Ballpark Fun and Games

Some families visit museums, battlefields and beaches on their vacations. Our family heads for America’s ballparks.

We can’t help it. My husband, Bruce Adams, and I were raised on baseball. I spent much of my childhood summers in Cleveland’s cavernous Municipal Stadium watching the Indians play. My twin sister and I would get 32 pairs of tickets each summer from the late Cleveland Press, which showered kids with tickets if they made the honor roll. Thousands of us spent summer afternoons in the bleachers, rooting for Rocky Colavito and eating Frosty Malts.

Bruce’s father spent his boyhood in Washington’s Griffiths Stadium watching games with his friend, Eddie Johnson, whose Hall of Famer father, Walter, was the greatest right-handed pitcher in baseball.

Our first date was at Fenway Park. On our honeymoon in Paris, Bruce tried to get into the U.S. Embassy on a Sunday to get the details of the Baltimore Orioles’ progress in the World Series.

So it makes perfect sense that in the past two years, our family, which now includes children ages 7 and 10, has traveled 25,000 miles across America, attending games at 85 of the best major and minor league baseball parks. Our stated purpose was to research and write a baseball-park guidebook for families (“Ballpark Vacations,� Fodor’s). But our real purpose turned out to be discovering the single best way to learn about a city and have fun in the process. Exploring a city through its ballclub and stadium is a delightful learning experience. A park’s customs and regional foods, its music, announcers, mascots and even the attitude of the fans reflect the culture of each locale.

We’re not alone in our love of baseball in large and small venues. America’s minor league ballparks are enjoying their best attendance since the pre-television years, with 33 million fans pushing through the turnstiles last year. We witnessed sellout after sellout as families discovered the inexpensive magic of a night in a ballpark, with activities that appeal to all ages. Grandma probably won’t ride the Flying Screamer at an amusement park, but she may teach her grandkids how to fill out a scorecard on a summer’s night at a ball field.

And you don’t have to endure a marathon car trip to see some wonderful parks. The western United States has an especially good crop of beautifully sited minor league parks as well as exciting major league stadiums. We visited 15 West Coast and mountain states ballparks on our trip and have some of our best memories from these stops.

At first, we thought our ballpark travels would meld into confusion, as “was that great beef sandwich in Buffalo or Cedar Rapids?� But we have surprisingly distinct memories from our travels.

When we think of Stockton, Calif., for example, we remember exploring the World Wildlife Museum with its ferocious stuffed animals and the sweet, 1950’s-era Pixie Woods Park, where our children played before watching traveling mascot BirdZerk hip-hopping with an umpire at the Stockton Ports game. The Fenway Park-style wall and its 90-foot-tall clock tower spring instantly to mind when we think of the Lake Elsinore Diamond.

Families living in the Los Angeles area are particularly blessed, with three of the country’s newest and most original minor league parks within 60 miles--Rancho Cucamonga’s Epicenter; Lake Elsinore’s Diamond, nestled in the foothills of the Ortega Mountains; and The Ranch in San Bernadino. These parks have beautiful architecture, exceptional landscaping and whimsical building details that give fans a true visual treat. We wondered about the players who spend their minor league years in these fabulous new parks and then graduate to lesser facilities in the bigger leagues.

We loved that the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes have a sense of humor, with their park named the Epicenter and their mascots, Tremor and Aftershock. This is making lemonade out of lemon in earthquake country. In an endearing thank-you to the performer who put its town on the map, the park has a life-size statue of Jack Benny, with violin, in its concourse. On his radio show, Benny used to call out a train conductor’s singsong of California towns, ending with RAN-cho Cuc-a-MON-ga!

No trip to California would be complete without seeing Dodger Stadium because of its history and fan enthusiasm. The state’s other major league stadium that shouldn’t be missed is 3COM/Candlestick Park, if only for nostalgia’s stake. Grab long pants and a sweatshirt and head to the windy park before the team leaves for its new, downtown San Francisco location in China Basin in 2000.

Also in the Bay Area is San Jose’s Municipal Stadium, home of the San Jose Giants. This park not only has unusual food (grilled abalone steak and turkey legs in the patio along the third-base line), but it’s got colorful reproductions of Norman Rockwell baseball prints on the concourse walls.

Heading up the coast, ignore the Mariners’ soulless domed stadium in Seattle until the city’s new park is built, and zero in on the minor league Aquasox in Everett, Wash. Then see how a baseball stadium can exist peacefully within a residential neighborhood when you visit Civic Stadium in Portland, Ore.

If there are young children in your family, don’t miss the Little League Softball World Series in Portland, held each June during the city’s Rose Festival for girls’ teams throughout the world. Like its better-known counterpart for boys in Williamsport, Pa., each August, this is an exciting experience for kids of all ages.

Bruce was among thousands of fans who filled the charming ball field at the Alpenrose Dairy during last summer’s competition. The series is held on a working dairy farm that also hosts a bicycle track, a miniature Western village, a 600-seat opera house and a music and doll museum. The grandstand is filled with flowers, and the scoreboard is painted with roses. It’s one of the nation’s prettiest settings for a ballgame.

Continuing north, you’ll pray for no rain in Vancouver so that you can see a Triple AAA, California Angels-affiliate Canadians game in Nat Bailey Stadium.

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We prepared for our trip by poring over the annual directory published each March by Baseball America. Titled “Baseball America’s Directory,� it’s sold in bookstores or may be mail-ordered ($12.95) by calling (800) 845-2726. It lists all the major and minor league teams and their schedules. More casual visitors can call the ballparks in cities they plan to visit to see if the team will be in town during their stay. Or one can visit the teams’ Web sites, which all list their schedules. (For minor leagues, it’s www.minorleaguebaseball.com/teams/Type in Name of City Here/. For major league teams, it’s www.majorleaguebaseball.com.

Unless you’re trying to visit the wildly popular Rancho Cucamonga, Jacobs Field in Cleveland, Coors Field in Denver, the St. Paul, Minn., Saints at Midway Stadium or Baltimore’s Camden Yards for a hotly contested game, you probably won’t need advance tickets. In most minor league parks, tickets cost $3 to $4 for children and $5 to $7 for adults. Major league prices are double and triple those costs, depending on your seats.

Usually, we tried to stay at the visiting team’s hotel so that our kids would have an opportunity to run into players in the lobby, as they boarded the team bus or swam in the pool. Teams change hotels frequently when they get a better lodging deal, so you’ll want to call ahead to the stadium ticket office (see Guidebook on this page for some stadium numbers) to see which hotel they’re using this season. Sometimes fans who stay at team hotels are given free tickets to the games if they ask for them.

On both summers’ trips, we made it a habit to take in some family attractions, such as science centers, zoos, historical sights or amusement parks during the day. We’d then cool off in the motel pool and head for the ballpark, recharged for a night of baseball.

As soon as you get to the park, have your children enter the on-field contests. The entry blanks usually are in the program. You stuff the filled-out forms into wooden boxes, and the park staff draws several for lucky fans to participate in races with the mascot, water balloon baseball, dugout bowling or other crazy contests. If your kids are under 12, it’s wise to pin their tickets to a jacket or pocket.

In all but the smallest minor league parks, write down where you parked. In the excitement of arrival, you can forget, and nothing’s more deflating of a night’s fun than a car search. You may find seemingly choice parking spaces right next to the stadium in the minor leagues. If the rest of the lot is filled, think twice about parking there. It usually means that row is foul-ball heaven. Again, a cracked windshield can really take the joy out of a summer night. Check with locals in the parking lot if you’re not a regular.

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From crab soup to carmelized nuts, you’ll find unusual food at ballparks these days, so you don’t have to despair over the prospect of yet another hot dog or pizza slice. San Francisco’s Candlestick is a cornucopia of good food, from prepared-before-your-eyes Mexican dishes to a 40-clove garlic sandwich, which was our vote for best ballpark food to eat alone. Even the smaller parks have grills, where at the minimum you can get decent chicken.

At Rancho Cucamonga, there are veggie and fruit plates, a real boon for getting something healthy into your child’s mouth. In Everett, the Aquasox sell San Francisco’s wonderful It’s It ice cream bar. The concession stands also provide hot vegetable soup, lattes and a blanket rental to warm you up in the late innings.

Visiting ballparks is a great way to see America, especially for a mom who wants to spend the summer in shorts and a T-shirt, with no cooking or cleaning responsibilities. We used hotel laundermats, and marveled at how much more time we seemed to have without household chores.

We would engage in a two-minute cleanup of our Dodge Caravan each morning to find the discarded banana peels and missing sunglasses. Another road rule was stopping every two hours for some exercise and bathroom breaks. To cut down on sugar highs, everyone was allowed only one soda pop per day.

Good maps are essential. It’s worth it to join AAA just to get the regional and city maps of every place you want to visit.

Motel 8s were the surprise bargain of our odyssey. They’re not in scenic areas, as a rule, but are $20 cheaper than the standard interstate chain motel. Locally owned and surprise-inspected four times a year, they were clean and more than adequate for our just-passing-through schedule.

One trip highlight for the children was the “Field of Dreams� movie site in Dyersville, Iowa, where you can walk out of the cornfield just like the players did. During the summer, there’s a pickup game at the field each day. Visiting the site is free, and one of the two concession stands will loan you bats, gloves and balls.

But you don’t have to travel to an Iowa farm to find this community spirit. By visiting ballparks, you can teach your children that California and the West are filled with real communities that come out to the ballpark and support their teams. You can dispel the visitor’s notion that California is a network of freeways punctuated by Disneyland and Sea World. Inside stadiums, you gain an appreciation for the locale, its sportsmanship as well as the crazy home-grown game we call baseball.

Engel is director of the Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation. Their book, “Ballpark Vacations: Great Family Trips to Minor League and Classic Major League Baseball Parks Across America� (Fodor’s, $16.50), was published this year.

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GUIDEBOOK

Catching the Leagues

Rancho Cucamonga Quakes: The Epicenter, 8408 Rochester Ave., Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91730; telephone (909) 481-5252. California League, Class A, affiliate of the San Diego Padres. Call ahead and order reserved tickets. The $4.50 view seats are fine, as is the $5 cafe seating. Parking $2.

San Bernardino Stampede: The Ranch, 208 South E St., between Mill Street and Rialto Avenue, San Bernardino, CA 92401; tel. (909) 888-9922. California League, Class A, affiliate of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Best bargain seats are in the upper boxes of this brand-new stadium. On the third-base side, you have the sun at your back. Parking $2.

Lake Elsinore Storm: The Diamond, 500 Diamond Drive, Lake Elsinore, CA 92530; tel. (909) 245-4487. California League, Class A, affiliate of the Anaheim Angels. General admission puts you on a grassy berm beyond first base. Parking $2.

San Jose Giants: Municipal Stadium, 588 E. Alma Ave., San Jose, CA 95112; tel. (408) 297-1435. California League, Class A, affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. Sit on the first-base side to avoid sun in your eyes. Parking $3.

Stockton Ports: Billy Hebert Field, Oak Park, Sutter Street and Alpine Avenue, Stockton, CA 95204; tel. (209) 944-5943. California League, Class A, affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers. General admission seats are excellent here, especially on the third-base side to avoid the sun. Free parking.

Portland Rockies: Civic Stadium, 1844 S.W. Morrison St., Portland, OR 97205; tel. (503) 223-2837.Northwest League, Short Season A, affiliate of the Colorado Rockies. Street parking.

Everett Aquasox: Everett Memorial Stadium, 39th Street and Broadway, Everett, WA 98201; tel. (425) 258-3673. Northwest League, Short Season A, affiliate of the Seattle Mariners. Free parking.

Vancouver Canadians: Nat Bailey Stadium, 4601 Ontario St., Vancouver, BC V5V 3H4; tel. (604) 872-5232. Pacific Coast League, Class AAA, affiliate of the Anaheim Angels. Upper reserved seats are close to the action. Parking about $1.50.