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Strike Two
The Occidental Tourist · June 28, 2000

Last week, the Tourist provided a view from inside a major-league ballpark: There's no shortage of people willing to spend an entire vacation going from one city to another to catch a game in all of 'em. Not that the Tourist can figure it out. Maybe they're hoping they get to the stadiums on "Porsche Night."

But, the truth is, you don't have to shell out supersized, owner greed-inflated Major League prices to enjoy the game. Minor league cities and spring training venues offer plenty of cheaper, more laid-back options. And send the Tourist your leads at tourist@ticked.com, and include your full name and city/town of residence:

Minor League appeal: Many people are ditching big leagues for the farm teams. It may be that the minor league parks offer a more intimate game setting. It could have been interest inspired by the great flick, "Bull Durham."

But mainly, those minor league parks offer a quirky, charming experience that is uniquely their own. The Tourist has to admit that the best glass of lemonade he ever had was served up routinely in Hagerstown, Md., Suns stadium. Not only was it fresh squeezed. Every glass came with a cherry on top. A strange, but nice, touch. (It was enough to make him forego beer. At least for an inning.)

"The lower minor leagues and college wooden bat league parks are like watching baseball as your parents and grandparents did," says author Margaret Engel, who wrote Baseball Vacations: Great Family Trips to Minor League and Classic Major League Baseball Parks Across America, for Fodor's with husband Bruce Adams. "Everyone is close to the action, the price of admission and food is under $20 for a family of four, and kids can easily get autographs and strike up conversations with young ballplayers. Affordability is a big factor. In Bluefield, West Virginia, where the baby Orioles play, it costs about $2 to get in - on the rare night that a local sponsor hasn't arranged for free entry for all fans. Drinks are 50 cents and hotdogs are $1."

One minor league venue to consider: The new Louisville Slugger Field seats just around 13,000. And, for families, down Main Street is the Louisville Slugger Museum. (You can spot the building fairly easily; there's a six-story, 68,000 pound bat standing out front.)

And if, by the time the season is over, you can't wait for spring training, there's hope for you. Spring Training Tours Inc sets up outings for Seattle Mariners, Colorado Rockies, Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants training camps. The trips include meet-and-greets with managers and players. The business begins bookings for spring 2001 as early as this August. Game packages vary greatly, from $761 to stay at Comfort Suites in Peoria, Ariz., to catch the Mariners (three nights at a single-room rate) to nearly $1,300 to stay at the Embassy Suites/Phoenix to see the Athletics (four nights/single room).

But be warned about venues with big stars: This is where grown adults who make a side living selling autographs come out in full force, often making spectacles of themselves. At the Chicago Cubs' camp in Mesa, Ariz., last year, for example, the Tourist watched fans rush the chain-link fence in an unsettling crush, all in hopes of getting Sosa to sign balls, programs and ball caps. Suffice to say, it took away from the laid-back nuance that makes spring training so appealing.

Web research resources: If you are gearing up for a major league tour, you may want to consider clicking on these to weed out the potential losers.

Many of the tour sites mentioned last week provide, well, rather detailed and often colorful insight. Jay Buckley's Baseball Tours , for example, notes that at Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco, Father Guido Sarducci - the guy from Saturday Night Live - is training labrador retrievers to bring back balls that plop into the water. Apparently, no informative tidbit remains unexplored, judging from this dispatch: "The wind in Pacific Bell Park shouldn't be nearly as bad as it was at 3Com Park (Candlestick). Elaborate wind-tunnel studies from the University of California-Davis say the configuration of Pacific Bell Park will reduce the wind velocity by half. In arctic 3Com Park, the study revealed, there were 44 spots in the stands deemed to be uncomfortable because of wind gusts. At PacBell that figure should drop to 4."

Fastball.com also has a guide to major league ballparks from author Jay Ahuja, who wrote "Fields of Dreams : A Guide to Visiting and Enjoying All 30 Major League Ballparks." Ahuja isn't afraid to diss a venue either, judging from this slam on the Vet in Philly: "Most ballparks of the past had a few individual quirks that made them unlike any other. The designers of Veterans Stadium seem to have gone out of their way to make sure the Vet doesn't have any."

The Occidental Tourist is a magazine writer in Washington, DC. He writes for Maxim, Capital Style and ABCNews.com. His column appears on Tuesdays. E-mail him at tourist@ticked.com.