Our Mission and This Year's Trip

BIB2024 with the Frisco Roughriders Mascots (sorry to the random thumb!)

Our Mission

We are just four white-collar schlubs on the downside of our mediocre middle-management careers in telecommunications (well, actually, one of us has moved in to the banking industry, one into wholesales systems development, and one retired!). We just want to get away from the families, and the jobs, and all the worries once a year and take in a little baseball together.

We first met in 1990 as part of work assignment in New Jersey. We quickly discovered we had a common bond for baseball and that's when we first started talking about seeing every major league ballpark. At some point we picked up the name of 'Brothers in Baseball' and we started making road trips to ballparks such as Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and of course, Cooperstown.

We've taken several trips together since then, and we feel like we're getting closer to our goal. Together we've seen 92 baseball games: some in ballparks that are no longer there, some in brand-new stadiums, and only three rain-outs. Along the way we discovered the simple and innocent pleasure of minor league baseball, so we now try to see as many minor league games as we can as part of each trip. We might hit two minor league games and a major on a trip, or any combination we can manage to schedule and road trip over a long weekend..

We are often asked, "What will you do when you've seen every major league ballpark?" Well, there are a nearly infinite number of minor and independent and rookie and winter leagues that should keep us busy until they take away our driver's licenses and our kids start putting us in rest homes.

Our usual method of travel is to fly into the first city's game on Thursday or Friday and then see three or four different games over a long weekend before we return to our homes.

Some guys may get more press than we do by doing every MLB ballpark in a single season and then writing a book about it, but we're just working stiffs, living all over this great country of ours, getting together once a year to catch up on the journey of life and get a little sunburned at a ballgame or three.

Scott, ever the thorough planner, has worked out a schedule for trips out to 2026:

BIB2022: Baltimore and Washington and a minor league game or two in Maryland and Virginia-COMPLETED July 2022
BIB2023: Minnesota Twins and the Dakotas minor league teams--COMPLETED August 2023
BIB2024: Marlins and Rays (but the Rays just announced a new stadium deal so we will delay the revisit to that wacky Sunshine State until the new Rays' home is built, so we headed to Texas to see the Rangers' "new" home with some minors tossed in)-COMPLETED July 2024
BIB2025: A return to Yankee Stadium to celebrate the 35th anniversary of our first game together, along with hitting the 100 game milestone!
BIB2026: Oakland or Las Vegas (if they've relocated to a new stadium by then), or Florida

We're also thinking about combining a visit to tennis' US Open in New York on that 2025 trip, and Scott is cooking up an Alaska minor league swing just to make things interesting.

As you can see, we're still crazy after all these years, and plan on still going strong 30+ years after we started this journey.

MLB Parks to go as of 2024:

Pacific time zone: complete! Unless the A's ever get a new stadium in our lifetimes, which at this point it looks like we may need to go to Las Vegas (where we can catch the new A's AAA affiliate stadium for their Aviators!
Central: Milwaukee Brewers
Eastern: Cincinnati Reds, Miami Marlins, New York Yankees
And of course, MLB powers that be keep talking about expansion and continue to threaten cities to build new ballparks, so we'll have enough ballparks to visit until we're confined to Rest Homes!

BIB2024 Hella Heat and Humidity II is complete!

UPDATE! We weren't quite ready for the 100+ Heat Index, but we had baseball to see! Scott's plan had us flying in to Dallas on the morning of the Fourth of July, but Mark, coming in from SF, needed to come in a day early and he hoped for better luck with the Hertz rental car this trip. We caught the night game on The Fourth in Frisco, TX between the Arkansas Travelers vs. the hometown Roughriders. Informal concensus ranks their ballpark #1 in the minors. On Friday we headed south to Sugar Land, TX to catch the hometown Space Cowboys play the Round Rock Express. Saturday we headed to San Antonio to catch the Missions play the Corpus Christi Hooks, but we suffered our third rainout after an inning and a half. To wrap up the trip on Sunday, we headed back to Dallas to catch the Rangers play the Rays. Along the way, Mark experienced his first two Buc-ees and Buffalo Wild Wings (B-Dub for those in the know), and we had a very crowded visit to the Johnson Space Center. Remember to check below for Kevin's pun-filled trip report and sign in to our Guest Book below and tell us what you think about our trips.

BIB2024: The HellaHeat&Humidity Tour II

Given our proclivity for scheduling trips in July and August, we’ve had some BIB trips over the years that absolutely made our teeth sweat. Just two years ago, we were in the nation’s capital traveling in a van with a malfunctioning climate system for the “DC-with-No-AC” tour. The year before that, it was Arkansas for the “Hot Springs Is Aptly Named” tour. In 2005, before the Marlins had a domed stadium, Scott needed to seek shelter in the concourse under the seats during the “Bringin’ the High Heatstroke” tour. And who can forget the original “BIB Hell-A-Heat and Humidity Tour” (as documented on the Round Rock Express scoreboard) in 2003, on our maiden voyage through the Lone Star State. Well, the 2024 Independence Day weekend in Texas can hang with any of them as a real torture of a scorcher and can claim its own spot in the BIB Hall of Flame.

We weren’t out of the airport, in fact we weren’t even out of the terminal area, before we’d missed our first turnoff. It’s really tough to make a wrong turn with a GPS, but where there’s a will, there’s a Waze. Once we recovered from that little slip-up, we were on our way to the Ft. Worth Stockyards. As soon as we got there and stepped out of the car, we realized that Texas in July is no joke, and started looking for the nearest air-conditioned lunch spot. Someone suggested brisket at Riscky’s Barb-B-Q. No one seemed to have a beef with that.

Every museum in the Stockyards was closed for the July 4^th holiday, but Gerry pointed us toward Billy Bob’s, billed as the world’s largest honky tonk. This begs the question of whether all tonks are honky and whether there might actually be some other type of tonk somewhere that is actually larger than Billy Bob’s. Regardless, it was open, it was cool, and since we are, after all, 4 white guys, a honky tonk seemed like our kind of tonk.

We hung around the Stockyards long enough to see the 4pm cattle drive, a parade of Texas longhorns (real ones, not Ricky Willliams or Earl Campbell) down East Exchange Avenue. It authentically reenacts the period from the 1850’s until the 1910’s, when 27 million cattle were driven from Texas to railheads in Kansas for shipment to stockyards in St. Louis and points east, and direct to Chicago. They could cover up to 25 miles a day, but could only move as fast as the slowest member of the herd. So it was key to avoid a bum steer.

The Frisco Roughriders hosted the Arkansas Travelers on Thursday evening at Riders Field, one of the most architecturally interesting parks in the minors. It is a series of 9 interconnected pavilions with a “coastal Galveston aesthetic” (seriously, that’s what they call it) that includes the Bull Moose Saloon down the left field line and a lazy river beyond the right field wall. They had an interesting July Fourth promotional giveaway: a men’s tank top with a cartoonish Teddy Roosevelt on the front. The Roughriders describe their team colors as slate blue, navy, cream, and scorched red, but as hot as it was at gametime, anybody choosing to wear that wife-beater looking thing gave off a vibe that could best be described as scorched redneck. Frisco quickly jumped out to a 6-0 lead in the first inning. They wound up hanging on for dear life, closing out a 7-6 win with a double play to end the game. Along the way, we met a lovely couple named Harvey and Rebecca, the latter of whom was the Roughriders’ seamstress. None of us even realized that this was a function that baseball team needed, but apparently it is sew. Fourth of July or not, we opted to forgo the post-game fireworks once it became obvious that it was going to take a good twenty minutes after the game ended to get fans into position on the field to view them. On the way to our hotel for the evening, Gerry began grousing about the poor level of service he gets from his bank, a frustration he has expressed in the past. We all can relate, having worked in telecom, another industry rife with occasionally substandard levels of customer care. So Kevin took the opportunity to sarcastically remind Gerry that his bank probably lives by the motto, “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”

Friday began with Breakfast at the Black Bear Diner in Mesquite, Texas, but the real attraction was a mid-morning stop on the way to Houston at Buc-ee’s, the part-gas-station-part-convenience-store-part-beaver-themed-amusement park chain that has only recently begun to surge beyond its southern origins. No surprise that the chain started in Texas, where everything is bigger, given the enormous scale of these places. In fact, Gerry and Mark, as first-time visitors, were left gawking at the roughly 100 gas pumps and enormous building that is reminiscent less of a large convenience store than of a small distribution center…best little warehouse in Texas.

Know what else was enormous? The crowd at Johnson Space Center in Houston. All the tours were booked by the time we arrived, so we were relegated to mostly watching astronaut videos in air-conditioned theaters. That is, except for the time that Mark, Gerry and Scott spent waiting in a Texas-sized outdoor line to walk through the shuttle replica Independence and the original NASA 905 shuttle carrier aircraft on which it sits. The shuttle’s thermal tiles can protect it from up to 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, or just slightly more than the temperature outside at Johnson Space center on July 4 weekend.

Speaking of heat, we were introduced to Texas Twinkies at Spectators Bar and Grill in Sugarland, Texas. One might think that regular Twinkies would be the order of the day in a place called Sugarland, but Texas Twinkies involve a bacon-wrapped jalapeno pepper stuffed with Philly cheesesteak mix. Traditional Twinkies rot your teeth; Texas Twinkies burn the enamel right off of them. At Constellation Field, just a short 3 miles away and home to the Sugarland Space Cowboys, the promotional giveaway was a Justin Verlander Astros jersey, a far more versatile piece of apparel than the prior night’s giveaway. The only thing the previous evening’s’ tank top might pair well with is a mullet.

Constellation Field itself has a few interesting features – most notably a large scoreboard shaped like the state of Texas in center field and a miniature children’s water park right next to it called the Splash Pad. The latter looked pretty inviting to the four of us, but one evening of cooling off in the Texas heat did not seem like a good trade-off for the four of us never again being allowed to live within 1000 feet of a grade school.

The Space Cowboys were playing the Round Rock Express, whose third baseman had the misfortune of somehow ripping open one leg of his uniform pants to expose a good-sized swath of thigh. His bad luck was compounded by the fact that, unlike the Frisco Roughriders, the Express evidently do not keep anyone who specializes in needlework on the payroll. Seams unfortunate. Thus, only the fans with a view of his bare thigh, but not his pant leg itself, were left in stitches.

Gerry has a son named Tyler, who is amazing in his own right. Nevertheless, he is not The Amazing Tyler, as seen on America's Got Talent, Ripley's Believe it or Not, ESPN and halftime shows across the country. Between innings, The Amazing Tyler regaled the Constellation Field crowd with his ability to balance anything (and we do mean anything) on his face. Baseball bat? Easy peasey. Bucket of popcorn? Child’s play. Foot-long soft plastic dinosaur? Nailed it. Four Nike tennis shoes stacked inside each other? Puh-leaz. Ironing Board? Of course. Ten-foot step ladder? Uh-huh. Impressive individual…in a carny sort of way. Not sure how much calling there can really be for a skill set this obscure. Seems like a tough way to make a living. Can’t help but wonder if the only thing he struggles to balance is his checkbook.

For the second night in a row, we saw the home team pull-off a high-wire act for a one-run win, this time surviving a two-on, none out situation in the top of the ninth to escape with a 3-2 victory. Unlike the prior evening in Frisco, the folks in Sugarland revved up the post-game fireworks post-haste, and like the name of their town, they were sweet.

Saturday morning began with breakfast in Katy, Texas, where we’d spent the night. We were looking forward to a morning stop to gas-up at the original Buc-ee’s in Luling, TX (yay!), only to find out that it had burned to the ground in a massive fire the previous Monday (bummer). Upon further review, we learned that it had been in the process of being razed anyway and a new Buc-ee’s – the world’s largest convenience store – was already opened across the street (yay!). Unfortunately, when we got there, we shouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the world’s largest convenience store has the world’s largest traffic jam waiting to get in (bummer), so we had to settle for fuel from somewhere a little less trendy. Fortunately, on the other side of the expressway, we found a crazy little thing called Love’s. And let’s be honest – if the only thing you’re after is gasoline, all you need is Love’s.

Our mission for the morning was, well, to visit a couple of the San Antonio missions. First, it was Mission San Juan, established in 1716, but transferred to its current rural setting in 1731. There remains a very well-preserved stone church, built in 1756. Next up was Mission San José, or more properly, “San José y San Miguel de Aguayo”. Founded in 1720, the so-called “Queen of the Missions” operated for 104 years until 1824. In 1931, Franciscans returned and live there today. They adhere to strict vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, so to be a member of the Order, founded by St. Francis in 1209, you can’t be Assisi.

After a short drive downtown, we had lunch at The Original Mexican Restaurant on San Antonio’s Riverwalk, where we paid the mariachi band to play Malagueña. originally the sixth movement of Lecuona's Suite Andalucía. Thus inspired, and after consuming Mexican meals of ample portions, we took time for four movements ourselves before we left the restaurant. Only a short walk away was the Alamo, where we happened to run into a family we’d seen at the Sugarland Space Cowboys game the night before. They were actually squeezing the visit to San Antonio in between two minor league games in Sugarland. Seems like a long way to go for a day trip, but I guess if you’re visiting Texas, you can’t forget the Alamo. There was a brand new collection of Alamo memorabilia on display in a newly constructed museum on the ground of what was technically our third mission of the day. Much of the collection was donated by, of all people, Phil Collins (yes, that one). The dude is from the UK, so it’s hard to figure where his affinity for Texas history has its Genesis.

Saturday evening’s game pitted the San Antonio Missions versus the visiting Corpus Christ Hooks. A few innings into the game, a steady rain provided both some relief from the heat and a beautiful rainbow beyond the centerfield fence. Unfortunately, it also provided an end to the game, as it was cancelled before becoming an official contest. That sent us heading for the Buffalo Wild Wings across the parking lot from our Drury Inn. Turns out Mark had never been to a B Dubs, making it officially unMarked territory.

We had a long drive ahead of us Sunday morning, so it was a light breakfast at the hotel and off toward Arlington. We did find time to stop at yet another Buc-ee’s, though, this time in Temple, TX (if anyone asks, we spent a portion of Sunday morning at Temple). Buc-ee’s thus became 2024’s version of 2023’s Culver’s – that is, a chain establishment some of us had never patronized before, but then proceeded to visit multiple times on the same trip. We even took a picture with the statue of Bucc-ee, so that years from now we will have photographic evidence of our beaver tale.

Globe Life Field, the Texas Rangers’ home, is now part of a complex that includes the Texas Live! entertainment center and Choctaw Stadium, the erstwhile Ballpark at Arlington (a.k.a. Globe Life Park in Arlington – not to be confused with Globe Life Field). After a walk from Parking Lot N that felt like a walk across the sun, we settled into a place at the former called Sports and Social Arlington to pre-game with drinks and spicy chips and salsa. There are a few things not to like about Globe Life Field, from the weird non-intuitive scoreboard layout, to the maniacal seat enforcement, to the metal bar inconveniently placed at eye level on the railing in front of our seats, to the pitch speed indicator whose extra digit to the right of the decimal seems superfluous and a little high-brow for our liking. On the other hand, there was the roof to protect us from the heat (we may be baseball purists in many respects, but give us ceiling vs. searing any day) and what the Wiener Connoisseur has officially recognized as MLB’s largest weiner. At 24 inches long, the chili and cheese-covered Boomstick, can be yours for $32.96, or just a little more than $1.37 an inch. If that doesn’t seem like quite enough ballpark food, there’s also the Boomstick Burger, described as a 2-foot beef patty topped with chili, nacho cheese, jalapenos, and crisp onion rings. At $34.99, the Rangers say it is designed (conveniently for a BIB trip) to feed up to four people, as if that last caveat somehow makes it seem any less a festival of gluttony.

Because of early flight times for Kevin and Scott, we had to leave just a little before the end of a 13-2 thrashing of the Tampa Rays. Everyone not named Gerry was flying out of Love Field. Since Mark had the last flight, he got to drive the first two guys to Love Field, take Gerry all the way to DFW, then turn around and come back to deliver the rental car and himself to Love Field. For poor Mark, in the words of Led Zeppelin, that was a whole lotta Love. It was probably poetic justice then, that Mark was the only one to make it home on time. With weather-related flight delays and at least one cancellation, Gerry arrived at 2:00am, Scott at 3:34am, and Kevin at 10:45am the next morning. You may be aware that in 2023, Texas had an outmigration rate of 11.7%, which was the lowest in the country. Now we know why…nobody can get out.

Closing out BIB2023: Target Field and the Twins

BIB2023: Sioux Falls Canaries' Birdcage

BIB2023: A Very Presidential Tour

Despite the fact that Gerry’s was the first flight out of Milwaukee on Wednesday morning, it still managed to be delayed long enough that he’d miss his connecting flight in Minneapolis. Kevin and Scott were also connecting through Minneapolis, but arrived to find that Gerry wasn’t there. Mark had picked up a rental car from the crack staff (foreshadowing) at Hertz in Minneapolis earlier in the morning. Since we’d be wrapping up the trip in Minneapolis, the idea was to pick up the car and drop it off at the same airport in order to get a cheaper rate. He was about 100 miles into his drive to meet what he thought would be the rest of the foursome at Fargo airport which, by the way, has only 5 gates - that’s only 4 more than were on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. It was Kevin and Scott, calling to see how receptive Mark might be to turning around and waiting with the two of them for Gerry to arrive in Minneapolis, then driving together to Fargo. Mark was about as receptive as one might be to a surprise colonoscopy. So Kevin and Scott flew ahead, as planned, to Fargo and, along with Mark, would meet up with Gerry at Newman Outdoor Field when he arrived that evening.

For those who may never have seen the movie Fargo, it is about a small-time shyster who hatches a money-making scheme that involves hiring two thugs to kidnap his own wife. Things begin to spin wildly out of control when one of the thugs shoots a state trooper. Ultimately one of the thugs winds up killing the other and disposing of him using a woodchipper (in other words, it’s a grate film). Well, the fact that that very woodchipper is now on display at the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Center made the choice of our first destination in Fargo an easy one. In fact, you might say there wasn’t a shred of doubt. The center’s attendant even gave us a great suggestion for lunch: the aptly named Beer & Fish Co. We can confirm that it served both.

Next on the day one agenda was the Hjemkomst Center, technically in Moorhead, Minnesota, but sitting right next to the river that divides Minnesota from North Dakota. It shares its name, which means “homecoming” in Norwegian, with a replica of a Viking ship constructed between 1974 and 1980 and modeled after a ship that was discovered in Norway in 1880. The guy who conjured up the idea of constructing this thing and floating around Lake Superior in it, Robert Asp, had to have been just a bubble off plumb. But after he died in 1980, it was his family that proved to be complete lunatics by actually sailing this monstrosity from Duluth, Minnesota to Oslo, Norway. We can barely survive 4 and a half days in an SUV stopping at baseball parks and quirky roadside attractions, let alone 3 months on open seas, once having to repair a 14-foot long storm-induced crack in the hull.

Since this is a baseball trip, here’s a riddle: what 9-man squad took 7 years before being caught stealing? Turns out it’s not a baseball team at all, but rather the 9 thieves who were charged in June 2023 with the July 2016 pilfering of Roger Maris’ 1960 MVP Award and Hickok Belt (awarded to the best professional athlete of 1961) from the museum of Fargo’s favorite son, inconspicuously located in the West Acres Shopping Center. That was our next stop, where, sure enough, there were the vacant spots where the plaque and belt used to be, with a note denouncing the “brazen thieves” who committed this “disgraceful act”. So many questions. These nitwits cut the belt in half and melted down the plaque. Why? And how did it take 9 guys to steal two small items from what amounts to a retail display case? Fargo meets Mall Cop meets Ocean’s Eleven.

Roger Maris is best known for the 61 times he went deep in 1961. Less discussed is the last time he went deep in 1985…six feet deep in Holy Cross Cemetery, to be specific. With some time to blow before the Lincoln Saltdogs vs. Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks that evening, we paid a visit to his grave, appropriately marked with a diamond-shaped headstone at which visitors had left a glove, a ballcap, a number of baseballs, and a few golf balls. Still looking to burn some clock before the ballgame, we found a bar near the ballpark called Herd & Horns. We can confirm that it served neither.

It was a large and early-arriving crowd at the ballpark for the “Championship Baseball Giveaway”. Apparently the Redhawks won the inaugural championship of the American Association of Professional Baseball in 2022, though you wouldn’t have known it by the 10-1 thumping that the Saltdogs put on them this night. The game had two memorable highlights. First, visiting manager Brett Jodie got ejected for arguing that a successful pickoff should have been called a balk and, in so-doing, using an f-word that was decidedly not “Fargo”. Second, Gerry finally arrived, after a day spent using the same non-Fargo word to describe his airline and pondering whether Delta is a portmanteau word meaning “delivered tardy”.

A 90-minute drive followed the game so that we could start fresh Thursday morning in Jamestown, ND. Why Jamestown, you ask? Well, because every one of our trips must feature at least one freakishly large statue, and Jamestown is the home to the World’s Largest Buffalo Monument (in all caps – that’s the official name).

To build the excitement to a fever pitch, we started with breakfast at the Depot Café. Our waitress had that distinctive northern Midwest accent, where an answer in the affirmative is pronounced “yaw” and reinforced with “you betcha”. It was also pretty clear that literally every other patron knew each other, so when we walked in, we got that quizzical “You ain’t from around these parts, are ya?” look that is usually reserved for sideshow carnies and suspected felons. Clear across the other side of the thriving Jamestown metroplex (a drive of 7 minutes) was Dakota Thunder, the alternative name of the 26-foot high, 60-ton steel and gunite buffalo. It was dedicated in 1960 and, since Wikipedia notes that it is anatomically correct, we can confidently assert that it was erected in 1959. We spent just a short time there, long enough to get a few pictures underneath the World’s Largest Buffalo naughty parts, and then it was bye-bye bison.

On the way to Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, Scott raised the philosophical question “How will BIB end?” Death of a member? A health condition that renders one of us unfit for travel and leaves the group unable to reach its 4-person quorum? Kevin suggested that it might end like the series finale of Newhart in 1990, where Gerry wakes up next to his first wife, Sue, and realizes the last third-of-a-century has all been a bizarre dream. Over the last 33 years, we’ve spent a lot of time pondering windups, but not a lot of time pondering wind downs. T.S. Eliott would no doubt say that BIB will end not with a bang, but a whimper, but we prefer to think that it will end with something of proportions that are more, well, BIBlical.

Two memories will stick with us from Fort Abraham Lincoln. One was the story documented in the visitor center of a laundress at the fort in the mid 1870’s known as “old Nash”. She was extraordinarily popular, though, it was noted, “not known for her external beauty”. While at the fort, she married her fourth husband, a Sergeant John Noonan who, we must conclude, had to have been a few peas short of a casserole. Only upon the death of Old Nash was it revealed that she was actually a man. A reporter quoted Sergeant Noonan, shortly after her death, as remaining adamant that he didn’t know his wife was a man. In fact, he said, they had been trying very hard to have a baby.” Dances with Wolves meets The Crying Game.

The second memorable experience involved the meticulously recreated “On-A-Slant Indian Village” that existed for nearly 200 years prior to the fort’s being settled there. It was so meticulously recreated that we were all nearly asphyxiated by the not-so-well-ventilated bonfire inside one of the five earthlodges (think big mud huts). Given that General George Armstrong Custer was the first commander of Ft. Abraham Lincoln, one can’t help but wonder if it was really a bullet that took him down at Little Big Horn, or just a latent case of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Two hours west of Fort Abraham Lincoln was the Painted Canyon Overlook in the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, on the upper margin of the Badlands. It served as the starting point for a guided (by Mark, who had visited not too long ago) tour of the park’s wildlife. We enjoyed the vast prairie dog towns and a 0.4 mile walk to a ridge overlooking the Little Missouri River. The best we could do though in terms of bison, the main attraction, was to see a few from several hundred yards away. Bison experience rating: Fair.

The lunch selection was Culvers, completing the Custer and Custard tandem by mid-day. It was on the drive afterward toward Rapid City, South Dakota that we encountered a long stretch of highway that had just been through grinding in advance of being repaved and was pelting our SUV with debris. Lots of it. No one has been more sick of pebbles constantly in their face since Bamm-Bamm. Somewhere along this drive, we first noticed about a four-inch crack in the upper driver’s side windshield. This was to become our journey’s equivalent of the Hiemkomst storm-induced crack in the hull. On a positive note, we did drive past quite a few fenced-in buffalo close to the road. Bison experience rating: Good.

With the crack growing…five inches…six inches…seven inches, we called an audible and diverted ourselves through Sturgis, just to see what all the fuss is about. The 2023 motorcycle rally had just ended less than a week earlier and you could tell. The place looked rough…like the Keith Richards of small towns. Finally arriving in Rapid City, we had a rare opportunity for a dinner that was not in a ballpark, so we selected a place called Minervas. It probably says something about us that our idea of upscale dining is a place attached to a Best Western. Nevertheless, they had a bison steak wrapped in bacon that was to die for. Bison experience rating: Delicious.

On the drive to Rapid City, Gerry had taken to the internet to study the options for slowing the growth of a windshield crack. Evidently, finding a Hertz location to swap out the car was not one of them. Instead, after dinner, we stopped at Walmart, where Gerry procured Super Glue, clear tape, cleaning fluid, and some paper towels (this probably would have been the first choice of the crew on the Hjemkomst, but for the fact that there are no Walmarts on the open seas). Now we had all the raw materials we needed to deal with the windshield crack and have enough left over to take a hostage or two, secure them to their chairs, and scrub the crime scene.

Friday morning, Gerry decided to: 1) get up early, 2) Super Glue the windshield crack, and 3) gas up the SUV. Under the heading of “no good deed goes unpunished”, Gerry somehow inadvertently hit the windshield wipers somewhere between steps 2 and 3. With goop now essentially everywhere, one could just imagine the wipers getting permanently glued to the windshield at about a 45-degree angle so that our SUV would look like a surprised Eugene Levy to anyone who saw us coming in their rear-view mirror. Instead, we hit up another Walmart on the way to Mt. Rushmore for Goo Gone, razor blades and more paper towels. If Walmart tracks purchases across locations, Gerry has to be on some kind of terrorist watch list.

Mt. Rushmore was next on the agenda. There’s something peculiar about seeing four men, framed by ponderosa pine trees in the Black Hills of South Dakota, permanently associated with one another and motionless for decades. You could tell that’s what the guy was thinking who we asked to take our picture. Only about 9 miles away was our next stop at Crazy Horse, more or less a poor man’s Mt. Rushmore. Mt. Rushmore took 14 years to carve. When Crazy Horse was started, it was estimated that it would take 30 years to complete. It is now 75 years in and it is currently estimated that just the hand, arm, shoulder, hairline, and top of the horse's head will take until 2037. There is no set date for it to be totally completed, though some have speculated that it might take another 50 years. By that time, BIB will have, in fact, ended (though we still don’t know how); nuclear holocaust may have left the earth void of all life forms except cockroaches and Cher; and our SUV’s windshield still will have traces of Super Glue.

On the way to Sioux City, we paused for a second consecutive lunch at Culvers, as the temperature outside reached 103 degrees – hard to believe given that just a couple of days earlier, the stiff breeze in Fargo had made it seem almost chilly. Meanwhile, our crack had grown to over a foot in length, so we broke out the clear tape for the first time. It didn’t do anything to slow the crack-creep, but it did make for a nice distraction in Mark’s sightline as he was driving.

We mentioned earlier that every one of our trips must feature at least one freakishly large statue. Well, this trip actually featured a colossi trifecta. The next was the Dignity of Earth and Sky on the eastern banks of the Missouri River in Chamberlain, South Dakota. The 50-foot tall Native American woman was completed in 2016 and wears a quilt over her shoulders with 128 stainless steel blue diamond shapes. While Wikipedia claims that three Native American women from Rapid City served as models for the sculpture, that seems unlikely, since the statue has neither three heads nor six arms.

Between the Dignity statue and a ballgame in Sioux Falls, we made a short detour to see “The World’s Only Corn Palace” (as if the world needed more than one) in Mitchell, South Dakota. It’s a genuine sports and events center that happens to be covered in murals and patterns that are made from corn and other grains, with a new design constructed each year. It has actually been the source of some controversy, as it has received Department of Homeland Security funding on several occasions, including in 2009 to protect a "new Fiberglass statue of the Corn Palace mascot Cornelius" across the street. A-maize-ing. Has DHS lost its last kernel of common sense? And exactly who would attack a corn palace? Orville Redenbacher?

At Sioux Falls Field, a.k.a., the Bird Cage, we continued with our avian theme (recall our first game was at the Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks) by watching the Sioux Falls Canaries drop a 5-0 shutout on the Sioux City Explorers. Like Gerry says, why settle for one Sioux, when you can have two? It was a rare 117-pitch complete game shutout for Canary pitcher Seth Miller. There was a lot to keep us entertained between mascot Harry Canary, the fact that it was St. Patrick’s Day night at the ballpark (complete with green beer), multiple visiting coaches’ being ejected, and the former owner sitting right next to us and chatting us up for much of the night.

Saturday began at the Original Pancake House, where Kevin somehow nearly choked to death…on a sip of water. His perfectly executed spit take nearly provided an answer to the question “How might BIB end?” that would have been the perfect BIB-esque mix of macabre and hilarious.

Our first stop after we crossed back into Minnesota was our third freakishly large statue, this time the 55-foot tall Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota, which is currently the tenth tallest free-standing statue in the United States. We can happily report that, unlike the World’s Largest Buffalo, JGG is NOT anatomically correct. No asparagus and brussels sprouts to have to edit out of photos. Nevertheless, when we asked a teen-age girl to take our picture under the statue, she took us a little too literally by taking a landscape orientation picture of the four of us straddled by two giant green feet. After we had a good laugh looking at the photos, we had a more seasoned photographer (read “older guy”) take a couple more in portrait mode that captured both us and the totality of the giant leafy fella.

Having stopped at attractions representing two of the basic food groups, grains (Corn Palace) and vegetables (Jolly Green Giant), we moved on to a protein-themed stop at the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota, home to Hormel’s headquarters. This is the type of museum that is right in our wheelhouse: quirky and free. The workers are called SPAMbassadors, for Pete’s sake. Betcha didn’t know that SPAM comes in far more flavors than you ever dreamed (and seriously, if you dream about SPAM, it’s time to see a therapist). There are “regular” flavors like teriyaki, jalapeno, hickory smoke, and bacon that are plenty offbeat, but it’s the seasonal flavors like figgy pudding and pumpkin spice that really peg the weird-o-meter. We also learned that SPAM as a term for unwanted emails originated with a Monty Python skit about a restaurant that served nothing but SPAM. Naturally, the first thing we did upon walking outside was find a place for lunch around the corner that served – what else? – SPAMburgers.

With some time to blow once we arrived in the Twin Cities, we headed for the Mall of America, which consists of 4 floors, each of which is a rectangle with a perimeter of a little over a mile surrounding an indoor amusement park. It also happens to be built on the sight of the old Metropolitan Stadium that was home to both the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings from 1961 to 1981. The Twins connection is memorialized by a plaque on the site where home plate used to be and a chair bolted to a wall where Harmon’s Killebrew’s stadium record 522-foot home run landed in 1967. So it once was a ballpark and is now an amusement park. But park is also a verb, and trying to do so on the day we visited was like participating in the Hunger Games. And if that wasn’t enough to fry our nerves, there were easily thousands of kids inside the place. We snapped our pictures of the home plate plaque and Killebrew home run chair and ran from the place like Indiana Jones fleeing the temple with the golden idol in the Opening Scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

On our way to CHS Field to watch the Triple-A St. Paul Saints, we did a driving tour of the Cathedral of St. Paul (after which the city is named) and the Minnesota State Capitol. Maybe we should have said a prayer for the Saints at the former. They lost 5-4 to the Indianapolis Indians, as a comeback came up just short. The Saints have a colorful history, having been owned from their inception in 1993 through 2023 by a group that included Bill Murray and Mike Veeck, son of Bill Veeck. Both father and son have been known for their outlandish promotions. While the move from being an Independent League team to a Triple-A franchise has forced the Saints to temper some of their more outlandish stunts (for example, you can no longer get a massage from a nun, Sister Rosalind, who was once shut down by the vice squad - you can look it up), there was still plenty to love. Looking for a ball pig (a real one) to make deliveries to the umpire? Check. Feel the need to see two people dressed as giant eyeballs racing toward a toilet paper finish line? Gotcha covered. How about a contest throwing produce from the second deck into a grocery cart on the concourse? An unsuspecting Gerry and Kevin almost got killed because of that one, first by a tater that was not of the home run variety, and then by nearly taking a melon to the melon. Then there was the P.A. announcer: “Hey section 112, you look great [crowd in that section screams]. How are the kids?”; [with Indians batter at the plate] “batter has 2 strikes and no balls”; and [following Indians home run] “Yeah, whatever.”

A lot of things came in 2’s on this trip: Culvers lunches, cities named Sioux, and now breakfast at The Original Pancake House, as we found one in Minnesota on Sunday morning. This, of course, begs the question, how can the one in South Dakota and the one in Minnesota both be The Original Pancake House? Someone is peddling flapjack fraud.

Sunday morning’s big event was a tour of Paisley Park, recording studio and home of the late artist, Prince. Kevin broke out a purple polo for the occasion. Sadly, no raspberry beret to go with it. Scott had to reserve a time for our tour in advance, and it became obvious why when we arrived. The place was locked down tighter than Mark’s buttocks in the Pennsylvania mineshaft ride. First, it was gated and you needed your tour time to get in. Then there was an enormous 8-foot square man (we’ll call him Thor) guarding the entrance, who looked like he might eat his young. His job was to not let us in until our appointed tour time. While we waited for permission to enter, Kevin returned to the SUV to get something he’d forgotten. More precisely, he returned to someone else’s SUV and then couldn’t figure out why the trunk wouldn’t open. In his defense, it was a similarly sized, if entirely different color, SUV (as opposed to, say, a little red Corvette). When Thor finally let us in, we had to not only turn off and surrender our phones, but turn off our smartwatches as well. Our actual tour guide, Margot, was the metaphorical photo-negative of Thor. She was a small woman, who was unnaturally enthusiastic about Prince and couldn’t wait to get us inside to share her excitement about walking the same hallways that Prince once walked, even though she’s undoubtedly done so hundreds of time, not counting the times she’s done it in her dreams.

The final act of BIB 2023, at least with all of us still present, was to watch the Twins lose a perfect game with one out in the 7th inning (on a completely catchable fly ball, nonetheless), though they still captured a 2-0 win over the Pirates at Target Field.

1,700 miles after we started, after dropping Mark off at his hotel, all that remained was for Kevin to drop off Gerry and Scott for their flights and return the rental, now sporting a crack that was about a foot and a half in length and enough residual glue to make it look like we were trying to hide whatever we’d done to it. Fortunately, there was no attendant when he returned the SUV, so he was able to drop it off and bolt, leaving Mark to deal with the call from Hertz: “uh…about the windshield on that vehicle you rented from us…” It would have been completely in keeping with the Fargo theme for one of us to get detained for vandalizing the SUV, have the situation spin out of control, and Mark somehow get arrested for insurance fraud. Maybe that’s how BIB eventually ends.

BIB2019: Braves Pre-Game Hydrating

Over the years, the Brothers-in-Baseball have shared some good baseball books with each other - many times as Christmas presents. Here are a couple good reads that Gerry just received from friend Jim Daviero - AT&T Operations Director (Albany, NY) and Mickey Bradley co-author of the books. Check 'em out!