East Coast Baseball Fever

By Ryan McGowan

A couple of weeks ago, the blood started boiling in anticipation of summer, and I started to experience what a certain ESPN.com sports writer refers to as the “Tingly Ball Feeling.”  I was getting a little stir-crazy in Boston and needed to get out and travel around this great country of ours.  It was time for a road trip.The road trip was actually planned on a much grander scale back during high school baseball practice, ten or so years ago.  Anyone who ever played baseball knows how there is an awful lot of time to kill, especially while doing endless soft toss drills and hitting off the tee.  So we made up an continuous array of diversions such as the Name Game and the Word Game to pass the time during practice and especially on seemingly interminable bus rides to places like Dartmouth and Fall River.  We also used to fantasize about the ultimate road trip, a summer-long expedition worthy of great road trippers of the past such as Magellan, Jack Kerouac, or Seann William Scott.  On this road trip, we would drive all over the country (and take a swing into Canada), attending a game at every major league ballpark along the way.

It was an endeavor that, at sixteen, we all assumed would definitely happen some day.  However, reality being what it is, the dream of the cross-country baseball road trip has died down somewhat over the past decade.  But it’s not dead.  Far from it.  In fact, two weeks ago, in the spirit of my old high school baseball buddies, I set off on a miniature version of the Great Ballpark Road Trip, East Coast-style.

Seeing how pretty much everyone I know works for a living except for me, and those that have vacation time want to spend it with their significant others and not eating hot dogs and peanuts with me in a random ballpark 500 miles away, I was having a hard time recruiting partners for the trip.  I had one automatic partner lined up, a guy named Curley who was so dedicated to the road tripping culture that one summer in college, he drove from his parents’ house in Westchester County, NY, to Foxboro Stadium at midnight for no other reason that he realized he had never been there and wanted to change that fact.  So Curley was an easy choice.  When no one else surfaced with any interest in the East Coast baseball road trip, we decided it would be a two-man affair.  Think of it as a modern-day Lewis and Clark, without the coonskin caps and with fewer skirmishes with Native Americans.

The road trip started out just as any great venture, with a trip to the casino.  On my way to New York to meet up with Curley, I stopped at Foxwoods to play a couple hours of poker.  Unable to get on a $4/$8 table, I settled for a $2/$4 table and was frustrated for a few hours until I decided to walk after my next hand.  Pulling an 8-9 of spades, I called the blinds and then flopped three 9’s, and then got a fourth 9 on the turn.  Surprisingly, people were betting into me and re-raising me, and when I flipped over my four of a kind, I calmly raked in about a $90 pot and walked away, leaving me at plus-$50 for the trip.  A good start; it would at least pay for a couple of gallons of gas.

I met Curley and his house and we proceeded to the first leg of the road trip, Shea Stadium.  It was the second time I’d been to Shea, and I am happy to report that the stadium is just as gross and worthless as it was the first time I went there.  This was easily the worst ballpark of the four we ended up going to.  The upper-tier sightlines are terrible; you need to have Superman’s eyesight to be able to make out the numbers on the batter’s jersey.  The atmosphere around the park is awful as well; it doesn’t help when you have planes flying over every four or five minutes.  Just a painfully poor ballpark experience.  The good news was that, being a promotion night, the tickets only cost $6 each, we got to see an extra inning game, and the Mets lost.

The next day we drove down to Philadelphia and checked into the Holiday Inn at City Line Avenue.  Lovely city, that Philly.  I got to experience a lot of it while inching along in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway trying to get to and from the hotel, trapped among an endless stream of Pennsylvanians leaving work and heading down to the Jersey Shore for the weekend.  Imagine if they closed every road to the Cape except for one, and on a Friday afternoon you had to drive up and down that road to get to the places you have to go.  Just plain torture.  

One positive about Philly is that the new ballpark, Citizens Bank Park, is beautiful.  This was probably my favorite of the four.  Except for its unfortunate location in the “Sports Complex” amid an ocean of concrete parking lots and all the other major Philly stadia, CBP was a great baseball experience.  The upper-tier seats were great, there is easy access to concession stands and bathrooms, and there is a pretty cool outfield plaza section with a Phillies Hall of Fame wall and a number of eateries, including the famous Geno’s cheesesteaks (of which I am still torn between them and Pat’s as to which is better).

My favorite part of the Philly leg of the trip was that as we left the stadium after a Phillies walk-off home run against the Brewers, we noticed an inordinate number of fans honking their horns and whooping it up in the parking lots.  It seemed like they were celebrating this random June game over the Brewers as if they just won the World Series.  Then we saw them: an army of purple-clad fans coming from the direction of the Spectrum and the First Union Center.  Since we would be stuck in traffic anyway, Curley and I decided to walk over there to figure out what was going on.  What we saw was priceless.  

Apparently, we were lucky enough to be in Philly on the night that the Philadelphia Phantoms minor league hockey team clinched the Calder Cup.  The pandemonium that we had seen was not for the Phillies’ walk-off homer, but rather for the local minor league team winning the AHL title.  The whole incident solidified my belief that Philadelphia fans are easily the craziest fan base on the planet, way ahead of Boston or New York or any other city.  Could you picture fans in any other big-league city getting so fired up over a minor-league title?  The Philly fans were genuinely psyched, all decked out in “Purple Reign” Phantoms gear.  So what did we do?  We joined the party.  We danced around, high-fived people, made calls on our cell phone and had other crazed fans join us in chanting and yelling.  I wonder if they could tell we were posers?  They seemed too fired up with Calder Cup fever to notice.  Gotta love Philly.

Then it was on to our nation’s capital.

TO BE CONTINUED…