BALLPARK BROTHERS

The Ballpark Collector

an essay by Michael Castro

 

            There are few things in life that I find more joyful than having a full tank of gas and an empty ribbon of highway stretching before me. I love to drive. I don’t mean driving to the supermarket to get tomatoes. I mean long-distance driving, down roads I’ve yet to travel. There is no other place where I am so free of the concerns of the everyday world.

            I have shared many road trips with excellent companions, but despite the convivial pleasures of a trip with a good friend, or the deep fulfilment and joy of exploring the world with my wonderful wife, for me, there is nothing quite like the solo road trip. For a mind as cluttered as mine, as full of lists and self-assigned burdens, forever racing the clock; being in a car, on the road, all alone, is where I feel the most carefree, the lightest, the most relaxed. When I am driving a long distance, there is literally nothing else I have to do, nothing else I can do, legally. Just drive and see what the world offers up over the next rise and around the next bend.

            There are so many things I love about driving to new places. I love the road signs. I love the changes in topography. I love the little towns that spring out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. I love the sudden appearance of a magnificent and unexpected vista as the car crests a long hill and begins to descend into a valley. I love the skeletons of long-abandoned mills and factories that tell their own story of a rich industrial past come and gone. I love roadside diners, with their homespun comfort food served by waitresses named Hazel and Blanche, and cooked by Lou. I love convenience stores, for some reason, with their unique mix of national brands and local products; Cupcakes by Trudy.

            I love seeing the country one mile at a time and understanding that everything I see that is new to me is the same old same old for the locals. This is their normal, but to me it is wondrous. It makes me want to see my town through new eyes, to refresh that sense of wonder I have about my own home.

            I love the roadside attractions that represent someone’s crazy notion, someone who overcame the laughter and derision of his neighbors to actually make a successful livelihood out of The World of Snakes or The World’s Largest Ball of Twine. These things are almost uniquely American, other countries relying on millennia of history to serve as their tourist attractions. There are no 1000-year-old pubs in America, so The Hubcap Museum will have to do.

            In a world that is ruled by the clock, by the expectations of others, and the unachievable standards we set for ourselves, the freedom of the road becomes freedom from all of it: freedom from work, freedom from the outside world, freedom from myself. It allows me to turn off that world, shut out the noise, put the Do Not Disturb sign on my brain. Some people meditate by sitting quietly in a room. Some people drink and party to get away from the real world. Some people enjoy the quiet company of friends.

            I drive.

            And I love baseball.

            Baseball is a little out of vogue these days and that’s mostly because, well, it can be kind of boring. Objectively speaking, very little happens. Most of the game is comprised of two guys throwing a ball back and forth to each other, with occasional burst of “action”, such as the batter hitting a ball softly to 2nd base and getting thrown out by 20 feet. Be still my heart.

            The appeal of baseball, however, is not so much the action itself, but the anticipation of action, the potential for something exciting to happen on every pitch and, for the aficionado, the relatively slow pace is part of the appeal. There is time for the fan to analyze the game situation, consider the various possible outcomes and then see which of them actually comes to pass. It is a game that can be understood on a deep level, unlike football, which requires a PhD to truly understand. If you disagree with that statement, I challenge you to explain why a nickel defense has five defense backs and a dime defense has six or what a “Kick-Out Block with a Pulling Guard in the Two Gap” is. You can’t. You just watch until the whistle blows, the dust settles and you see where the ball ended up.

            With a love of road trips and a passion for baseball, it can be no surprise that I have become a connoisseur of the Baseball Road Trip. I don’t claim to have invented the Baseball Road Trip. People have been doing this kind of thing for years and, with the advent of the internet to aid in planning and logistics, now more than ever. Most Ballpark Collectors focus on the thirty Major League baseball stadiums, their goal to see a game in every top-flight venue. This is not as easy to achieve as you might think. Just look at a map.

            The Major Leagues are scattered to the four corners of this vast land, and it takes both time and money to get to 30 stadiums in 27 cities in order to claim to be “Current”. This is the term that ballpark collectors use to describe a fan that has been to all 30 stadiums currently in use at the time the 30th ballpark has been visited. This word is a necessary qualifier because baseball teams love tossing out their old stadiums and building new ones. The Atlanta Braves opened a new stadium in 1997, then another new one in 2017. Every time a new stadium opens, thousands of folks who spent years achieving the exalted position of “Current” lunge for baseball and flight schedules in order to reclaim their hard-fought status. After the 2024 season, the Oakland Athletics committed the ultimate nose-thumbing to all of these folks by moving to Sacramento for a few years, then moving to Las Vegas after that. Serious collectors of major league stadiums need to decide if they are going to Sacramento to restore “Currency”, or wait for the move to Las Vegas and suffer the ignominy of dropping down to 29 for a few years. It’s a vexing question.

            I am not, nor have I ever been “Current”. My goal has never really been to see every major league baseball stadium, although I might get there someday. As much as I like the big ballparks, my true passion is for smaller venues in smaller towns. For the uninitiated, these diminutive venues are in the Minor Leagues, where thousands of players struggle and scrap and work their way up the long, long ladder of baseball’s talent pyramid, all hoping one day to play in one of those 30 Big Ballparks. It is down in the basements and sub-basements that one finds the roots of baseball, where the best player to ever take the field at Calvin Coolidge High School discovers to his dismay that he was a big fish in a very, very small pond, while someone who arrived with no fanfare and little in the way of expectations blossoms into the next Mike Piazza.

            People who don’t drive around to various and assorted baseball stadiums might be under the impression that they are all the same. I mean, a baseball field surrounded by seats is pretty straightforward, right? There are those who would argue against this as a naïve misconception born of ignorance and a complete lack of appreciation for the subtle, but critical factors that separate one venue from the other, lending each its own special character, making every baseball stadium worthy of the devotion shown by those who travel the country seeking them out and marking each off their personal list.

            I’m going to let you in on a secret.

            Baseball stadiums are all pretty much alike.

            The fiction that each one is like a big concrete snowflake, unique in magical and significant ways, is just an excuse for guys and, more and more commonly, women, to drive around the country without seeming like maladjusted children who just like going to baseball games.

            Oh, sure, they are a little different from each other, and there are great variations in size and style among classes of ballparks, but, in the end, they are basically baseball fields surrounded by seats. Since everyone likes things in threes, I’ll break them down into three different classes:

 

The Modern Stadiums

From the lowest of the minor leagues to the pinnacle of the Major Leagues, almost every owner wants a new stadium, designed with ideal sight lines, abundant bathrooms, wide concourses, revenue-generating luxury suites and top-notch food. The purists lament that these ballparks are, in fact, all the same, and there is some truth to that. There is a basic template for the modern ballpark, but it is a nice template and, for the most part, delivers an excellent fan experience. And, really, why should a fan in Joliet, Illinois care that his park looks just about the same as one in Bridgewater, New Jersey? This is only really a problem for Ballpark Collectors, who go to all of these places and complain that they begin to blur together.

 

The Classics

There are only a few of these left in the Major Leagues, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston being the most famous. Only 5 of the 30 MLB stadiums were built before 1989. Down in the minor leagues, however, there are still dozens and dozens of lovely old ballparks, many built during the Great Depression with money from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program that put Americans back to work building all kinds of municipal improvement projects. Though many of these great old stadiums were lost before the turn of the century, replaced by stadiums from Category 1, many still remain, cherished by their communities. Though typically below the standard now required for Minor League Baseball, the growth of Collegiate Summer Leagues, where prospects get to show their stuff to top scouts with wooden bats, has breathed new life into many small town WPA stadiums, while providing the impetus for the investment to carry these historical landmarks on to the next generation.

 

The Makeshift

If the MLB stadiums are the towering trees of the ballpark forest, and the Classics are the bucolic fields of flowers, then this third class would be the weeds. This is baseball doing everything it can to survive in the shadows, where the game would seem to have no place surviving. These ballparks are in places like Fremont, Nebraska and Pocatello, Idaho, where a few sections of grandstand, a press box with a ladder and some neighborhood folks with a BBQ constitute a ballpark. Some of these ballparks are recent, and some are very old. Many were tossed up during the heyday of the Minor Leagues in the 1940s and 1950s, built fast and cheap and abandoned when television came along and nobody wanted to sit on a metal bleacher to watch Class D baseball anymore. Baseball has no business surviving in some of these places, but with a good business plan and clever marketing, many of these small towns continue to make a go of it, putting lipstick on pigs and shouting Play Ball night after night. Some are sad, some are glorious, and I love them all, because it is baseball in its purest form.

 

            Seeing all of the baseball stadiums and games is wonderful, but the thing that makes a baseball road trip rewarding is the time spent between the destinations. This is one of those cases where the cliché really is true; the journey is more important that the destination. The pursuit of baseball stadiums will take you to places you would never have thought to go, to see things you never knew were there to be seen, to eat foods you never knew existed. Whether it’s the great Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, Pennsylvania, or the giant pheasant in Huron, South Dakota, crisscrossing the country in search of baseball stadiums can be as rewarding as you choose to make it.

            Taken in their totality, the sheer number of minor and major league ballparks, not to mention older stadiums hosting college-age hopefuls, create a constellation of points on the map, and connecting those points, one mile at a time, can weave a tapestry that represents the real America, a country of big cities and small towns, of local civic pride and even neglect and decay. It’s all there to be seen and appreciated and experienced.

            I’ve met some wonderful people along the way, like the time I arrived at Bowen Field in Bluefield, West Virginia with my Ballpark Brother, Gary, only to find the gates locked due to a sodden field. A gentleman whose name is lost to history saw our downcast faces, leapt into his car and sped away, to our bewilderment. Ten minutes later another car drove up and we met George, who’d been alerted to our presence by the first gentleman. George was the General Manager of the team, having worked for decades at this nice little ballpark in the rugged wilderness of West Virginia. George let us inside the stadium and regaled us with tales of Baltimore Orioles greats that had passed through these humble grounds.

            Twenty years before Rickwood Field was made famous by the recent Major League game played on the hallowed home of the Southern League Birmingham Barons and Negro League Birmingham Black Barons, Gary and I attended the annual “Rickwood Classic”, using press passes to gain access to all corners of the oldest professional stadium in the United States (1910). We climbed into the manual scoreboard, strolled across the roof and walked on the field, surrounded by all the history that had played out on this diamond. How did we get these Golden Tickets? We asked!

            I am a Ballpark Collector. As of this writing I have been to 311 baseball stadiums in the United States, Canada and places further afield. I have driven in 47 of the 48 contiguous states (I’m coming for you Mississippi!). I have seen many of the wonders of this great continent and much, much more of the gloriously mundane. I revel in the experiences and memories and take solace in the knowledge that this journey will never be complete. There will always be another road to drive, another stadium to visit, another ballgame to attend.

            When the weight of the world begins to press down and gravity threatens to be too much to overcome, I will reach for a map and a baseball schedule and know that salvation is just over the next hill, identified by the distinctive silhouette of stadium lights on the horizon.

 

Michael Castro is a freelance writer, baseball fan and, in partnership with his oldest friend, Gary Aufforth, founder and webmaster of the baseball stadium website BallparkBrothers.com

 

© 2026, Michael Castro