I’ve been extremely busy at work this summer, and I’ve been looking forward to Labor Day weekend when I could go on another trip and see a new ballpark.
One thing I struggle with is deciding where to go. I often prioritize based on seeing the closest stadium I hadn’t seen each year, or teams that are moving, or ballparks that will no longer be used, or cramming in the most games as possible into the shortest amount of time. But for this weekend, I didn’t have any of those drivers, so I get into my other considerations. Those mainly consist of trying to knock out the short season teams since my window to see them each year is smaller, or trying to get to outliers of teams that I really can’t combine with anything else. It seems that the weather forecast changes hourly, and that everywhere I want to go has about a 30% chance of rain.
So for a while, I was hoping to get to Portland, ME this weekend, since it’s an outlier for me, but driving to New England on Labor Day weekend, plus the potential of lingering issues with the massive flooding from Hurricane Irene between here and there caused me to rethink it a little.
I did decide to hold out to see what the championship matchup for the Appalachian League was going to be and see one of those games. Since the first round of games was between two teams I hadn’t seen and two teams I had seen, I knew that Saturday or Sunday would have a game in a new ballpark for me. The finals will be Johnson City vs. Bluefield, so I plan on seeing the Bluefield Blue Jays on Sunday. My preference was to see a Saturday game so that I would travel on Saturday and Sunday, but I’m hoping that the Labor Day traffic on I-81 in Virginia isn’t so bad. And that the possibility of rain doesn’t come true and holds off until after the game.
9/4 Update: I ended up not going to Bluefield, so I’m done.
I don’t get into minor league ballparks as much. Although if I do visit all 30 MLB ballparks eventually, I’m sure I will need new places to travel.