ago and I saw an Angels affiliate in Arkansas on this most recent trip. It seemed suddenly like I've seen affiliates for more te...