Our Mission

• BIB2011: Orioles, Nationals, and/or Pirates--mission accomplished!  Saw the Little League World Series and the Pirates
• BIB2012: Giants and Sacramento, Stockton, or Reno Minor League games--mission accomplished!  Saw Stockton, Reno, and the Giants.
• BIB2013: Cleveland and Cincinnati--we may switch 2013 and 2014 trips--swapping with 2014's plan.
• BIB2014: All Deep South Minor League games--mission accomplished in July 2013!  BIB2014 morphed to Toledo, Tigers, and Midland
• BIB2015: Anaheim, San Diego, and a LA-area minor league team, completed!
• BIB2016: Washington DC, Baltimore, and Philly, just completed in May 2016, with a Philly, Allentown, and Harrisburg swing (no DC/Baltimore this year)
• BIB2017: Memorial Day Weekend 2017: Cleveland, Akron, and Columbus, Ohio
• BIB2018: The Smoke Gets in your Eyes/Not Quite a Run for the Canadian Border Tour: Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane and Vancouver, BC
• BIB2019: Recently completed Atlanta trip with minors in Coumbia, SC and Charleston
• BIB2020: Minnesota and/or Utah, Montana and Idaho minor league teams--Cancelled by COVID
• BIB2021: Arkansas and Oklahoma minors
• BIB2022: Minnesota and/or Utah, Montana and Idaho minor league team
• BIB2023: Marlins and Rays
• BIB2024: All Appalacian Minor League games
• BIB2025: Oakland (maybe they'll have a new stadium by then)

BIB2021: Hot as Hades Tour (aka Hella Heat and Humidity II)

Oklahoma and Arkansas are the 4^th and 6^th hottest summer states in the Unite States…perfect for conducting a mid-August ballpark tour.  We chose Little Rock to begin our 4-day swelter-in-place drill… temperature 98 degrees; dew point 69.4; heat index between 105 and 110.  But Scott was evidently pretty hot before he even arrived Wednesday evening.  On Gerry’s way to BIB 2021, he was toting “Flat Scott”, the near life-size cutout that he’d ordered from the Brewers as a birthday gift to “Not-Flat Scott”, as a carry-on. Flat Scott had spent the COVID-ridden 2020 season watching from the stands in Milwaukee’s Miller Park (now American Family Field). A fellow passenger, identified by Gerry only as “cute girl”, asked if Gerry was traveling with a friend and, rumor has it, asked if Flat Scott could sit with her.  There’s no accounting for taste.  What does a perfect 10 girl see in a 2D guy?

The first time we all met was actually Thursday morning, after we’d flown in Wednesday night.  Mark, as per tradition, was the last to emerge from the hotel.  He threw his stuff in the back of the SUV, and off we went down East Roosevelt Road.  Only once we got up to about 40 mph did the unusually loud road noise clue us in to the fact that Mark had neglected to shut the back door.  Gerry pulled us over on the side of the road while we pondered just how widely our belongings had been strewn across Central Arkansas.   We weren’t 5 minutes into BIB 2021 and we’d already sprung a leak in our think-tank.  We opted for breakfast at a well-seasoned diner called Rosie’s, where we met a friendly waitress named Katie…or was it a well-seasoned waitress named Katie at a friendly diner called Rosie’s?   In any event, once friendly, well-seasoned Rosie was able to grasp the notion that four grown men had flown from all over the country to watch minor league baseball in mid-August Arkansas (she did clue us in that the Little Rock Travelers are the “Travs” to locals), she bid us farewell with “Y’all enjoy the game. It’ll be hotter than Hades.”

Since none of us were entirely sure just how hot Hades is, and since Google does not provide a Hades-to-Fahrenheit conversion chart, we had our own way to figure it out.  We simply needed to find the temperature of something that emanates from the underworld.  So it was that we paid a visit to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where the main attraction, you’ll be shocked to find out, is its hot springs.  Assuming that the natural springs spew water that has its origins somewhere near the River Styx, and based on the smell of searing flesh when Kevin reached into a pool of it behind one of the town’s famous bath houses, we estimate that 1 Hades = 143 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of the springs, per the National Park literature.  On this day, that was only mildly balmier than the air itself, which could make your teeth sweat.  We next rode to the top of the 216-foot Hot Springs Mountain Tower, overlooking both the town and surrounding national park of the same name.  The latter essentially encircles the former.  There was a pleasant breeze and quite of bit of interesting historical information at the top (did you know that Bill Clinton attended Hot Springs High School?), the payoff for having to wear a mask inside the tower and take the chance that mildly acrophobic Mark could deliver payment pizza at any point during the elevator ride. After a couple of drives around a scenic loop in the hills overlooking the town (one on purpose and one as the result of a navigational gaffe), we were headed back toward Little Rock.

On the way back, we found Dan’s I-30 Diner, rated just a half-star higher in the Forbes Travel Guide than anywhere that has 15-foot letters on the roof spelling out “EATS”.  The poor waitress was starting her job that very day.  It’s got to be mortifying for any server to see the four of us plop ourselves down at his or her table.  Dialing us up on your first day has to have you seriously rethinking your career choices.  Aside from bringing Gerry a chicken sandwich when he requested chicken salad (Gerry didn’t say a thing), she got through it okay.  Kind of makes you wonder if he’d have made her take back the ears of corn if he’d ordered Cobb salad.

Back in Little Rock, we visited the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.  Well, kind of.  We would have liked to have checked out some of the historical documents there, but since it was closed due to COVID, we did not have textual relations with that building. Best we could do was admire some of the architecture from outside, most notably the cantilever wing that extends over the Arkansas River. Next up was Little Rock Central High School, a National Historic Site for the role it played in desegregation in 1957, offering the first test of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.  Of course, the visitor center there was also closed due to COVID.  Since we’d seen the hot springs in Hot Springs, it stands to reason that we’d want to see the little rock in Little Rock.  And so we did.  There it was, on the banks of the Arkansas River, at the foot of Rock Street, nonetheless, where it served as a navigational landmark for early river travelers.

After a short rest back at our hotel, we proceeded to a watering hole called Brewskies just across the river from Dickey-Stephens Park.  And what did we check out at Brewskie’s?  Hint:  hot springs in Hot Springs, little rock in Little Rock.  We also watched the TV broadcast of some of the inaugural Field of Dreams game between the Yankees and White Sox.  After the short drive to the ballpark, we watched the Springfield (Missouri) Cardinals dispense with the hometown Arkansas Travs 4-3 in 10 innings.  During the game, we learned that the Travs’ name emanates from the mid-19th century folk song The Arkansas Traveler, and we watched a portion of the game from the wooden, but remarkably comfy, Adirondack chairs just beyond the outfield fence.

On our way to breakfast on Friday, Mark regaled us with excerpts from the latest book he’s been reading: The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party.  Nothing whets your appetite before breakfast with friends like hearing about a breakfast of friends. Meanwhile, driver Gerry approached our destination, Delicious Temptations, as a bad golfer would a tough pin placement.  Went right past it once, passed it again on the way back, then finally nailed it on the third try.  

After breakfast, we headed for Mount Magazine, which admittedly sounds more like a periodical you’d hide from your parents than a state park in the Ozark-St. Francis National Forests.  The visitor center was actually open (the difference between a state park and a national park) and there were a few short trails leading to sheer cliffs with breathtaking views.

As we made our way toward Northwest Arkansas, it became obvious that we were getting deeper and deeper into Razorback country.  Nowhere was this more evident than at Ed Walker’s Drive-In and Restaurant, a diner specializing in French dip sandwiches and covered from floor to ceiling with University of Arkansas logos and memorabilia.  The place opened in 1943 and maintains a 1950’s vibe.  You get the feeling that the last time the Razorbacks won a national football championship, in 1964, someone at Ed’s said “We must never again update our décor, lest we jynx the team.”  Ed Walker’s is in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, so named for the military outpost built in 1817 in an attempt to keep the peace between the native Osage and newly arriving Cherokee.  We traveled there next, where we found a visitor center that was (naturally) closed due to COVID.  The most intriguing elements of what remains of the compound were the well-maintained gallows and the spot where an overlook used to be (recently washed out by a flood) marking the Trail of Tears (the real one, not the string of exasperated restaurant servers we’ve left in our wake over the years).

From Ft. Smith, we drove into Oklahoma, which was unfortunate because we meant to drive to our hotel in Springdale, Arkansas.  4 adults, all sporting the latest in GPS-enabled navigational technology, managed to find ourselves in a state we did not intend to visit until a day later.  After bouncing aimlessly around northwestern Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, our little disorient express finally made it to our hotel for a brief rest and respite from the heat.  That rest was interrupted when power was suddenly cut off to our hotel, an event probably related to the arrival of some nasty looking weather in the area.  The outage wasn’t limited to our hotel; we knew that because we tried to visit a local bar called Foghorn’s near the hotel and it was lights out as well.  Not to be deterred, we found another Foghorn’s in neighboring Fayetteville.  We settled there while we periodically checked in on the status of the game at Arvest Ballpark, back in Springdale.  Despite what appeared to be a steady rain in Fayetteville, the phone message of the Northwest Arkansas Naturals indicated that the game was still on.  As we arrived at the Ballpark, the stream of fans headed out of the stadium indicated otherwise.  Nevertheless, we entered the stadium like salmon swimming upstream to check out the sweet suite that Scott had intended as a little surprise for the game.  With the game cancelled - our third rainout after Ottawa (2002) and Lehigh Valley (2016) - the best we could do was take a few pics of the tarp-covered infield from the would-be BIB crib.  Now with some time to blow, we reversed field and headed back to Fayetteville to check out the University of Arkansas and Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium.  A few photo ops there and it was back to Foghorn’s, but this time, with power restored, it was the one back in Springdale, near our hotel.  For those of you scoring with us at home, just since lunch, we had gone from Fort Smith to Oklahoma (by mistake) to Springdale to Fayetteville to Springdale to Fayetteville to Springdale.  Not since John Daly has so much driving produced so little in the way of intended results.

Saturday began at the Buttered Biscuit, paradoxically both the home of such masculine BIB-worthy platters as the Slaughter Pen and the Carnivore and such dainty “is my slip showing?” dishes as the Acai Power Bowl (lookin’ at you, Gerry) and Avocado Grove Toast.  What every menu item did share in common, however, was service that could be timed with your choice of an hourglass or a sundial.  

Most of tour drive-time conversation on any trip is unfit for print, but suffice it to say that somewhere between Springdale and Eureka Springs, there was a thought-provoking conversation that involved both the relative merits of backyard vs. pet cemetery burials and product adjacencies in the call-before-you-dig market.  It was on this same drive that we figured out (on day three of our trip, mind you) how to use the SUV’s Bluetooth capability with Scott’s phone GPS.  Have we mentioned recently that we met thirty-one years ago when we were selected as four of the former Bell System’s top thirty young technologists?

 Eureka Springs, while it sounds like a brand of mattress you might purchase on Home Shopping network, is actually a quirky Victorian town built into a hillside in northwestern Arkansas.  Its main export, best we could tell from driving through, appears to be kitsch.  The first of two places we decided to stop in the surrounding area was the Christ of the Ozarks statue, the fourth largest Jesus in the world. It vaguely resembles Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer, but with a minimalistic, simplified shape that RoadsideAmerica.com describes as both “a milk carton with a tennis ball stuck on top”, and “Willie Nelson in a dress”.  It is also somewhat reminiscent of the Word of Life Mural in Notre Dame, Indiana, except that the outstretched arms pose of Christ of the Ozarks is less “Touchdown Jesus”, than “Unsportsmanlike Conduct” Jesus.  Keeping with the religious theme, our second stop in the Eureka Springs area was Thorncrown Chapel, constructed in 1980 using organic materials indigenous to northwestern Arkansas, including pressure-treated Southern pine and flagstone.  The predominance of glass gives it the feel of an open-air structure, very much in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright.  However, it was actually designed by another individual, E. Fay Jones.  He may have entertained using other designers as well, but if you want something done Wright, you have to do it yourself.

As we pushed on toward Tulsa, we were reunited with the Trail of Tears at the Pea Ridge National Military Park.  Located in northwest Arkansas near the Missouri border [foreshadowing], it is the site of the March 1862 Battle that saved Missouri for the Union.  Of course, the visitor center was (all together now) closed for COVID.  Not far away, in Bentonville, Arkansas, was one of the highlights of the trip, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.  The Walton Family Foundation (as in Sam, of Walmart fame) is very involved with the museum, and Walmart’s sponsorship ensures that schlubs like us don’t even have to pay admission.  The complex itself consists of a series of interconnected pavilions that wrap around two creek-fed ponds and picturesque wooded trails. Not a bad way to see Charles Willson Peale’s famous portrait of George Washington, original works of Norman Rockwell, and all manner of contemporary sculpture, digital art, and lighting displays.  

Inspired by our own sophistication and realization of our status as art aficionados, we hit the road again for Oklahoma…and somehow wound up in Missouri.  A day earlier, we’d wound up in Oklahoma by accident, and now we couldn’t get there on purpose.  We learned two things from this: first, that it’s easy to take an incorrect turn in the bustling metropolis of Gravette, Arkansas; and second, that Bluetooth doesn’t fix stupid.  Nevertheless, we repointed ourselves toward Oklahoma, where Kevin was quick to remind us, that the wind comes sweepin' down the plain, and the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain.  Over and over, he reminded us…incessantly…with vocals like a honey lamb stuck in barbed wire.  We had barely gotten ourselves headed in the right direction when our pressure gauge indicated that one of our rear tires, like Kevin’s voice, was a little flat.  So we stopped to pick up some air, some gasoline and, unintentionally, a fly that would torment us the rest of the way to our Tulsa hotel.  Scott always makes the hotel reservations, and he’d made one at the now sold-out Tulsa Club Hotel…exactly one.  No matter – we just confidently explained to the front desk receptionist that we had most certainly made four reservations and the hotel MUST be at fault.  Miraculously, three rooms opened up at precisely that moment, negating the prospect of four of us having to share two queen beds.  Thank you, Christ of the Ozarks!  We make better Sooners than spooners. 

Our walk to Elgin Park took us right by Tulsa’s quirky “Center of the Universe” tourist attraction.  Weirdly, if you stand on a small concrete circle inside a bunch of concentric rings of bricks on an otherwise normal looking walkway, your voice echoes back at you more loudly than you spoke (or so it seems, anyway).  No one seems able to completely explain this weird acoustic phenomenon…but if someone could explain it while standing there, it would reflect well on them.  You probably thought Elgin Park was a ballfield.  Not quite.  Elgin Park is a bar across the street from ONEOK Field, where the Tulsa Drillers normally play.  On this night, however, the Drillers had assumed their alter ego as the Tulsa Noodlers, as in barehanded catfishing.  Minor league teams seem to be assuming a new identity for one weekend a season with increasing frequency, presumably so they can sell an entirely fresh set of merchandise, and apparently, Oklahoma fancies itself the noodling capital of the world.  The Noodlers, in lime-green pants and caps that were a wild departure from their normal Driller royal blue, won 5-2 over the Wichita Wind Surge.  No Adirondack chairs at ONEOK Field, but the park more than made up for it with a top shelf selection of between innings tomfoolery that included what had to be 100 young kids chasing Hornsby the Bull (Tulsa’s mascot) across the outfield while players were trying to warm up, Hornsby using two foam pool noodles to play the heads of four bald men sitting on the roof of the dugout like Chinese temple blocks (synchronized to the stadium sound system, of course), an inter-sectional volleyball competition using a giant beachball and a net that suddenly appeared in the row alongside our seats (sadly, our section 104 fell in a barn burner to section 105), and a seventh inning stretch punctuated by the singing of Oklahoma! (for the love of all that is holy, why did they feel the need to egg Kevin on?).

Sunday morning began with a bit more subdued tone at Greenwood rising, an exhibit that had opened only ten days earlier, commemorating “Black Wall Street”, the surrounding Greenwood District, and the Tulsa Race Riots that had occurred exactly 100 years earlier.  From there, we drove to see the Tulsa Golden Driller, a 75-foot tall, 43,500 pound statue of an oil worker erected in 1966 on the grounds of the Tulsa Expo Center and composed of steel, concrete, and plaster (not gold).  It’s the sixth-tallest statue in the United States, just edging out the 65.5-foot Christ of the Ozarks – an ill-advised architectural oversight that seems like a great way for TGD to get himself struck by lightning a time or three a year.

We decided to begin our drive from Tulsa to Oklahoma City along Route 66, which passes within about a half-mile of the Tulsa Expo Center.  With our Bluetooth-enabled GPS, we were able to navigate our way there in less than 15 minutes.  Somewhere along Route 66, the topic of whether or not to invite wives to a BIB trip arose, as it always does.  The vote usually falls along party lines: those who want to put a damper on the party are in favor of including the wives.  An agreement of sorts was reached, that any trip including the wives would need to be a “modified” BIB trip.  A committee will likely be formed to study the issue.  About 11:30am, we arrived at the Route 66 Interpretive Center in Chandler, OK.  Good news: it was not closed for COVID.  Bad news: it opened at 1:00pm.  So we did not gain a new understanding of the construction and history of America’s first cross-country highway.  What we did gain was another stowaway insect.  Levi Strauss never had to deal with this many flies.  

Upon arrival in Oklahoma City, our first stop was at Tucker’s Onion Burgers – a far better choice after a drive of over 100 miles than before.  From there, we headed downtown to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, commemorating the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.  Even 26 years later, the tragedy of that day remains vivid despite all that has occurred since, perhaps even amplified by the eerily similar manner in which the 9/11 bombings also interrupted an otherwise peaceful downtown workday morning.

We decided to check in early at the “Airport” Wyndham, which earned its quotation marks by being the world’s only airport hotel without an airport shuttle.  Scott had made four reservations this time, which turned out to be a mixed blessing as the Keystone Kops front desk staff of 2 required a full 30 minutes to get the four of us checked in.  That left just enough time to hightail it to Bricktown Brewery where we’d pre-arranged a time to meet with Gerry’s niece and her husband, Oklahoma city residents who seemed nice enough, but apparently didn’t have the good sense to ask a few questions when Gerry mentioned bringing his posse.  Gerry frantically tried to drive with one hand and call to extend our rental car reservation with the other, now that our airport shuttle’d been scuttled.  As for Bricktown Stadium, just a few blocks from the brewery, some of its features were weird: uncomfortably close Hampton Inn and Hilton Garden Inn overlooking left center and center field, respectively; deepest portion of the park being left center (415 feet) as opposed to center (400 feet); obtrusive foul ball screens that lean into the stands as they approach the outfield, diverting foul pops that might otherwise reach the fans; and a PA system so annoyingly loud as to be indecipherable.  The between-innings fare was downright lame by comparison to Tulsa: a sack race (seriously?) and another seventh-inning stretch version of Oklahoma!, Kevin’s performance of which was made even less tolerable than before due to his discovery of 32-ounce novelty beers served in a hollowed out plastic bat.  As for the game itself, the Oklahoma City Dodgers bested the Round Rock Express on an eighth inning two-out RBI double.  Aaron Wilkerson, the Dodgers’ 32-year-old starting pitcher who in 2018 and 2019 had played in eleven major league games for the Brewers, went a full seven innings, giving up four earned runs.  After the game, we spent what was left our last night of the trip wandering through the Bricktown entertainment district, nestled a little too conveniently around what is described as the Bricktown Canal.  It seems designed to mimic San Antonio’s River Walk, but unlike the River Walk, is obviously man-made with water that does not appear to flow anywhere.

After a drive back to the ne’er-port Wyndham, the longest BIB trip in our 31-year history was, well, history.  And so we will meet again in 2022, Gamma, Eta, Iota, Kappa, Mu, and Zeta variants of COVID notwithstanding.

BIB2019: The Not-Quite PC Tour

There’s politically correct (PC), politically incorrect (PI), and politically wrong/technical foul (PWTF). We encountered a little of each during the Brothers-In-Baseball 2019 Tour that began in Atlanta.  We decided to make our first stop the original Chick-fil-A restaurant.  For a place that seems to generate all kinds of controversy over the most nuanced details of its political and religious views, how is it that no one seems the least bit offended that the name of the original location, dating back to 1946, is the Hapeville Dwarf House, or that the main entrance still features a miniature arched doorway as an homage to its Lilliputian roots?  Never mind that on the drive there, we actually did pass a stroller-pushing little person near the restaurant that lent an air of Ozian creepiness to this first roadside attraction of BIB 2019.  Uncomfortable though it may have been, a quick perusal of the Little People of America website indicates that “dwarf” is not only an acceptable, but, in fact, a preferred term for people of short stature. BIB PC rating: Politically Correct (PC).

Two of the four of us chose to wash down our Chick-fil-A with Coca-Cola products, remarkably poor planning given our next visit…to the World of Coca-Cola.  There we had the opportunity to sample some of the hundreds of flavors of Coca-Cola products from around the globe.  Some were surprisingly tasty (Thailand and Madagascar), while others hinted at carbonating an infected water supply (looking at you, India and China). While the World of Coca-Cola goes to great lengths to discuss the history of its namesake beverage, it glosses over the fact that the original 1886 version contained trace amounts of cocaine.  However, at 4.3 milligrams of cocaine in a 6-ounce drink, that means that the original Coca-Cola was only about 2.5 one-thousandths of a percent cocaine by volume. For comparative purposes. Lindsay Lohan is a full 2.5 percent cocaine.

From Casa de Coke, we walked a few blocks to hop on an open-air electric car tour of downtown Atlanta and surrounding environs.  We saw sites like Georgia Tech’s campus, Centennial Park, and Martin Luther King’s final resting place.  Of particular interest, though, was Atlanta’s first planned suburb, an obviously affluent community of picturesque homes called Inman Park.  Coincidentally, on the June day we were there, a day of bright sun and temperatures in the 80’s, Dolly Parton was filming her Christmas special at one of the homes.  Understandable, though, that they would have to film it in the summer – no one wants Dolly Parton getting a chest cold.

Our electric car driver recommended Reuben’s Deli for lunch – a fine choice, if for nothing other than the opportunity to approach the counter and participate in the military precision of the Soup Nazi-esque ordering process.  From there, we walked to the College Football Hall of Fame.  One of the first exhibits you encounter there is an interactive one, where we each took out turns tossing a football at targets and trying to kick a field goal.  Gerry was a quarterback in high school, so he was at least graceful, if not always accurate. The rest of us, on the other hand, not so much.  Kevin trying to kick a football looks like an ostrich tripping over a pig.  Next we walked across Centennial Park to “Skyview Atlanta”, a 20-story tall Ferris wheel with enclosed compartments that combines Mark’s twin terrors of height and confined spaces.  With some time left before we needed to head to the ballpark, we figured Mark would have the opportunity to simultaneously blow both some time and his lunch.  

Good thing Mark kept it together, though, as he would need every bit of the Reuben’s Deli carb loading to sustain him for the walk from where we parked for the baseball game in Cumberland, Georgia to SunTrust Park or, more accurately, to the entertainment area surrounding SunTrust Park known as the Battery (Bat-tery, see what they did there?). There must surely be closer places to park (they do have handicapped people in Atlanta, right?), but most of the spaces seemed to be in garages interconnected to the Battery only by a human-scale hamster trail “across-the-garage-down-the-elevator-through-the-subterranean-tunnel-up-the-ramp-into-another-elevator-across-the-plaza-onto-the-bridge-through-the-construction-zone-into-yet-another-garage-down-the-steps-and-into-the-street-at-which-point-you-can-see-the-stadium-another-quarter-mile-away”.  13 minutes of walking at a pretty good clip to reach the park.  Leave the peanuts and cracker jacks at home, but don’t forget your hydration system and a Sherpa. 

Gerry somehow negotiated a table for us at a crowded bar called Sports and Social in the Battery.  It came complete with a waitress whose mildly-frightening Natasha Fatale fake eyebrows and thick accent just screamed vintage 1970’s Eastern European Olympic gymnast.  By the time we’d left, Mark had won a gift card from the DJ for traveling the greatest distance – well over 2,100 miles, not counting the walk from the parking garage.  The game itself was one of the more exciting we have seen, with the Braves coming back from a 7-2 deficit, twice down to their last strike in the bottom of the ninth, to win 9-8 on a Brian McCann walk-off two-run single.  As for the park itself, kudos for the shelf in front of our seats for setting food and drinks.  On the other hand, seating is enforced maniacally – an unfortunate development for four large older men with adjacent assigned seats.  Exacerbating the situation is that the place obviously draws well, so there weren’t even any upper deck outfield seats readily available to spread out.  And for a park opened just two years earlier, the number of concessions and width of the main concourse both seemed woefully inadequate for the number of patrons. And about those patrons…that tomahawk chop thing, even when you want to root for the home team, is beyond obnoxious. It would be one thing if they played it only at critical points in the game…but they do it after what seems like nearly every pitch.  Nothing like a stadium full of almost exclusively white fans incessantly bellowing war chants while making a motion reminiscent of the Native American practice of scalping.  BIB PC rating: Politically wrong/technical foul (PWTF, with emphasis on WTF).  

Our accommodations for Friday evening were at the Hilton Atlanta/Marietta Conference Center, originally the site of the Georgia Military Institute from 1851 until 1865, and a stately building with plenty of historical artifacts.  Breakfast the next morning was at the Red Eyed Mule.  Not quite as stately (building that looks like it may have been a converted bank branch in a light industrial area), its history dates all the way back to its founding during the Obama administration; and, while short on artifacts, its menu does feature such artery-packers as the Mule Basket, Feed Bucket, and Redneck Reuben.  From there, we set off on an ill-fated attempt to visit the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.  The only battle on this day, however, was for parking.  Scott made an initial charge for the visitor center lot, but was thrust back.  He circled the lot several more times, but was repeatedly rebuffed before sending Kevin into the visitor center as a scout to assess the situation.  Kevin returned with maps of the surrounding area that offered alternative lots that held the promise of fewer rival vehicles.  Scott attempted to outflank the hordes of affluent suburban Atlantans by approaching an alternative lot by way of an entrance we had passed on our way in, a gambit made riskier by Scott’s own admission that he “can’t simultaneously talk and drive”.  But alas, it was for naught, as we were forced to retreat toward Stone Mountain by way of Interstate 75.  Rest assured that Sherman’s March through Atlanta would not have gone nearly so easily had he been forced to take a suburban route on Father’s Day weekend and had to deal with thousands of water-bottle-toting, Golden-Retriever-walking millennials.

Stone Mountain’s granite relief of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall (anybody else see the irony in that?) Jackson, is, depending on your point of view, either an awe-inspiring work of art memorializing Southern history or a 1.57-acre testament to slavery and white supremacy.  We’ll simply point out that the grounds were well-kept and there was plenty of parking. Still, even some of the language that can be found on plaques around the park feel a bit cringe-worthy today: “They fought for a principle: the right to live life in a chosen manner.  This dedication to a cause drove them to achieve a moment of greatness which endures to this day.”  Ee-yikes.  As we discussed among ourselves, it’s easy to point an accusatory finger from the perspective of 21^stcentury sensibility, but context of the era matters. We’re sure there are a few people somewhere with Bill Cosby tattoos that seemed like a good idea at the time.  Still, the best we can give this is a BIB PC rating of Politically Incorrect (PI).

On our way from Stone Mountain to Columbia, South Carolina, we stopped for lunch at a place we saw advertised on a billboard (so it has to be good) called the Farmview Market.  Good food, crazy-long wait, but hey, they had Coca-Cola cake, so there’s that.  After a brief stop to see the University of South Carolina Campus, we made our way to Segra park to see the Columbia Fireflies fall 6-2 to the Lexington Legends. Despite the loss, we found Columbia to be one of our favorite minor league parks.  For starters, the park is erected on the grounds of the old South Carolina Mental Hospital, founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum. The building remains visible beyond the right field foul pole.  The last of the hospital’s patients was removed in 1990, and the only concession stand in the portion of the park nearest the building is a craft beer stand, so it remains a safe haven for fans with nut allergies.  We’ll just go ahead and call a political correctness foul on ourselves for that one.

The Columbia Fireflies are a marketing machine.  They especially play up the fact that they were once Tim Tebow’s team and trim virtually every piece of logo wear in glow-in-the-dark neon green.  Even the mascot is named Mason (as in the jar where you might keep glowing fireflies).  Mark and Scott each procured one of their caps from Minor League Baseball’s Copa de la Diversiónweekend, during which the Fireflies renamed themselves the Chicharrones de Columbia. Chicharrones, for the uninitiated, are a fried dish usually made with pork belly or pork rinds.  This now makes two minor league teams we’ve visited (along with the LeHigh Valley IronPigs) that have an alternative cap featuring fried pork products.

Scott selected Eva’s on Main in Summerville, South Carolina for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Namesake Eva passed away in 2011 at the age of 96, but Whitney and Ray assumed ownership, along with their daughter Mackenzie. How do we know all this?  Well, it started when our waitress noticed Kevin wearing a shirt with a Reds Spring Training logo and made the misguided leap of logic that he must be a ballplayer.  We can assume that the only major leaguers of whom she has actually seen a picture are Bartolo Colon (285 lbs), CC Sabathia (300 lbs), Dmitri Young (295 lbs), and Cecil and Prince Fielder (combined weight almost a quarter of a metric ton).  Kevin was having Scott, Mark and Gerry autograph a “World of Coca-Cola” baseball he’d procured two days ago.  So they were probably ballplayers too!  In order to soften the disappointment at not meeting any real celebrity ballplayers, we offered to let our waitress sign the ball too.  By the time we’d left, Whitney, Ray, Sarah, Tina, Taylor, and someone with really bad penmanship who stopped by to fill our water glasses had all signed the ball and the Brothers in Baseball were featured on Eva’s on Main’s Facebook site, right between the breakfast casserole and the liver and onions. We might have been the toast of Summerville, but for the fact that Monday’s breakfast special was Toast of Summerville.

Our next stop was Charleston, known for its cobblestone streets, horse-drawn carriages, pastel antebellum houses, and elegant French Quarter.  So naturally our first stop was a dungeon.  More specifically (as if there were a dungeon under every Starbucks in Charleston and we needed to be more specific), we visited the Old Exchange Building and Provost Dungeon.  Aside from serving the functions that its name would imply, it was where the South Carolina convention met to ratify the United States Constitution in 1788, and it saw slave auctions conducted just outside its north wall…not Key and Peele slave auctions, but real ones.  We also walked through Charleston Waterfront Park, including its famous Pineapple Fountain, then took our own driving tour past Rainbow Row, the Citadel, and Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the horrible shooting had taken place two years earlier, almost to the day – a stark reminder that the same type of cruelty associated with slave auctions isn’t purely the vestige of a distant past.

Our afternoon ballgame was the visiting Greenville Drive vs, the hometown “Holy City” Riverdogs, the Sunday moniker of the Charleston Riverdogs since 2016.  The Riverdogs apparently have a bit of an identity crisis, as they also go by the name “Charleston Boiled Peanuts” one game a year, to honor the official state snack, as well as late fan favorite Anthony Wright, a.k.a. "Tony the Peanut Man."  Our seats for this afternoon where the temperature reached 90 degrees with 74% humidity were conveniently just beyond the reach of the shade on metal grandstands in an area where we were protected from any cool breezes that might arise…an area we’ll just call Hell’s Humidor.  Fortunately, we didn’t have to sweat it out until the end of Holy City’s 2-1 victory, as we needed to leave after the sixth inning to catch our 4:00pm boat to Fort Sumter National Park.  However, we didn’t leave before Scott lost an embarrassing exchange with another baseball-crazed tourist.  This guy actually dragged his wife, 3 kids, and pink-haired mother from Jacksonville. We long ago acknowledged that we are four man-children with a few screws loose on this quixotic quest. But this guy was a whole new breed of lunatic.  He took Scott to the figurative woodshed in the baseball-geek equivalent of an Eight Mile rap battle.  In fact, it never really got off the launch pad.  After feeling each other out with a few cursory questions to mutually establish stadium-touring street cred, this dude asks Scott what should have been a softball: “What’s your favorite minor league stadium?”  Scott locked up like the engine on a ’71 Ford Pinto.  The only stadium that could even penetrate the fog of his senior moment was the previous night’s visit to Columbia.  Dude scoffed: “Pshaw!  I hate that stadium solely on the basis of their new clear bag policy.” Apparently, Segra Field’s 2019 limitation to a single clear bag, not to exceed 12" x 6" x 12", is insufficient for a guy that needs to placate his family with a backpack full of cheerios, a second topcoat of pink hair spray for Grandma (just in case the first one doesn’t take to the primer well enough), and at least a fifth of hooch for his wife, who is not so much a soulmate as a hostage.

Our last stop of the trip with Gerry in tow was Ft. Sumter, where we were able to watch the flag-lowering ceremony at the end of the day. As Old Glory came down, so did the curtain on BIB 2019.  Gerry did leave us with one tip as we dropped him of at the airport, and it was a dandy. He recommended dinner at a place called Lewis Barbecue.  You know a barbecue joint will be outstanding when the most prominent feature is an illuminated outdoor sign that screams “GET YOUR MEAT HERE”.  And so we did, while kicking around ideas for BIB 2020 and the 30^thanniversary of our first BIB season in 1990.

BIB2016: The Pennsylvania Deja Vu All Over Again Tour

It should have been enough that Scott had driven the 250 miles from Virginia early on Friday to schlep Gerry, Kevin, and Mark around the Keystone State for the weekend like he had been banished to some sort of Uber driver purgatory.  But for reasons known only to Scott, he had even taken the time to thoroughly clean out his van for the occasion, the rough equivalent of putting on cologne at the starting line of a Tough Mudder.  With Mark arriving later in the day, Scott, Gerry and Kevin had the opportunity to tip back a beverage at a Chickie’s and Pete’s near the Philadelphia airport.  Unfortunately for the wait staff, Kevin chose to tip back his beverage when it was nowhere in the proximity of his mouth.  And, with that sticky mess, BIB 2016 had already hit its stride.  Think “3-year olds with cotton candy” and you’re pretty close.  Remove the adult supervision and you’ve got the complete picture.  Once order had been restored, conversation turned to Kevin’s season tickets to the Cincinnati Reds.  Scott was incredulous at the fact that Kevin’s tickets are, in fact, for the entire 81 home game season (Andy Dufresne didn’t have that much free time) and after a few quick calculations, decided that, while we all love baseball, Kevin could be spending his children’s inheritance on something more practical – like a set of spill-proof barware.

It turns out that Scott has developed a new rooting interest himself.  Once we had retrieved Mark from the airport, Scott explained that his frequent business travel to the United Kingdom had made him a fan of the over-performing underdogs from Liecester City in the English Premier League.   He even went so far as to explain that, despite its spelling, the name is pronounced “Lester”.  Scott’s newfound worldliness made us all just a little uncomfortable, as we wondered what ever happened to the politically incorrect NASCAR Scott we once knew.  You just know that somewhere deep inside, politically incorrect Scott wants to scream “less Manchester United and Mo’ Liecester”.

When we arrived at Citizens Bank Park, we told Mark that we were going to get our picture taken with “The Bull”.  We were referring to four-time all-star with the Phillies of the 1970’s and early 80’s and 1975 NL RBI champion Greg Luzinski, who hangs out at his own barbecue restaurant in the ballpark.  However, Mark apparently did not follow the Phillies of the late 70’s, and was visibly disappointed when we did not get to pose with the real bull he was expecting (or at least a mechanical one).  None of us opted for the barbecue, instead settling on authentic Philly Cheesesteak.  Mark, the discerning palate of the group, noted that he found the traditional cheesesteak with sharp provolone not quite as tasty as it might have been with cheddar.  Scott was more succinct: “the provolone tastes like vomit.”

The only thing that stunk worse than the sharp provolone was the play of Phillies third baseman, Maikel Franco.  From our seats near the field just beyond the third base dugout, we had a marvelous view of his two errors as the Phillies fell 7-1 to the lowly Braves, who entered the game sporting the worst record in baseball. 

 If the location of our lodging for the night near to the airport and next door to a Denny’s didn’t scream “BIB certified”, the flashing neon “OPEN” sign put it over the top.  Then there was the Abbott-and-Costello routine that took place between Mark and the desk clerk at check-in:

Mark: Do you have an airport shuttle?

Clerk: Yes, we have an every-fifteen-minute shuttle that leaves on the hour and half-hour (yes, she really said that).  What time do you need it?

Mark:  I don’t.

In Mark’s defense, he and Kevin would be returning to this same hotel a couple of nights later and would need the shuttle on their return visit.  But the already confused clerk didn’t know that and must have thought we were four crackpots touring the country checking out airport shuttle schedules for no particular reason.  Nothing could be further from the truth; we are four crackpots touring the country checking out baseball stadiums and quirky roadside attractions for no particular reason.

Despite the proximity of Denny’s, we opted for breakfast Saturday morning at Miller’s café, a fairly nondescript little joint of which the most distinguishing feature was a waitress with a weird combination Boston/Long Island accent that made her sound like the love child of Mark Wahlberg and Fran Drescher.

Saturday’s touring began with a trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum to see the famous statue of Sylvester Stallone raising his arms at the top of the museum’s steps in the movie Rocky.  The running time for Rocky is 122 minutes, or just slightly longer than it took us to find a parking space as Scott circled the museum like the Clark Griswold in European Vacation (“Big Ben, kids; Parliament…Big Ben, Parliament”).  Once we finally plopped down $15 for a spot in a lot across the street, Scott and Kevin ran up the steps of the museum and performed a remarkable reenactment of the lesser known  “I’m winded” scene that unfortunately was cut from theater versions of Rocky.

Next up was a visit to the Mutter Museum in downtown Philly, run by The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and displaying examples of every conceivable medical oddity.  When a museum bills itself as “disturbingly informative”, you just know you’re in for a dog’s breakfast of barf-inducing BIB fun.  Just listing a few of the items available in the gift shop yields a good sense for what a creepatorium this place was.   You had your Siamese twin gingerbread cookie cutter, your “human organ for transplant” beer cooler, and the puke de ré·sis·tance, your mega-colon stuffed plush toy, a replica of the museum’s real mega-colon, which the gift shop literature describes as a “nine-foot-long diseased colon formerly owned by a very uncomfortable man who…died from chronic constipation at age 29 with 40 pounds of poop in his intestines.”  It goes on to point out that the plush toy “also doubles as an unusual in-flight pillow”.  I don’t know about you, but if the guy next to me in seat B is sporting an inflamed large intestine around his neck, I’m hitting the flight attendant call button, stat.  It’s fair to say that we all had our favorite exhibits, but Mark found it hard to narrow down to just one, settling on “anything involving syphilis”.

A visit to the Eastern State Penitentiary was next on our agenda, if for no other reason than to create a comfortable buffer between the Mutter Museum and lunch.  No longer serving as a place to house society’s less desirables (except for the one day that we visited), it was constructed to look like a castle the size of a large city block, complete with faux windows and turrets.  There were a number of parallels to Alcatraz, which we visited a few years ago: solitary confinement cells, a cell where Al Capone had once been held, and a daring escape many years ago by burrowing through a cell wall.  Unlike at Alcatraz, we were able to procure a senior discount for Mark by sharing his age at the ticket window.  Presumably, his raised middle digit was to let the salesperson know that he needed only one ticket.

For lunch, we followed up Miller’s Café with the equally generically named John’s Roast Pork.  This was one of those places that social media appears to have taken from well-known local hole-in-the-wall to gastronomical Mecca.   The result is an out-the-door-and-down-the-street line conducted with Soup Nazi precision that serves up what may legitimately be the best cheesesteak and roast pork to ever choke an artery.

On our way from Philadelphia to Allentown (home of the Triple-A Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs), we paid a visit to Valley Forge.  The suffering that occurred there is difficult for a modern BIB to grasp, what with legend having it that Washington’s troops sometimes had to go as long as 5 hours at a time without cheesesteak.

We had seats in the “Bacon Strip” at Allentown, a 2-row section playing off the “Iron Pig” team name in right field.  Unfortunately, we never actually made it to those seats, as we spent most of our time in Allentown seeking shelter from the steady rain.  We were in the stadium long enough to have a drink and watch the running of the Preakness on the stadium scoreboard, but beyond that, it was a rare BIB rainout…shades of the Ottawa Lynx.  In Ottawa, we found a downtown Hooters to bide our time.  In Allentown, it was the Tilted Kilt, where a perky waitress named Amber provided every bit as much entertainment as we might have expected had the Iron Pigs made it onto the field.  When we asked Amber’s permission to use her picture and first name on our web site, she offered her last name and telephone number as well – just in case we needed it.  For the love of Pete, we don’t even allow our own last names on this shady site!  We left the Tilted Kilt pretty sure she’d have offered her social security number and a couple of references if we’d told her we needed them.

Oddly enough, Amber didn’t even take Saturday’s award for “Most Likely to Exercise Bad Judgment in a Moment of Flirtiness”…not even close!    That title goes to the woman who inexplicably decided that rubbing Mark’s leg at the Abe Lincoln Hotel bar Saturday evening would be a good idea.  Fortunately, Gerry showed up on the scene before Mark tried to mace her.  Still a little unclear to Kevin and Scott, who didn’t actually see this unfold, was whether Gerry just gracefully cut in, or whether he and Mark went into full “Mitch and Cam” mode to scare her off. 

Sunday breakfast was at the Marvel Ranch at the corner of Penn and 4^th Street in Reading, Pennsylvania.   The address is important, because that’s the only way you’d ever find the place.  It has absolutely no signage and is neither marvelous, nor reminiscent of a ranch, except inasmuch as a ranch is fit for habitation by livestock.  The patrons could be described as “diverse” – in a Star Wars cantina scene sort of way.  Nevertheless, President Obama apparently visited the place in 2008, no doubt to sample something called the Marvel Mess, or its smaller cousin, the Mini Mess, an amalgam of ham, onions, green peppers, eggs, home fries, and cheese – sort of a mega-colon starter kit.

As we drove from Reading toward Centralia, Pennsylvania (more on why anyone would want to visit Centralia in a minute), Kevin thought he noticed us passing a restaurant that looked familiar.  Given that the GPS told us we were somewhere between Hicksville and Arse-End-of-Nowhere, that hardly seemed possible.  But sure enough, a few miles down the road, we found ourselves in lovely Ashland, Pennsylvania, home of the Pioneer Coal Mine attraction that caused a somewhat claustrophobic Mark to nearly soil himself five years ago. 

How we missed visiting Centralia in 2011, when it is less than 3 miles from Ashland, is a mystery.  We target strange places, and nowhere we’ve visited is stranger than Centralia, Pennsylvania.  It was a thriving town in 1962, when hot ash in the town’s dump-landfill ignited a vein of coal beneath it.  It wasn’t until 1979 that folks realized it was still burning…and it still is to this day!  In the intervening 54 years, the ground has collapsed here and there and toxic gases have been emitted, causing the permanent evacuation of the town by all but a handful of residents.  Just like that, a thriving town literally disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving behind nothing but a closed portion of state highway and street grids that now run eerily through what amounts to woods and meadows.  The buildings that once crowded the center of town are completely gone.  The post office even stripped Centralia of its zip code.  Although one TripAdvisor contributor describes Centralia as “a whole lot of nothing”, the BIBs nevertheless came in search of the so-called “Graffiti Highway”, the roughly three-quarters of a mile long stretch of Pennsylvania State Highway 61 that had to be closed and is now completely covered by all ilk of intermingled messages, art, and vulgarity.  The website centraliapa.org describes the Graffiti Highway as “one of the most popular locations to visit in Centralia”, which is like saying that fried chicken is one of the more popular dishes at KFC.  One option stands head and shoulders above a bunch of low quality alternatives.

Our next ballgame was at FNB Field in Harrisburg to see the hometown Senators take on the Bowie (Maryland) Baysox.  The place had a unique charm, if for no other reason than that it sits on City Island in the middle of the Susquehanna River.  The mid-river location might contribute to the other unique characteristic of FNB Field: it is frequently overrun by mayflies, pests that descend on City Island just long enough to be an irritant to regular fans of the Senators.  It is not lost on us that the same could be said of the BIBs.  We did encounter a little more than we bargained for when we asked one local fan to take a group photo for us.  He made Gerry and Kevin remove their sunglasses, told Scott to tuck in his shirt, and generally gave us what for.  We did get to see Harrisburg pitcher Jaron Long throw 6 innings of perfect baseball before giving up two runs in the seventh, on the way to what became a 5-4 13-inning win for the home team.  We had to take off after 9 innings, however, so that Scott could drop off the rest of us near the airport and get home at something that could be mistaken for a reasonable hour.

After Scott dropped off the boys at the same Hotel from two nights ago, he headed for home, while Gerry, Kevin and Mark toasted BIB 2016 with a pint and one last cheesesteak at Monaghan’s Irish Pub.  Gerry caught a cab to the airport, while Kevin and Mark headed for the flashing neon “OPEN” sign and made their reservations for the next morning on the every-fifteen-minutes-at-the-top-and-bottom-of-the-hour airport shuttle.

BIB2015: The Southern California Drought Tour

Scott, being a native of San Diego, assured us that “the morning fog always clears out by noon”.  It was the Friday morning fog that had diverted Gerry’s plane to Ontario (California, not Canada) while the rest of us, having arrived just ahead of the marine layer, entertained ourselves with a driving tour of Balboa Park and Old Town San Diego.  As the morning fog turned into afternoon fog, Gerry’s airline must have found just enough of a window to take off from Ontario for the fifteen minute flight to Lindbergh Field.  Gerry arrived in time to join us for Mexican lunch at El Indio.  Demonstrating that Scott’s local tour guide skills must be honed more to gastronomy than meteorology, El Indio turned out to be a great find.  And while the fog still lingered over our outdoor seating, it was a beautiful afternoon in the restaurant itself - not a cloud in the ceiling.

The fog yielded only marginally as we toured the USS Midway after lunch.  So many of the sights on-board were reminiscent of scenes from the movie Top Gun that our next stop could not have appropriately been anywhere else but Kansas City Barbecue, the self-proclaimed home of the “sleazy bar scene” from the 1986 movie classic.  We settled in for a late afternoon, pre-game drink, reasonably confident in the notion that – unlike many establishments - this was a place whose Mobil Travel Guide rating was in no jeopardy from a BIB visit.

Petco Park was only a short walk away.  Petco is the home of the San Diego Padres.  You can tell by the fact that about 50% of the people in the stands are wearing Dodger blue.  Petco is integrated into the fabric of downtown San Diego’s Gaslamp district more literally than any other park in the majors.  The Western Metal Supply Company’s warehouse, built in 1909, which means that it pre-dates the ballpark by 95 years, was left standing and now contains, among other things, the left field foul pole, part of the left field stands, and the Padres’ gift shop.  We saw Clayton Kershaw strike out 11 in 6-2/3 innings, surviving a 107 mph (according to Statcast) line drive to the hip off the bat of Justin Upton.  The fact that Kershaw went on to throw 117 pitches erased any notion of an Upton Funk (whew, that was a long way to go for that one).  The Dodgers won 4-3 in a back-and-forth game to send about half of the crowd home happy.  And, for the record, there still appeared to be fog in the area as the game concluded.

Saturday morning, we opted not to grab an early breakfast at the cartoonishly named “Hash House a Go Go” near the hotel, in favor of an authentic Mexican breakfast in Old Town San Diego.  Old Town San Diego, however, in a display of remarkable prescience given our history of wanton gluttony (motto: no-spam-left-behind) and questionable treatment of wait staff, was closed until late morning.  Just outside of Old Town proper, however, we found the equally cartoonishly named “Café Coyote”, home to, if not discerning standards for their clientele, at least some mighty fine Huevos Rancheros.

From breakfast, we headed downtown to “Another Side of San Diego” Segway Tours, which (and, really, do you think we would make this up?) happened to double as the Chabad Jewish Community Center.  I doubt any of us ever thought we would hear in one sentence “Pick out a helmet and feel free to use the restroom in the back…but try not to interrupt the Shabbat observance.”  If the bizarre dichotomy of Jewish Sabbath and “tourists on wheels” didn’t strike you, the fact that two of us had chosen to wear red shirts and the other two black might have.  It must have been an odd sight, because even strangers who saw us rolling by were yelling things like “Hey, Team Red and Team Black”.  When we’d congregate in a circle, we must have looked like a human roulette wheel.  It didn’t help that we were about as graceful as elephants on bowling balls, either.  When we tried to line up close to each other for pictures, we’d inevitably bump into each other, triggering a sort of Keystone-Kops-meets-Monty-Python moment where it was all we could do not to knock each over like a row of middle-aged dominoes.

After a couple of hours touring downtown, we traded our wheels for meals at - extending the prairie carnivore theme from breakfast - the Coyote Ugly Bar.  When your moniker includes the word “ugly”, you’ve set the bar appropriately low for the quality of the food - maybe just a tick above Kansas City Barbecue’s “sleazy”, but still not as good as one might expect from a highway truck stop with “EATS” emblazoned on the roof.  While waiting for our food to arrive, we began reminiscing about classic BIB meals of the past.  Just how discriminating our palates actually are was captured in a single phrase uttered by Scott, who recalled “a really good pile of something we had for breakfast in Quad Cities”.

Following lunch, we headed north to Yorba Linda and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.  We were already a little short on time, so a myriad of traffic-jams-for-no-apparent reason along the way was absolutely maddening.  Traffic would come to a halt or near-halt, we would crawl along for 5-10 minutes, and then accelerate to highway speed until we encountered the next bit of congestion.  What should have been less than a two-hour drive to the Nixon Library wound up being closer to 3 hours…not counting an 18-1/2 minute gap in what we can recall.  We were left with only about an hour to tour the library and museum.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the introductory film, produced while Nixon was still alive, paints a fairly sympathetic view of our 37^th President…even going so far as to say that he knew nothing of the Watergate break-in (a notion rendered laughably naive by the public release of hundreds of hours of Nixon's tapes in 2013 and 2014).  Beyond the film, there were several areas of interest in and around the site, including Nixon’s boyhood home, the helicopter from which he bid farewell to the White House, and the grave in which he now lies (no pun intended).

Angel Stadium was only a few short miles from the Nixon Library.  Upon arriving at the stadium, we somehow finagled our way into the Schock Top Brew Pub on the club level down the first base line.  The atmosphere at our “real” seats in left center field was almost identical to that of the pub – except for the spacious tables with nice place mats, waiters and waitresses catering to every whim, and beautiful panoramic view of the entire stadium.  Nevertheless, we managed to hang out with the club-level aristocracy for quite a while before taking our rightful place among the great unwashed. Ironically, the only run of the game, a first-inning Albert Pujols home run, landed pretty close to our seats among the proletariat, but before we ever actually made it to that location.  Once we did arrive, it was tough not to recognize the contrast between first-class and steerage, as a guy seated behind us kept banging the seats around him incessantly and yelling “huddle, huddle, you’re in trouble!” (yeah, we didn’t know what it meant either) to no one in particular.  Try that kind of garbage in the Brew Pub and there’s a good chance you’d get your sushi and kale salad privileges taken away…or worse yet, left to drink some light beer swill instead of a proper local craft IPA.  The evening ended on a solid note, though, as we found some more peaceful seats in the upper deck, perfect for viewing dualing fireworks displays, as the post-game pyrotechnics happened to coincide with those of nearby Disneyland.  While we didn’t make it to Disneyland ourselves, through the magic of Priceline, we did find ourselves staying at the Knott’s Berry Farm Hotel for the evening.  Nothing like staying down the hall from a bunch of slobbering juveniles on vacation…said everyone unfortunate enough to get a room near us.

8:00am Sunday morning was not only the time that we planned to meet for breakfast.  It was also exactly 24 hours from when Mark’s Southwest Airlines flight would be leaving for home.  In order to ensure “Group A” seating on the flight (which, based on Mark’s maniacal attention to check-in time must be the only seats equipped with oxygen masks and flotation devices), Mark would need to access his mobile app at precisely 8:00am Naval Observatory Time.  Luckily, Mark had gotten a rental vehicle equipped with the cesium beam atomic clock option, so we were good to go.  And go we did, to the Sunrise Café, home of locally legendary banana pancakes, for breakfast.  We appeared to be the only patrons in the restaurant that were not permanent residents of Buena Park, California.  The fact that they don’t get many out-of-towners may have had something to do with why, when we asked the waitress what she would recommend on the menu, we got an extemporaneous speaking performance worthy of Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessep.  Perhaps she attended French Toastmasters.

Back on the road after breakfast, Scott made the mistake of disclosing that he prepares many of his meals out of something called the Pioneer Woman Cookbook.  If you can get past the fact that the title sounds like somewhere Hannibal Lecter would get his recipes, you are still left with the disturbing image of Scott cooking possum stew.  If you can get past the possum stew, you are still left with the disturbing image of Scott in an apron. 

It is fair to say that we visited a more alluring roadside attraction this time around than last time we were in L.A.  Of course, the Le Brea Tar Pits had set the standard at “20-acre latrine”, so not a high bar.   By comparison, the Watts Towers, concocted in large part from shards of soft drink and milk of magnesia bottles held together by steel rebar and wire mesh, were downright charming.  Upon exiting our vehicle in Watts, we were serenaded by the sound of nearby sirens and barking pit bulls – just enough to remind us that this 2-1/2 square mile area had twice been home to six straight days of rioting – once in 1965 and again in 1992.  The place has experienced less genuine harmony in the last few decades than the Milli Vanilli fan club.

From Watts, we headed to downtown L.A.  Outside the Staples Center, we took some pictures with the bronze statue of Los Angeles Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn who, it turns out, much to our disappointment, is not a chick at all.  Just across the street, a line had formed around 3 sides of the Microsoft Theater in anticipation of the World Nintendo Championships.  Get a life, lonely, pathetic, people…said many of those waiting in line who saw us posing with Chick Hearn.  Our reason for coming downtown, the Grammy Museum, would not disappoint; it was dedicating an entire floor to a temporary exhibit called the “Taylor Swift Experience”.  While, Mark refused on principle to step foot on the Swift floor (dude, “Shake it Off”), there was actually much to be learned from the exhibit…like how the blonde femme fatale chews up and spits out old boyfriends by making them the target of ill-spirited song lyrics.  Note to selves: “Do not date Taylor Swift.”  Thank goodness we toured that exhibit and now know to dodge that bullet!

We had some time to blow in oppressively hot San Bernardino before the game between the visiting Visalia Rawhide and the Inland Empire 66ers.  After allocating the better part of an hour for Kevin to find and apply several coats of SPF 50, we still had enough time to visit the McDonald’s Museum on the site of the original restaurant in the Route 66 Business District.  Not since 2004 (when we met Chuck, the caretaker of the Twister House in Eldora, Iowa and his dog Buddy, who he claims had rescued him from a diabetic coma), have we come across the owner of a roadside attraction who seemed quite so unnaturally happy to see us.  In this case, it was Albert Okura, founder and CEO of the Juan Pollo restaurant chain in Southern California, and self-proclaimed “Mexican Colonel Sanders”.  In fact, he virtually held Scott hostage while he located and signed a copy of his book of life lessons: Albert Okura, The Chicken Man with a 50 Year Plan.  One can’t help but wonder why a successful restaurateur would be so interested in entertaining 4 schlubs like us…or for that matter why he chooses to work out of an office surrounded by pictures of the original Ronald McDonald (a beyond-creepy demonic-clown-on-crystal-meth looking beast), a life-size Grimace costume, and all manner of crème de la crap from over a half-century of hawking Big Macs.

The game at San Manuel (Spanish for “no shade”) Stadium was, in a word, hot.  That’s really all any of us remember.  Not 100% certain, but we think we may have caught Kevin brushing his teeth with sunscreen in a desperate attempt to ward off spontaneous combustion.  Mercifully, Scott suggested that we go try another game starting a little later less than an hour away: San Jose Giants at High Desert Mavericks.  Why not?  After all, how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Adelanto?  Mark was especially enthusiastic, until we clarified that it was “High Desert”, not “High Dessert”, and that no hemp-laced brownies would be involved.  So, we left the oppressive, shadeless 87-degree furnace of San Bernardino for the 99-degree, sustained 14 mile-per-hour wind tunnel of Adelanto.  The wind is, in part, a by-product of the barren moonscape for miles in every direction around Heritage Field, and explains why the ballpark holds the distinction of giving up more home runs per game, 2.94, than any other park in professional baseball.  We saw our fair share – three - in the Mavericks’ 7-5 victory.

Our last night in Southern California was spent at a hotel on the main road into LAX.  With runway approaches on both sides of the hotel, one got the sensation of sleeping on a double-yellow line at rush hour.  No worries though – plenty of time to rest up before we kick off our second quarter-century of BIB tours in 2016.

The Brothers in Baseball 2012 Tour came early this year, when the Mid-West and East Coast Brothers flew in to San Franscisco Friday morning, May 4th, and Mark, the Left Coaster, after many circles in SFO, picked them up and headed right to the former Federal Penetentiary of Alcatraz Island.  Despite Kevin and Scott being delayed an hour, we just made our assigned 12:30pm ferry at Pier 33 and had a great tour of "The Rock."  From there we sat in Bay Area Friday Get-Away Traffic out to Stockton where we made the first pitch at the Stockton Ports game against the Lancaster Jethawks at the new Banner Island Ballpark--there was a "tin lunchbox" promotion, and we all got one!!  We were part of a crowd of 3,066 to see the hometown Ports drop a 3 to 2 decision to the Jethawks.

Saturday, we cruised around Old Sacramento and checked out Raley Field, home of the Scramento RiverCats, unfortunately out of town.  We toured the California State Railway Museum before heading up to Reno, NV to catch the Reno Aces taking on the Tacoma Raniers at their new Aces Ballpark.  We saw this team in their last year as the Tucson Sidewinders, but they moved north and west for the 2009 season.  In a very cold ballpark, we were among the hardy fans who stuck around to see the Aces pull out an 11 to 10 win!  We stayed in the Tahoe area Saturday night then took the 200 mile run down the mountain back to San Francisco where we saw the Giants take on Gerry's hometown Brewers at AT&T Park on Sunday afternoon.  Going in to extra innings, pinch hitter Hector Sanchez hit a walk-off single against a non-traditional five-man infield the BrewCrew set up with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 11th inning for a home-town 4 to 3 win. 

Here is our ever-pithy Kevin's full trip report!

2012 BIB Trip Report

Scott designs BIB trips just like the Parker Brothers game Jenga...move any piece and the tightly packed mess can all come crashing down.  The ceremonial first glitch to this year's trip (christened the Baysball Tour, since it began and ended in the Bay Area) was thrown out by Kevin, whose flight was cancelled.  In a bizarre twist, the flight was resurrected an hour later (“thank you for flying Lazarus Airlines”) when some mechanic apparently banged his palm on his forehead, remembering where he'd put the missing replacement part.  This made for a just-in-time arrival in San Francisco for the Alcatraz tour.  Had we been ten minutes later, we may have been the first men ever to contemplate how we were going to break in to Alcatraz.

Our first game of the trip was in chilly Stockton, California to see the hometown Ports take on the Lancaster Jethawks.  The game itself featured an inside-the-park home run (one of two home runs from Jethawks right fielder Adam Bailey) and two notable injuries.  First, the game's leadoff batter, Lancaster shortstop Jiovanni Mier, severely injured a hamstring rounding second and dropped as if someone from the stands had shot him with a crossbow.  A little while later, our beer vendor crumpled to the concrete just as quickly when his knee took on the metal armrest of an aisle seat and lost.  Mier may one day tell his grandchildren how his dreams of playing in the major leagues were put on hold as he was stretching for a triple that might set the pace for the game and inspire his team to victory.  The beer vendor may one day move out of his parents' place.

We spent the first night of this trip in Sacramento (so named for the soft candy-coated breath mints which the Spanish missionaries blessed and served to the original natives).  The power breakfast is a staple of any BIB trip.  On this trip, we experienced a tower breakfast.  The Tower Cafe is an ethnic restaurant in Sacramento that is equal parts Mexican, Asian, and Sanford-and-Son.  On this day, the featured special was "Relleno de Chihuahua".  We assume the dish was named for its origins in northern Mexico, not its origins at the SPCA.

At the California State Railroad museum in Sacramento, we learned that a Golden Spike means something besides peeing in someone's beer.  It turns out that Sacramento is where they began building the railroad from the west to meet up with the portion from the east at Promontory Point, Utah.  The cross-country railroad revolutionized the entire world in ways we'd frankly not considered.  Time zones, and therefore precise timekeeping, were a byproduct of the railroads.  Without the railroads, the movie "High Noon" could never have come to be.  Gary Cooper would have starred in "Around Midday-ish".  We even took a train ride along the Sacramento River.  It was here that we met a woman from Oregon that was right out of BIB trip central casting: the trash-talking senior citizen who gives us what for.  Most strangers we encounter understandably think we are to be either pitied or feared; either way, they usually leave us alone.  But about once each trip, someone - usually a female who vividly remembers the Eisenhower administration and nearly always a waitress (this instance was an exception) - finds us enough of a curiosity to invest some time in ridiculing us for sport. We made the mistake of inadvertently cutting in line in front of Oregon Lady at the train station and had to listen to her and her blue-haired posse mouth off about our lack of manners for the whole train ride.

And speaking of being fed up with people...our next stop was at Donner State Park.  The Donner party, as you may recall, was the group of settlers who got trapped by a snowstorm on their way west and, for lack of a sufficient supply of trail mix, went Hannibal Lecter on one another (entrail mix?).  Donner State Park recognizes the hardships encountered by those who blazed the trail westward.  It also recalls a watershed event in the development of proper dining etiquette...some of the more sordid and seldom-shared details of the ordeal seem to indicate that women of the Donner party were, in fact, always served first.

If Stockton was chilly, Reno, where the hometown Aces took an 11-10 victory from the Tacoma Rainiers, was downright cold.  We did get to stand in the sun before the game, though, for a batting practice jersey giveaway.  The jerseys were one-size-fits-all…and that’s accurate, as long as your definition of “fits” includes a sweater vest on a sumo wrestler.  Fittingly (as if that adverb had any place in this paragraph), it was Gerry - our Wisconsin native - who most resembled a kielbasa being stuffed into its casing.  We managed to get seats in Reno behind several women who spent much of the game dancing to the between-innings music, and just in front of an overly perky young couple whose non-stop banter was reminiscent of Alvin and the Chipmunks on amphetamines.  What we wouldn’t have given for a nine-inning complete game shut-up.  Our neighbors in the stands did provide a nice counterbalance to the creepy factor of Aces Ballpark, though.  First, there’s an inflatable "Mr. Baseball" that appears during the seventh inning stretch from behind the batter’s eye in centerfield.  It is a giant baseball-shaped head, probably 20 feet in diameter, that conjures a twisted blend of "Wilson the Volleyball" from the movie Castaway and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that bursts into flames in Ghostbusters.  You half expect this Franken-flatable to start spinning on its axis spewing pea soup all over the outfield.  Amazingly, Mr. Baseball is only the second creepiest character in the park.  “Archie” is the Aces’ Elmo-gone-bad red blob of a mascot, who roams the stands and speaks (yes, speaks) with the kind of spooky, gravelly voice that makes him sound like the forgotten love child of Vincent Price and Adele.  Between the raspy voice, some off-color jokes and occasionally suggestive gyrations, you can’t help but wonder if the Reno Aces’ publicity department actually posted a help-wanted ad looking for “heavy smoker…registered sex offender a plus”.  The commentary on a YouTube video of his antics actually wonders aloud whether he might not be “The World’s Most Perverted Mascot”.  

After the game, we spent the night at Mark's place in Tahoe...temperature inside 56 degrees when we arrived.  The frigid cold in such a remote place, all the earlier fascination with the Donner Party, and Gerry's kielbasa imitation naturally combined to trigger several discussions about which BIB would eat whom in a pinch.  For the record, it was decided that Mark's recent fitness regimen would leave him unacceptably chewy.  We were also introduced to Mark's deceased and cremated pets who now reside on or around the mantle of the Tahoe place: Rusty, Carrie, and Max (yes, Rusty is now Dusty).

Following 5:30am reveille, breakfast on Sunday was at Jax Truckee Diner (a.k.a., Jax at the Trax).  Truckee is a cute little town tucked in a valley between the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It looks for all the world like it was constructed for a miniature train display.  Then we were off to Mark’s “real” house in Alameda and a wind-blown ferry ride from Alameda to San Francisco to watch the Giants take on Gerry’s Brewers.  Having experienced two games that felt more like the Green Bay area than the San Francisco Bay area, and with a forecast high of only 71 degrees in the notoriously breezy city by the bay, we were all wearing jeans and carrying layers for the mile-or-so walk from the ferry terminal to AT&T Park.  Naturally, the sun chose this moment to make an unexpected appearance and create an afternoon of bakesball.  71 degrees, my eye. The temperature wasn’t the only thing in the eighties, however.  Willie Mays was at the park to celebrate his 81st birthday.  He was able to do so in style as the Giants beat the Brewers in 11-inning walk-off fashion.  Mark, who is an Oakland fan because he was born there, and an occasional  Giants fan because they win more often and K-mart was out of Yankees jerseys, provided the post-game entertainment by going into a rapturous fit that Gerry captured on Facebook when the last out was made. Brewers’ centerfielder Nyjer Morgan provided plenty of in-game entertainment.  Apparently, he is not on many Giants’ fans Christmas card lists after a 2011 incident in which he allegedly asked them collectively “how many fingers am I holding up?”  (the answer was one).  The fact that he made a great catch in left-center to end an inning just upped the ante on the lovefest.

After the game, we hiked to Murphy’s Irish Pub for a drink with Mark’s wife, Janet.  Mark and Janet then turned us on to Brandy Ho’s, an unmistakably authentic Hunan restaurant in Chinatown.  Completing the San Francisco ethnic trifecta was gelato in Little Italy.  For those of us heading out the next morning, it was time to head off to our hotel near the airport and begin awaiting Scott’s proposed plans for BIB 2013.  Early indications are that we may be doing an all-minor-league trip through the Deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama…just begging to be called the “Throw-the-Ball-Bayou” tour.

As usual, Scott, our Planner Extraordinare, figured out the possible trips as soon as all the Major and Minor League Schedules came out, but this year he decided to throw us a knuckleball by adding the Little League World Series to the itinerary! Planning around that, the planets aligned in late August. Arriving Friday morning, we caught the Mets in their new digs in NYC, then "road tripped" to the middle of Pennsylvania to catch a couple of Little League World Series games and check out their museum, then we caught the Pirates on Sunday after paying our respects to the Flight 93 Memorial. As usual, we found some of the more odd and unusual roadside attractions across this wonderful land of ours as we travel from ballpark to ballpark. Read on to find out how much fun four fat old farts can have over a long weekend crammed in to a rental car.

2011 BIB Trip Report

It tells you all you need to know about the Brothers in Baseball that after our first day of BIB 2011, we found ourselves asking whether the best $10 we’d spent was on the pastrami or the freak show. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Upon landing at BWI airport on Friday morning, Kevin was greeted by a text message from Scott that said we’d have to meet Gerry at “lga”. Since Gerry was to land a few minutes behind Kevin at BWI, it wasn’t clear why he’d be at a grocery store (IGA, as any Midwesterner can attest, means “Independent Grocers Alliance”). Turns out that “lga” was actually “LGA”, or LaGuardia airport. In other words, due to a cancelled flight, Gerry would be landing a little more than 200 miles from where Mark and Scott had intended to pick him up. Last year, we had to cross town to recover Gerry’s late-arriving misdirected baggage. This year, we had to cross the eastern seaboard to recover a late-arriving misdirected Gerry.

Speaking of misdirected, Kevin assumed his traditional navigator’s spot in the passenger seat. It became obvious this year that Kevin is permitted to serve as navigator only because he brings a GPS…not because he actually knows how to use it. If Kevin had been piloting the Enola Gay, there’s a better-than-average chance that the first atomic bomb would have been dropped on Hoboken. After picking up Gerry, the Brothers descended on Coney Island exactly 9 days before Hurricane Irene did precisely the same thing. Thankfully, having lost some strength due to traveling over land for such an extended period, the disturbance caused only moderate damage. The hurricane may also have caused some problems. As you might suspect, the first Coney Island attraction of interest to the BIBs was hot dogs at Nathan’s Famous, the competitive eating capital of the world. After a short stroll along the boardwalk – and because these trips are all about finding little hidden bastions of understated elegance - we headed into the Coney Island Circus Sideshow to view the “freaks, wonders and human curiosities” (which is a little like Kojak paying money to see people with a receding hairline). BIB faves included the Illustrated Penguin (“Illustrated”, because his body is covered with tattoos and “Penguin” because – well, you’d just have to see for yourself) and Baron Von Geiger, who lifts brass anchors by way of attached fishhooks through his eye sockets. Kinda makes you want to go back to Nathan’s to slam another round of chili dogs, eh? We used our last few minutes at Coney to ride the historic Cyclone roller coaster, which has been at the corner of Surf Avenue and West 10th Street in Brooklyn since 1927.

We had to hustle back to Queens (where we’d just picked up Gerry a few hours earlier), to make sure we were in our seats at Citi Field in plenty of time to catch all of the 2 hour and 46 minute rain delay. It was only 2 years ago they finished building this park, and now it looked like they might need to start building an ark alongside it. Making the delay somewhat more tolerable was our discovery of the pastrami-on-rye at the concession stand in left field. A sandwich completely worthy of its New York origins, it was a sloppy delight with more fat than bread…just like the Brothers in Baseball. We also got to know a friendly, if somewhat orthodontically challenged, hot dog vendor. Dude’s mouth was a dental amusement park; when he smiled for a picture with us, you felt the urge to pay a dollar for three softball throws and a chance to knock out the remaining incisors. Once the baseball game resumed, we sat through 3 innings of it before we had to hop in the car and drive across Manhattan to Morristown, New Jersey.

The area in and around Morristown is nostalgic for the Brothers, since we all met on an internship in New Jersey over 20 years go. Mark took us to one of his old culinary haunts for breakfast Saturday morning – the Minuteman Café in Bernardsville, New Jersey. An intriguing new addition to the breakfast menu at some point in the last 20 years was something called a “pork roll”. The waitress explained that it was “a New Jersey thing”. Drawing on what we recalled of New Jersey, that meant that the pork roll was either outrageously expensive, had an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the New York pastrami, or was just perpetually ill-tempered. Best we could tell, it was none of those…it was simply Spam. After breakfast, it was on to our morning nostalgia tour of New Jersey and the places we lived 20 years ago. What makes a nostalgia tour nostalgic is remembering things from 20 years go. Gerry couldn’t. He had to be shown where he used to live. He thought he remembered living on Smoke Rise Road in Bedminster, but had to be shown that he’d actually lived on Smoke Rise Lane. That little bit of confusion sent us driving in circles (in this case, without the aid of Kevin’s I-could-get-lost-on-a-merry-go-round sense of direction). When Gerry starts having to be shown the way to his own house, he just begs to have his middle name changed to “Atric”.

From New Jersey, we headed to the Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine in Ashland, Pennsylvania. There, we hopped onboard the mine cars for the 1/3 mile trip inside Mahanoy Mountain. About half-way in, a young boy, looking to be about 9-years-old, started screaming at the top of his lungs that he wanted to go back. The tour guide obliged and reversed the train of cars. As you might expect, the minute we came to a halt just outside the cave, the guide opened the door on the boy’s car and both boy and mildly-embarrassed mother disembarked. As you might not expect, Mark, who had apparently been quietly nursing himself into a claustrophobic panic attack for the last few minutes, stood up in our car, did his best Roberto Duran impersonation (“no mas”) and jumped over the side of the car onto the tracks, leaving behind his brethren and, at least metaphorically, his man-card.

Following the coal mine tour, we hopped back in the rental and headed for Williamsport. It was a little tougher now for Mark to drive, what with his skirt getting caught on the gas pedal and all (we kid because we love, Mark). Williamsport is quite the spectacle…a baseball oasis tucked among the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, somewhat reminiscent of Cooperstown. We arrived in time to catch the tail end of the Midwest (Rapid City, SD) vs. Southeast (Warner Robins, GA) game. More interesting, however, was the international game, pitting Mideast and Africa, or MEA (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia), against Europe (Rotterdam, Netherlands). Europe featured a kid with what has to me the best baseball name ever: “Diamond Silberie”. The MEA team, on the other hand, was full of kids with really exotic-sounding names like “Shane”, “Dylan”, “Tanner”, “Tyler”, “Brandon”, and “Jonathan”. Mideast, my eye…the team could just as easily have been from the Midwest. We left the international game about midway through to head to a minor league game across town, where the Williamsport Crosscutters were taking on the Jamestown Jammers. For those of you scoring at with us at home, that made three games that we’d seen portions of so far on the trip, without even coming close to sitting through a whole game.

We arrived at the minor league game in the second inning (make that 4 partial games). The Crosscutters put on a great show, with some classic minor league stunts (fans sumo wrestling in oversized costumes, fans racing toy horses, fans racing from the midpoint between home and first in opposite directions while connected by a bungee cord that is oh-so-close to being long enough for them to reach the finish line) and some new twists (kids strutting with numbered placards between innings a la Las Vegas showgirls at a boxing match, and the inimitable BellyBusters contest that involves competitors attempting to eat 2 hot dogs, a pack of bologna, full jars of frosting and mustard, a 6-pack of Jello cups, and 2 loaves of bread – winner determined after others have either voluntarily bowed out or involuntarily burst like a piñata). The Crosscutters came out ahead on the scoreboard, 5-1, but likely did not produce more runs than – judging from the frequency of the winner’s trips to the restroom - the BellyBuster contest did.

After spending the night in Altoona (closest accommodations Priceline had to Williamsport that were rated above “manger”), we paid a visit to the Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When we visited, phase one of the permanent memorial was just being completed, for dedication on September 11, 2011. What strikes you about the location where Flight 93 came down is that while it is in the remotest of remote locations, it crashed at the bottom of a gentle slope, at the top of which is an abandoned strip mining operation with a paved approach road. In other words, it fell in a spot that provides a sort of natural amphitheater for visitors.

From Shanksville, we headed for PNC Park in Pittsburgh and a game between the Pirates and Reds. As we descended along the side of a mountain into Pittsburgh, Mark was entertaining us with some story or another just as a fully loaded car-carrying tractor-trailer began weaving in front of us. Mark calmly continued his story. Then, when we realized that a collision involving an RV had occurred a little further ahead, it became obvious that the car carrier wasn’t so much weaving as jack-knifing. Mark kept talking. Amazingly, Mark never did break his verbal stride, even as he weaved his way through the “Dukes of Hazard - Rust Belt Edition” unfolding around us. To this day, he probably thinks our white knuckles and flop-sweat were a result of his story being just that riveting.

We parked downtown in “the city of bridges” and walked across one of them to the park. Statues of Pirate greats – Mazeroski, Clemente, Stargell – grace the plaza outside PNC Park, and the view of the city beyond the outfield fence is worth the price of admission – especially when the price of admission is only $27 for seats in the lower deck, just one section away from being directly behind home plate. The only venue that lets you near a plate for less is IHOP (and, come to think of it, they never let you see their batter). Two rain delays insured that we’d need to leave the game early in order to get Gerry to his early evening flight and to get Mark and Scott back on the road to BWI that evening. They rain also insured that we would not see a single game in its entirety on this trip. In fact, Scott pointed out that we have become like “baseball ninja”, slipping into towns unnoticed, watching fractions of games, and then slipping out just as quickly as we came. His metaphor is a pretty good one. Except for the fact that ninja are physically fit, courageous warriors of supernatural intellect, we are exactly like ninja.

BIB2010: the Schwing through the Southwest Tour

BIB 2009: The Land of Lincoln Tour

Mark had arrived Thursday evening and procured a rust-orange rental SUV, one that looked vaguely like Mater, from the Disney/Pixar movie Cars, but with better dental hygiene. So when Gerry, Kevin, and Scott all showed up at the same baggage claim carrousel within 10 minutes of each other on Friday morning, it appeared that we would be off to an uncharacteristically efficient start.  Lest the world spin off its axis from such an unlikely event, Scott's luggage did take a good 20 minutes to show up, while Mark rode Mater around in circles outside.  Scott is our trip planner, our organizer without equal, the Maharishi of Mapquest, our Triple-'A'ngel.  His halo was dimmed only slightly when he hopped in Mater and announced "This day might be a little screwed up, so be patient."  Turns out he had booked us to be at both the Anheuser-Busch Beermaster Tour and St. Louis Arch at the same time. We’d have plenty of time to sort that out, though, since the day’s agenda was to start with a tour of Busch stadium.  On the way to the stadium, Scott revealed that poison ivy was gradually taking over his entire body.  Because we only meet once a year to share stories, the car conversation on these trips is always an exercise in one-upsmanship recapping the quirky, bizarre, and occasionally grotesque details of the last 12 months.  When you start right out of the gate with prospect that every square inch of surface area on your body could be oozing pus by trip’s end, where is there to go from there – I mean really?

The new Cardinals’ home, as encountered in the tour, is one of the classier of the nouveau stadia.  We got to see the Stan Musial statue that’s been moved over from “old” Busch Stadium, visit the radio booth, go on the field, sit in the dugout, see Fredbird’s nest (dressing room of the team mascot) and pass by what’s left of Marty Hendin’s Trinket City (Marty Hendin was the Cardinals’ VP of Community Relations until his death from cancer at age 59 in 2008; his collection of schlockly St’ Louis Cardinals memorabilia in his office had caused it to be dubbed “Trinket City”).  There are some subtle nods to the Cardinals’ history in the new stadium.  For example, the concourse has a yellow stripe painted on it that traces where the outfield wall of the old stadium had been (the footprint of the old and new Busch Stadia overlap somewhat).  There are also several displays, including the 10 flags to the right of the scoreboard, that acknowledge the cardinals’ 10 world championships.  Interestingly, every time these are mentioned on the tour, the host for that portion of the tour feels compelled to point out that St. Louis has more world championships than every club except the New York Yankees, who have 26.  Do we detect a bit of what Freud would have called “pennants envy”?

We opted to go on the Beermaster tour next, figuring we’d take our chances on getting new tickets for the Arch between the brewery and the ballgame.  And besides, the notion of sandwiching a trip in a catenary ferris wheel of gimbaled eggs to a confined space 630 feet above St. Louis right between two beer-drinking events seemed really, really smart.  This was especially true since Scott was promising to taste his first beer on the Anheuser Busch Tour.  We had no idea how he would react – maybe not at all, maybe it would take the edge off the poison ivy itch, or maybe he’d just launch into a Cirque de Spew-leil of projectile vomiting.  Regardless, it sounded like good sport.  We grabbed lunch on the outdoor patio of Big Daddy’s Bar and Restaurant near the brewery and then headed over to meet out tour guide, Amanda.   Amanda was a perky young thing, who, like Scott, had never had a beer in her life, or at least so she claimed.  The only other folks on the tour with us were seven guys from Boston [Ed. Note: there would have been 8, but apparently one had been arrested on some sort of felony charges] whose ringleader was a bartender.  It appeared that they were his best customers – Lord knows they were professional drinkers – and that he was taking them on this trip.  They were overweight, loud, chronically unemployed, and apparently devoid of any real skills – social or otherwise…in other words, everything we aspire to be.  The tour was a blast, we got our official Beermaster certificates, and Scott did indeed sample his first brew – directly out of the finishing tank.

And so we headed to the Arch, where we had no trouble at all getting tickets – unless you count the reaction of mildly-claustrophobic Mark when he saw how we would be penned up in the egg-scalator on the trip to the top.  He first suggested, and then demanded, that Gerry get only 3 tickets.  Mark would wait at the bottom.  We now understand where the term “vertigo” comes from.  Because when Gerry showed up with four tickets, Mark shot him a one-finger salute and told him “ver”-to-go and how to get there.  Turned out to be much ado about nothing, as Mark was just fine the whole way.

After the Arch, it was back to Busch stadium to watch an 11-4 thrashing of the Redbirds by the Colorado Rockies.  The wheels came off in a nine-run implosion by the St. Louis bullpen in the seventh inning.

Saturday morning began, as so many BIB mornings have, with a trip to Cracker Barrel.  Just to whet our appetites, Scott announced on the way that his poison ivy had worsened overnight.  Our first stop after breakfast was the Cahokia Mounds.  Though it sounds like a new Hershey’s candy bar, it is actually what’s left of the largest prehistoric Indian site north of Mexico.  It is in Collinsville, Illinois (part of the thriving Collinsville – Fairmont City metroplex).  Amazingly, a portion of the site had actually been developed as a subdivision in the fifties and sixties.  At some point a guy digging for a septic tank found a gazillion arrowheads, which must have gotten somebody to thinking that they may want to preserve the place as an historical site.  Never mind the 14-acre,100-foot tall “Monks Mound” across the street that didn’t seem to tip anyone off.

From Collinsville, we headed north toward Springfield Illinois, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.  It seemed appropriate to pay homage to our 16^th chief executive on this, the 200^th anniversary of the year in which he was born.  The library and museum were constructed only four years ago.  That’s “zero score and four years”, in Abe-speak (and, coincidentally, an accurate way to describe the college experience of any one of the Brothers in Baseball).  The place turned out to be the kind of diamond-in-the-rough roadside attraction that we pride ourselves on discovering.  It had a treasure trove of Lincoln and Civil War artifacts, several theaters, reproductions of scenes from Lincoln’s life, and even a not-so-bad cafeteria with plenty of indoor and outdoor seating, but, appropriately for a Lincoln museum, no Booths.  The highlight had to be the “Ghosts of the Library” show, in which an actor playing a civil war soldier spends about 10 minutes onstage describing and interacting with various civil war relics and then, somehow, gradually begins disappearing from the feet up until he has totally vanished.  We still have no earthly idea how they did it. 

On the way out of Springfield, we stopped by Lincoln’s Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery on our way to Davenport, Iowa to see the Quad Cities River Bandits host the Clinton Lumberkings at Modern Woodmen Park.  Scott had somehow procured us seats in the first row behind home plate – so close that when a foul ball came straight back, there was enough give in the screen that if we weren’t sitting straight up, we could take one in the chops.  Scoring these seats was all the more remarkable because the “cities” weren’t the only thing “quad” on this night.  There were actually four separate promotions going on (gotta love minor league baseball!):

1.       A post-game concert starring Superfly Samurai (did they name their band after a Japanese porn star?)

2.       John Deere night (evidently trying to give the Kansas City T-Bones’ “Mullet Night” a run for the money in attracting the low tooth-to-toe ratio crowd)

3.       CPR night (????)

4.       80’s night (we weren’t sure if that was targeted at Spandau Ballet fans or the geriatric set).

Davenport, Iowa captured our hearts in a Twin Peaks-esque sort of way.  There was the wait-staff (hey, we had seats right behind the plate, remember?).  Victoria, our waitress, was very sweet, if just a little intimidated by us.  Once she was frightened off, they sent in Andrew, a wisecracking waiter, who we promised we would remember in the annals of BIB lore…to which he wistfully lamented, “Look, I’m Asian.  We all look the same to you.”  Then there was the young couple (Andy and Erin) sitting just down from us who had that rare appreciation for the magical quirkiness that is BIB.   Erin proudly displayed the ring she’d recently gotten from Andy, but explained that they weren’t engaged yet, because they hadn’t found “just the right moment”.  Apparently, a ballgame sitting next to four beer-guzzling, hot dog inhaling, middle-aged man-children while being serenaded by Superfly Samurai sound-checks wasn’t “just the right moment” either.  About those sound-checks…they started around the top of the ninth, anticipating that the game, then tied at seven, would end in regulation.  It didn’t.  So we endured sound-checks in the 10^th…and the 11^th.  By the 12^th inning, Superfly Samurai was wearing down a little.  A two-run Clinton rally in the top of the 13^th put some spunk back into their “check…one, two…check”.  You could almost hear their little Superfly hearts deflate when the River Bandits came back to tie in the bottom of the 13^th.  By now, virtually the only people left were the John Deere crowd pounding Polish sausages and having belching contests in the Tiki Village beyond right field, and a few folks gathered nearby, anxiously anticipating a chance to strut their stuff in an all-out DEFCON-1 CPR situation.  Mercifully, Clinton scored a run in the top of the 14^th, the River Bandits were unable to match, and most of us could head home, while Superfly Samurai played a concert for their parents down the right field line and Scott announced that poison ivy had invaded his eyelid.

            The final day of BIB 2009 began, as it traditionally does, with the appearance of Mark’s Zappa T-shirt.  Those civil war relics had nothing on this piece of BIB memorabilia, originally purchased by Mark shortly after we first met, circa 1990, in New York’s East Village.  Gerry, Kevin, Scott, Mark and Frank all headed to breakfast at Ross’ Restaurant in Davenport, home of the Magic Mountain (Texas Toast, sausage, gravy or cheese, hash browns, and scrambled eggs all piled high).  Andy (of Andy and Erin fame) had turned us on to this place and it didn’t disappoint.  The setting was right out of the BIB playbook: underneath an interstate overpass and right across the street from the QC Mart that proudly proclaims “Cheap Gas/Cash Loans”.  Laminated menus?  Check.  And not just laminated.  These menus didn’t just need a good wiping off – they could probably have used a good delousing.  And, of course, there was the obligatory 30-year veteran waitress (Jan, in this case), who was at once flattered that we wanted to take her picture and mildly frightened that we were serial killers who ritualistically photograph our victims.

From Ross’, it was off to our final stop at U.S. Cellular Field (or whatever the heck it is that we call Comiskey Park these days).  Along the way, Gerry received an email from his brother, David, requesting admission to the Bothers in Baseball.  Informed that one of us would have to die first, he countered by asking if getting our story on CBS would gain him BIB Hall-of-Fame status.  Game on, David.  Flight schedules were such that none of us would actually see the end of the Sox’ game, but an 8-4 loss to the Cleveland Indians assured that visiting teams swept our 2009 BIB series.

Next year marks the 20^th anniversary of BIB.  Stay tuned to see where all the pageantry will unfold, who will be selected to throw out the ceremonial first wisecrack, and how far Scott’s poison ivy will have spread by then.

BIB 2008: Vegas Baby!

Charles Kuralt has nothing on the Brothers in Baseball. We’ve been to the La Brea Tar Pits; Underground Seattle; the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; the ruins of the Branch Davidean compound in Waco, Texas; the house used in the final scenes of the movie "Twister" in Eldora, Iowa; Vollis Simpson’s Whirligigs in Lucama, North Carolina; and museums for Louisville Slugger, Jello, and Dr. Pepper. None of these are places you’d likely visit without either a warped travel agent or a convenient excuse. Welcome to BIB 2008, our annual convenient excuse to see quirky Americana…oh, and we caught some baseball too.

Scott and Gerry had already arrived in Phoenix a few days earlier, but Kevin and Mark flew in just a few minutes apart on Saturday, April 19. Everyone met at the rental car pickup just a few blocks from Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. That would have been really convenient, but for the fact that, in true BIB fashion, our itinerary had us traveling those few blocks to the stadium by way of Tombstone and Tucson.

We weren’t even out of the parking garage when Scott announced that he had a problem. A family emergency was going to limit his participation in the trip to only the first day. While having only three of us for a portion of the trip would still constitute a quorum and an officially sanctioned BIB event (as if that matters to someone somewhere), it wouldn’t be the same once Scott had left. Without him, for example, there was the prospect of having no one to blame for our consistently poor trip planning…and Mark and Kevin were going to have to pick up the slack of harassing Gerry for his poor navigational skills (not that anyone else in this fearsome foursome knows their azimuth from a hole in the ground). Believe it or not, both Gerry and Kevin showed up with GPS systems for the trip. Just what we needed – now we could get lost way more efficiently.

Barely on the road, Gerry made the mistake of disclosing that one of his sons was doing a “semester at sea” this summer, and that it would contribute credit toward his international business degree. This may come as a surprise to those of you unfamiliar with the distinguished Carnival School of Business at Royal Caribbean University. If you’re intrigued by the “semester at sea”, check out the syllabi for their “doctorate at Disneyworld” and “bar exam at the beach” programs.

First stop on this year’s tour was Tombstone, Arizona, site of the shootout at the OK Corral. After a buffalo burger at one of the local restaurants, we stood in line for our tickets to see the daily reenactment of the shootout. To say that the reenactment is amateurish wouldn’t do it justice. It would have to improve dramatically to be amateurish. When the blank didn’t go off on one of the actors’ (and we use that term loosely, since we were pretty sure the same guy doing the acting had just served us a burger down the street) guns after a couple of tries, he actually yelled “bang you’re dead” at one of the other “actors”. It didn’t help that several obnoxious kids sat next to us at the “amphitheater” (amphitheater in this case being a convenient term to describe a dirt area with metal bleachers stacked way too tight with tourists in the afternoon heat). The kids (Holly and her brothers, as we would later find out) were kids with huge mouths, tiny bladders, and no parents to be found. It wasn’t enough to be incessantly climbing over us to go to the bathroom or retrieve the shoes they’d dropped under the bleachers, Holly managed to get herself into the show so she could share her charm with the whole audience...and climb over us yet one more time on her way to the stage. After the show, as we wandered through town, we came across a copy of the April 18^th edition of the Tombstone News with the Headline “Actor Shot at OK Corral”. Turns out one of the MENSA members in their acting troupe had actually injured another one by getting too close when he fired the gun with the blanks. It’s probably just as well that the guns don’t always work – at least it slows down the rate at which the actors maim each other. Tombstone bills itself as “the town to tough to die”…which begs the question of why one of the top local attractions would be Boothill Cemetery. That was our last stop in Tombstone…as it was, come to think of it, for some of the participants in the real shootout at the OK Corral.

Our first ballgame was Fresno Grizzlies at the Tucson Sidewinders. Kevin was particularly happy to see the game go 11 innings…ending at 10:35 Pacific time, a little more than 22 hours after he had gotten up for his flight from the eastern time zone. The Sidewinders’ loss, before an eerily quiet crowd of 3,777, broke an 8-game BIB winning streak for minor league home teams. Our home for the evening was a Country Inn and Suites on the North side of town, where we met our new best friend, Matt, the nervous desk clerk. Matt took at least 25 minutes to check the four of us in. It shouldn’t have taken that long to tuck the four of us in! Our reservations were prepaid through Priceline, for crying out loud! The Country Inn and Suites folks will be glad to know that he attributed the delay to the fact that “our systems are not set up to check people in efficiently.” As if to try to make it up to us, we each got a personal call from Matt in our rooms at 11:30pm. Nothing like being jolted from your REM sleep by a tightly wound desk clerk checking to see if the in-room coffee maker is adequately stocked.

Sunday, April 20, started with a hearty breakfast and a drive north to take in Biosphere 2, in Oracle, Arizona. There our guide, Nancy, explained that the eight Biospherians were forced to live inside this artificial ecosystem for two years, completely sealed off from the outside world, surviving mainly on beans and bananas. Rest assured that if you stick the Brothers-in-Baseball in an environment with no meat for two days, let alone two years, it’s gonna be “Donner, party of four”. Somewhere between Oracle, AZ and Florence, AZ Scott realized that we were nearly out of gas. Naturally, this is nothing to which either of the guys in the front seat would be paying any attention. The fact that these two thriving metropolises are more than 50 miles apart and the best we can do to describe where we were is say “somewhere between them” gives you an idea of just how much civilization exists in that part of Arizona. Still stinging from having had to turn back just a few miles short of Mt. St. Helens nine years ago when we nearly ran out of gas in the wilderness, there was no stopping us now. We were damn sure going to make it to either Florence or to a spot in the 2008 Darwin Awards, whichever came first. Thankfully, we puttered into some generic-looking gas station (“Motley Fuel” or something like that) only moments before our SUV became a buzzard Lunchable.

As we dropped off Scott in Phoenix for his flight home, we realized that “gas gauge monitor” was another role that one of us would have to assume in his absence. We didn’t realize until we got to Chase Field that “ticket custodian” was yet another. We’d locked the car and started down the steps of the parking garage before we realized that we’d left the tickets in the SUV. The irony of our ticket situation was that on our 2007 trip, Scott had inexplicably procured only 3 seats for each game. This year, Scott had remembered to get one ticket for each of us, but now we had an extra. Our choices were to sell the ticket or keep it and have a little extra room around our seats. After careful consideration, we determined that net girth took precedence over net worth, so the ticket remained ours.

Chase Field is a little reminiscent of Minute Maid Park in Houston. You can appreciate the retractable roof as you’re attending an Arizona day game, but it gives the place the feel of an enormous, imposing structure. On the mound for the D-backs was another enormous, imposing structure: Randy Johnson. On this day though, notsomuch, as he struggled with his control through 5-2/3 innings and took the loss in a 9-4 San Diego victory. After the game, we headed over to Tempe, where Gerry’s middle son attends Arizona State University. You have to believe he was really glad to see us. Nothing says, “I’m a big man on campus” like hanging out with 3 pasty middle-aged man-children schleps on a Sunday night. If having to go to dinner with us was purgatory, hell must have been the campus walking-tour where we kept pointing out coeds like safari participants spotting Cape Buffalo on the Serengeti.

Sunday was our last full day of this year’s trip, and we made it an (overly) ambitious one. We got out on the road early (unBIB-like) and did a little canyon hiking among the red rocks of Sedona (very unBIB-like). In order to take in the Skywalk on the West Rim of the Grand Canyon, we needed to skip lunch (Did anyone else feel a breeze? Was that hell freezing over?). By the time we’d followed Route 66 to Peach Springs, AZ, it was becoming obvious that the route to the West Rim was, to say the least, rustic. It was, to say the most, lunar. Our first stop for directions was the Frontier Motel Restaurant, where the hostess-slash-desk-clerk-slash-farmhand explained that there were no roads to the west rim that were actually paved. Realizing that we were in for 75 miles of dirt road, we went across the street to Truxton Station. As soon as Mark saw the analog pumps ringing up gas at $6 a gallon and the attendant who looked like he’d eat his young, Mark was ready to take a knee on this whole West Rim Skywalk thing [note: for the record, there is no way that the Truxton Station attendant could really eat his young; he and the Frontier Motel Restaurant woman didn’t have one good set of teeth between them]. The attendant asked where we were going and what kind of “vee-hickle” we had. When we told him, he looked up and down at our SUV and offered the following words of encouragement: “You might make it.”

Truth be told, there are actually a good number of people (and at least one longhorn steer) that brave the twenty-one miles from the nearest paved roads to the West Rim of the Canyon. In order to get to the nearest paved roads, however, we were going to have to drive 33 miles north from Route 66 on what would be flattered to be called dirt roads. They were really more like tracks worn into the dirt. For those 33 kidney-punching miles, we saw exactly no one coming the other way, and only some clouds of dust miles in the distance that hinted at human life besides our own.

When we finally reached the Skywalk, which is essentially a horseshoe-shaped glass floor that extends out into the canyon, it was every bit the acrophobe’s nightmare that one would expect. It was also everything we’ve come to expect from the privatization of our national parks: overpriced tickets, long waits in lines, buses and helicopters polluting the natural landscape and tacky gift shops. How this place hasn’t been captured in a National Lampoon Vacation movie is beyond us. Nevertheless, we managed to spend enough time there that there was no way we’d make it to Las Vegas in time for the start of the home team “51’s” game vs. the Sacramento River Cats. In true tribute-to Scott fashion, though, we raced like bandits back across the twenty-one winding miles of dirt roads, across the Arizona desert, over Hoover Dam and into Las Vegas, only missing the start of the game by a few minutes. The Las Vegas 51’s didn’t seem to mind our late arrival though, prevailing 5-2.

By the time we got to our hotel, which Scott had conveniently selected next door to the Hooters Casino, we were nearing exhaustion. But this being our once-annual experiment in sleep deprivation, we made time for a late-night stroll down the strip. We stopped at Bally’s for a final adult beverage (about the only thing adult about any of our trips is the occasional beverage) before heading our separate ways early the next morning.

Mark sits in the driver’s seat. Scott or Kevin navigates from the passenger seat (neither has securely claimed the starting nod, so they continue to platoon at this position). Gerry sits in the back and fiddles with his camera. This is the established order of things. So when Scott drove from home to pick everyone up at the Raleigh-Durham airport and Gerry jumped into the passenger seat to navigate, there was a pretty good chance that it wouldn’t end well. Hell, it didn’t even begin well. We spent 10 minutes stuck in the “cash only” line to exit the airport parking lot, behind some guy who apparently had more trouble trying to locate a bill than Hillary does.

First destination was Durham Bulls Athletic Park. It took the collective wisdom of the front seat occupants once past the place and an extra trip around the block to realize that park is a verb, too. Gerry’s initials are “GPA”. Any similarity to ”GPS”, a device which actually helps you get where you’re going, is purely coincidental.

Once inside the stadium, you realize that the movie “Bull Durham” has made a legend of the Durham mascot. Not unlike capitol hill, the bull is everywhere. As we lined up near the front entrance for our own obligatory picture with Wool E. Bull, a voice from the gathered crowd yelled out “Hey, weren’t you guys in Batavia, New York last year?” For three of the four Brothers, this turned out to be a welcome reunion with Mark Brumbaugh, a former member of the Batavia Muckdogs promotional staff, now the Assistant Director of Media Relations for the Durham Bulls. For Kevin, who had brought shame upon himself and his family by taking a header on the Muckdogs’ warning track a year ago (see “Great Batavia Bellyflop”, 2006), notsomuch. Only two beliefs had kept Kevin from joining the witness protection program following the embarrassing incident: 1) no irrefutable photographic evidence appeared to exist and 2) he doubted anyone from Batavia ever ventured outside the cozy confines of western New York. To Kevin, this voice from the past might just as well have been a summons from the gates of hell, echoing ominously across the River Styx.

Scott, on the other hand, seized the opportunity to correct a little planning boo-boo. For reasons known only to Scott, he had purchased only 3 tickets to each game. It was an understandable error – the four of us have only been doing this every year for the last decade. On a positive note, it opens up a whole new world of things we can get Scott for Christmas. He’s a Civil War buff, so maybe a copy of the Gettysburg address: “Three score and seven years ago…”. Perhaps a picture of his beloved Tony Gwynn rounding the baseball triangle – first to second to home. Or maybe some music memorabilia: a signed album cover showing the three Beatles: George, Ringo, and John-Paul. Since the ticket office wouldn’t let him exchange the 3 tickets held at will call, he was forced to purchase a fourth seat in another zip code. With a little coaxing, our new friend in the front office got us four seats together down the first base line.

As if we hadn’t learned from recent years, scheduling a game in the South in August is a recipe for a fairly predictable game-time forecast: over 90 degrees with 100% chance of perspiration. The game itself was highlighted by a discussion as to which Durham Bull had the best adult film star name – Raul Casanova or Evan Longoria. Bulls won 3-0, with most of the offense courtesy of back-to-back homers by Wes Bankston and adult-film name honorable-mention candidate, Elliot Johnson.

For our first evening of BIB 2007, Scott had booked us at the Residence Inn, North Raleigh. Given that he had reserved it on Priceline for something like only 40 bucks a pop, the only question was whether it was next door to a prison or a cemetery…or maybe built on top of one or the other. Turns out that not only was it a really nice place in a great neighborhood…it was right down the street from a Hooters restaurant! None of us could say for certain, but we thought we noticed that this confluence of good fortune may have brought a tear to Mark’s eye as we pulled up. The signage outside the Hooters even proclaimed “Same Day Service”. We weren’t exactly sure what that meant, except that somewhere inside was at least one smart alec…our kind of people. Here’s where it gets really weird. The wings were good…at Hooters…seriously…the chicken wings…they tasted good. Not in a “scenery-is-good-so-I’ll-pretend-to-enjoy-the-food-so-they-don’t-make-me-leave” sort of way. Fact is, the scenery wasn’t all that good. In fact, this was probably the first Hooters we’d ever encountered that appeared to be staffed almost entirely by soccer moms. A nice clean hotel on a BIB trip and good food at Hooters – two of the seven signs of the Apocalypse, if we’re not mistaken.

Saturday morning began with a hunt for a BIB-worthy breakfast spot. We started by driving around aimlessly in the area within a mile or two of the hotel. A place called Biscuitville initially caught our attention, but, after further inspection from the parking lot, was deemed too “fast-foody” by Mark. This set off a quest for something more fried-and-true: “Cracker Barrel”. We vaguely remembered seeing a Cracker Barrel on a map at the hotel, but would have to wing it with no printed directions. No worries – with Scott at the wheel and the modern-day Magellan navigating from the passenger seat, this would be a snap. Gerry even had the 21st century equivalent of a compass – a brand new i-phone. Didn’t know how to use it, but he had one. In fact, we were all admiring it as we drove right past the Cracker Barrel exit off of I-40. With the next exit 9 miles away, Scott took about 3 miles to decide it was time to do a little off-roading with the Honda Odyssey. We took an about-face across the median and were back in business. By the time we arrived, Scott was obviously shaken, as we’d barely gotten seated before he spilled water all over the place.

After breakfast, Scott got a sippy cup to go and we pointed ourselves in the direction of Vollis Simpson’s Whirligigs in Lucama, North Carolina. In the general direction, that is. We really didn’t know where Vollis Simpson’s Whirligigs were…we only vaguely knew where Lucama was. Once we made it to Lucama, Gerry’s i-phone really came in handy…because when you’re lost in a small town in the middle of marry-my-sister, North Carolina, it sure helps to have a device that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no cell coverage. The best Gerry could muster navigation-wise was to yell out the van window at some poor woman walking with her kid in a park; she did a double-take, shielded her children and ran. We then found a guy in a red shirt walking and told him that we were looking for the Whirligigs. Once we convinced the guy that we meant no harm, he took his hands out of the air, put his wallet back in his pocket, and explained that all we needed to do was turn around, cross back over route 301, turn right at the stop sign, cross the railroad tracks, bear left at the double-wide, pass go, collect $200, and follow the crowds…or words to that effect. Shockingly, those directions didn’t work…but they did lead us about 3 miles away to a yard sale at what appeared to be the Clampetts’ place – before they discovered oil. Now what the point of a yard sale is when you’re the only yard as far as the eye can see we’re not exactly sure…other than to prove that one man’s junk is another man’s…well, crap. We sent Kevin in to seek directions one more time. Not because we expected Kevin to be any more effective than Gerry at gleaning directions, but because Kevin was wearing a goofy pink shirt and it just seemed like good sport. So here we were…Kevin in pink shirt, carrying on a conversation with three toothless yard sale attendants in a place that would make Green Acres look cosmopolitan. This couldn’t have had Deliverance written all over it any more if we’d had dueling banjos playing in the background. You can imagine our trepidation when Kevin came back with directions that sent us another couple of miles into the woods.

We eventually did find the whirligigs, though. They were essentially a bunch of windmills. Most of ‘em were pretty big, maybe 30-50 feet tall, constructed by ole’ Vollis Simpson from all kinds of junk. It wasn’t lost on us that this could explain who the yard sale folks have been selling their crapaphernalia to. Vollis’ display, spread over several grassy areas where a couple of country roads intersect in what could otherwise be described as a forest, resembled an abandoned amusement park. You half expected the laughter of evil clowns to suddenly interrupt the creaking of the whirligigs in the Eastern North Carolina breeze. We decided to take a few pictures and go visit somewhere with a little less of a Blair Witch theme. The Belhaven Memorial Museum wasn’t it.

We grabbed lunch at Fish Hooks Café in Belhaven, North Carolina, billed as the gateway to Pamlico Sound and the Outer Banks. Our waitress was plenty chatty, sharing the better part of her entire life story. A couple doors down, occupying a portion of the second story of the city building, was the Belhaven Memorial Museum. If the locals call it the “BM” museum for short, that would be not only more succinct, but probably more descriptive. When a place advertises its collection of items crafted from human hair, you know you’re about to peg the old creepometer. Need we even point out that we were the only patrons on this day? Come to think of it, the guestbook seemed to indicate that no one had visited in over a week. No small wonder - the museum experience begins with the creepy curator, utterly devoid of social skills, but full of useless minutia about items in the “collection”. Then come the two-headed kitten, 8-legged pig, pickled human tumors, jars of fruit from several decades ago, and, well, you get the idea. If you could preserve it and it was grotesque, they had one.

Our last roadside stop of the day before seeing a game that evening in Norfolk was the Outer Banks of North Carolina and, more specifically, Kitty Hawk, home of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. We were able to view a model of the original Wright flyer, in which the pilot was on his belly, low to the ground. As a result, there was no need for the brothers to build a ladder in order to get into the plane. So there you have it – two Wrights do not make a rung.

The game that evening at Harbor Park, Norfolk Virginia was itself was fairly uneventful, as the Norfolk Tides claimed their third straight home victory, 5-3, over the Richmond Braves. The park actually sits on the Elizabeth River and lives up to its name, with some excellent views of the harbor beyond the outfield fences. The Tides also have a big, fuzzy, blue blob of a mascot named Rip Tide, who is not shy about getting into it with opposing players and umpires.

After the Tides game, we headed for Scott’s house in Richmond for the night. With our overnight stay there, all four BIBs’ homes have now been part of a BIB trip. It wasn’t an easy night for Mark, though, as he had to sleep in the room of Scott’s daughter. That meant that big bad Mark had to be alone with all of her dolls staring at him from the shelf. Maybe Mark had seen Child’s Play or Bride of Chuckie one too many times. Maybe it was lingering images from the Whirligig graveyard. Or maybe the Belhaven formaldehyde festival was getting to him. Suffice it to say, Mark had a restless night.

The final day of BIB 2007 began with Scott introducing us to a local Deli, Boychiks, for breakfast. Uncharacteristically, this was yet another fine call by Scott. Service was good. Food was great. It would have been an unadulterated thumbs-up, but for a seating blunder. When we arrived, there were several booths and tables open, but for reasons unknown, they chose to sit the four of us in a freakishly tight booth. You know how you have to eat with those little alligator arms when you’re served a meal in coach? Imagine doing that with a full complement of dishes and condiments. Now imagine that the seats directly in front of you are turned around to face you…and that the two husky middle-aged men in those seats are not particularly attractive to begin with. Now imagine that the guy next to you looks like he could fall asleep drooling on your shoulder at any moment because he’s been up all night worrying about attack dolls. Bon appetit.

The trip was to wrap up that afternoon with the Washington Nationals’ seventeenth-to-last game at RFK stadium. That gave us time for a little drive-around sightseeing in Washington Sunday morning. Gerry had a city map of Washington DC. Giving Gerry a roadmap to navigate Washington was like giving Davy Crockett a violin to defend the Alamo. After driving around in circles for a bit, we decided to spend the remaining time before the game at Arlington National cemetery.

By early afternoon, it was time to head over to RFK stadium. We had really peculiar seats that were in an unmarked, enclosed area with a low ceiling that felt like a pressbox for dwarfs. We stayed there for a bit before opting for some higher seats along the third base line that gave not only a good view of the field, but from the top row, a nice view back at Washington, DC. Amid cheers of “Go Nats”, starting pitcher Shawn Hill kept the Nationals in the game through seven innings. That was long enough for us to see the Milwaukee Sausage-ripoff “President Races”. It’s a pretty funny ripoff, though, as presidential mascots with oversized heads race through foul territory (we were told that tradition dictates Teddy Roosevelt never, ever win).

As soon as the Nationals’ bullpen wet the bed on their way to an 8-2 loss, we got an early start for the airport. Good thing, too, as Gerry saved his best for last. For his big navigational finale, Gerry accomplished a BIB first – he directed us to the wrong state on the way to the airport. We’re not talking wrong state of mind – he literally sent us to Maryland by accident. So it was that we got to take an unplanned driving tour of Alexandria, Virginia on our way to the airport. Fittingly, as Scott dropped off each of the departing brethren at their terminals, he bid a heartfelt farewell with two simple words: “Get out.”

BIB2006: The Great Batavia Belly Flop

For 2006's trip, the gang got started planning for this year's trip as soon as the major league schedules were published, but we ran into a snag trying to coordinate family schedules along with our annual pilgrimage. We originally hoped to catch the Beef Festival in North Carolina along with the Nationals and some of the great minor league action in the area. Gerry and I have freshmen entering college, so a late summer sojourn couldn't be worked out, and other conflicts arose with other options, so our North Carolina/DC swing could not be worked out. Our peerless planner, Scott, went back to the drawing board and we came up with a Buffalo-Toronto-Syracuse itinerary that worked for everyone. And, as long as we are so close, we included an extra day's side trip to Cooperstown--we haven't been there in over 15 years--and any one who has gone realizes that it ain't close to anything. So, without further ado, we present BIB2006:

• Friday, Aug 4: Fly in to Buffalo late afternoon - Buffalo Bisons, 7:35pm - Stay in or near Buffalo
• Saturday, Aug 5: Drive Buffalo to Toronto, 103 miles - Toronto sightseeing - Toronto Blue Jays, 4:07pm - Toronto sightseeing - Stay in or near Toronto
• Sunday, Aug 6: Drive Toronto to Niagara, 82 miles - Niagara Falls sightseeing - Drive Niagara to Batavia, NY, see the Batavia Muckdogs (this has to be the BEST mascot name in Minor League history) - Drive Batavia to Cooperstown - Stay in or near Cooperstown
• Monday, Aug 7: Baseball HOF - Drive Cooperstown to Syracuse, 96 miles - Fly out of Syracuse late afternoon

We were about 5 minutes into the 2006 tour – had just left the Buffalo airport – when Gerry and Kevin had already started criticizing Scott’s planning job. Clearly too much driving had been left for the final day, and why would we be flying out of Syracuse anyway, when Albany is closer to Cooperstown, our last destination on this trip? We were about 10 minutes into the trip when we got lost for the first time (a new BIB record, it generally takes us a half-hour or more to get wrapped around the axle on our directions). Our destination and first stop on the Buffalo leg of our trip was the Anchor Bar, home of the original Buffalo chicken wings. Scott’s planning capabilities didn’t regain any credibility when the map he whipped out to set us straight was a state map of Hawaii. Letting Scott navigate is like letting William Hung sing lead in your choir.

At the Anchor Bar, we were lucky enough to stumble upon “Rose, the Bar Maiden”. In the tradition of the mouthy waitress from the Broken Egg (Siesta Key, 2005) and the Frau Farbissina sound-alike drill-sergeant waitress (Montreal, 2002), Rose had apparently decided it would be a solid career move to forego the traditional greeting of “How may I help you?” in favor of “Back off. I’m busy right now.” She could have graduated from the school of Miss Manners…that is, the one where “Miss” is a verb, because she was missing all of them (summa cum loud-ass, nonetheless). Oddly enough, her full repertoire of assorted insults, barbs, and service-when-she-was-damned-good-and-ready was right up our alley. Rose, you had us at “Back off.”

It was only a short ride from the Anchor Bar to Dunn Tire park, one of the largest ballparks in the minor leagues. A 7-6 Buffalo Bisons victory over the Norfolk Tide was overshadowed by the fact that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a washed-up major leaguer in this game. Appropriately enough for a game in a park named after a tire company, the retread list included Jose Offerman, Jose Lima, Edgardo Alfonzo, Danny Graves, Michael Tucker, and Ken Oberkfell. In the eyes of his BIB brethren, Kevin redeemed himself in this game…twice. First, he caught a T-shirt that was rifled into the stands between innings, erasing memories of an ugly “drop” of same during a game in Appleton, Wisconsin some eight years ago. Second, Kevin was attending this game on his 16th wedding anniversary. Only a few years earlier, when Kevin could not finagle a single minor league game during a weeklong stay in Disneyworld that coincided with an Orlando Rays homestand (whose field is on the Disney property), the Brethren had suggested he just make it official and notify the Humane Society that he had been properly neutered. Opting to spend his anniversary weekend with the Brothers, rather than the missus, put Kevin in the same category metaphorically with some of the great home run hitters of all time. You will recall that following the really big achievements, Henry Aaron and Mark McGwire generally had their balls returned to them.

On the way back from the Bisons game, Scott topped his own “lost within 10 minutes” record by actually leading us to the wrong hotel. Try as they might, the poor slobs at the desk of the Days Inn couldn’t get our names to come up on the computer. That’s because our reservations were at the Quality Inn. Technology has done wonders for our annual trips. With the advent of Mapquest, Scott can now get us to the wrong place 30% faster.

Day 2 of BIB 2006 started off with a BIB favorite: Bob Evans. There we encountered a classic BIB irritant: the unjustifiably happy waiter. Great service and a toothy grin can’t hold a candle to crappy service accompanied by witty banter. Give us Don Rickles over Donny Osmond anytime. After breakfast, we left Buffalo for Toronto and a White Sox - Blue Jays game Saturday afternoon. Along the way, Dr. Gerry offered career and relationship counseling. It may have been good advice, but considering the facts that a prerequisite for BIB membership is to be in the twilight of a no-better-than-mediocre career and that we’ve already established that one of the Brothers had chosen to be on this trip rather than at home for his anniversary, it’s safe to say that Gerry’s seeds of wisdom for upward mobility and dating success did not find fertile ground.

Crossing national borders with Mark is always an adventure (see “hot border guard chick causes flop sweat and loss of neural function”, 2002). For this year’s performance, he decided to forget his passport. Nevertheless, we were lucky enough not to be asked for passports and made it to Toronto with minimal trouble. We even had time for a little sightseeing. First we took the Rogers Centre (bogus corporate name for SkyDome) tour, led by our guide, Mike. Mike’s personality was far too intense for his job. If Barney Fife had been a tour guide, he would have been Mike. His best attempt at humor was to tell us to pick up anything we’d brought at our first stop on the tour, because we would never, ever be back there again. With each successive stop, he’d add another “never” or “ ever”, until by the end of the tour, we were warned that we would NEVER, NEVER, EVER, NEVER, EVER, EVER, NEVER, EVER be back here again. The guy clearly did not have both feet down in the endzone. By the time we were done with him, we were half-tempted to pay to take the whole damn tour over again just to prove the irritating twit wrong. Instead, we opted to go to the top of the CN Tower next door (the world’s tallest freestanding structure), where we had lunch and stood on their sphincter-tightening glass floor, 113 stories up.

When we finally made it to the game, we got to sit behind some truly talented hecklers who had traveled from Chicago to follow their beloved White Sox. Their most creative cheer came in the form of a single word: an enthusiastic “Baseball!” that they would chant once or twice an inning. It appeared to occur at random, but somehow they all did it in perfect unison. We were several innings in before we realized that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the game. Whenever a good-looking woman walked by the aisle, it triggered the chant. Then they started doing derivative versions of the same thing. Girl under 18? “Minor League Baseball!” Well-endowed woman? “Double-header!” It was completely inappropriate and utterly sophomoric…well done! Long live the Chicago hecklers!

After the game, we had dinner outdoors at a steak place called “Montana’s”. Over dinner, Scott regaled us with tales of his recent kidney stone. When you get right down to it, does anything make better dinner conversation than discussing medical issues? And what couple at an adjoining table wouldn’t want to have their romantic al Fresco dining experience peppered with terms like “catheter” and “urethra”?

Day 3 took us to Niagara Falls. This provided a great opportunity for Kevin to call his wife and point out the irony of spending his 16th anniversary weekend at Niagara Falls, but without his wife. She may very well have encouraged him to have himself fitted for a waterproof barrel while he was there. Scott was a veteran of prior visits to the falls and suggested the next best thing: that we experience the “Cave of the Winds” tour on the United States side, wherein we could stand not just near, but essentially in, the falls. This was practical as well, inasmuch as it would assure that we each had showered at least once during the trip. All we had to do was get passportless Mark back across the border. You had to wonder if Mark had not noticed that border security had gotten just a wee bit tighter recently and that a passport would be a good idea. Or maybe he thought all those years of fluoridated toothpaste left him immune to a cavity search. This time around, the border guard had a couple of questions. She started with an easy one: “Where are you going?” Mark got through that one without touching off an orange alert at the Department of Homeland Security. Then she asked, “How do you know each other?” Mark misinterpreted the question. It was an honest mistake. He must have thought she said “Hey guys, the half-dozen cars behind you are in no particular hurry, so let’s gather round the hearth, I’ll put a pizza in the oven, we’ll have a few brews, and you guys tell me your life story, whaddya say?” Mark started telling her the unabridged version of our careers, and how it was that we came to meet in New Jersey at an internship, where our careers had gone since then, and was just about to launch into the really cool part about how we had our own website and everything, when the little border guard girl suddenly morphed into one of those Men-in-Black space aliens, leaned in real nasty-like and barked at him “I DIDN’T ASK YOU THE STORY OF HOW YOU MET! HOW DO YOU KNOW EACH OTHER?” Mark: “Business.” Guard: “Go ahead.”

We left Niagara and, by the hand of God, were led to the Country Café for lunch, in Wheatfield, New York. Actually, the Country Café pretty much is Wheatfield, New York. From the laminated menus, to the young waitress mildly frightened by the notion of four strangers in the restaurant, to the limited selection featuring nothing but breakfast food (even though it was midday), to the homemade pies for dessert, this place was built for BIB. Back in the car, we headed for Batavia, New York. It turns out that Gerry had been holding out on us. Just about the time that you think you’ve covered all standing agenda items for our annual pilgrimage: medical issues, romantic interests, trips abroad, etc., Gerry unleashes a blockbuster development: he’s discovered that his son has a freakishly large uvula. And Gerry even has pictures! Uvula – you know, that thing that hangs in the back of your throat. Gerry’s kid can pull his out of his mouth! How cool is that?!? Well, Gerry whipped out a photo and it was just like a woman showing off a new engagement ring to her friends. Gerry instantly achieved BIB demi-god status for siring such a cool specimen. A few uncomfortable moments ensued as we considered whether this could force us to lift the ban on family-member participation in future trips.

A brief stop at an ice cream parlor shaped like a giant ice cream cone and the Jell-O museum (why not?) and before we knew it, we’d arrived in Batavia, home of the Batavia Muckdogs. We were even a little early, which gave us an opportunity to meet their Director of Community Relations, Linda. Linda and Scott had been having an ongoing dialogue over the previous several weeks, as Linda had tried to coax us into going out on the field with the players before the game and playing a bunch of their games between innings – all things that 8-year olds would normally be called upon to do. Some would argue that between the four of us we don’t have the intellectual capacity of an 8-year old. We disagree. Between the four of us, we have exactly the intellectual capacity of an 8-year old. So it was that we all ran out on the field before the game as the PA announcer encouraged the fans to visit www.brothersinbaseball.com and follow the “zany antics” of the four of us (perhaps the first time that the phrase “zany antics” has ever been applied to anything but a sitcom). Somehow, Mark avoided further humiliation, but Gerry volunteered to serve as “Zweigle’s Sausage King” between innings. Linda explained that he’d simply have to where a cape and ride around the diamond in a golfcart, waving his sausage to the crowd (honestly, you can’t make this stuff up). For the record, we were all relieved to see that a 6-foot strand of silver link sausage came with the cape. Scott and Kevin volunteered for the Dizzy Bat Spin Race. You’ve seen this one. Both stand in foul territory near third base, Kevin closer to the infield, Scott closer to the warning track (which, we should note, was made up of what appeared to be small, jagged landscape rocks). They both put foreheads down on a bat handle with the barrel touching the ground, run around said bat until their equilibrium is completely toast, and then attempt to run about 70 feet or so to the finish line, near home plate. At stake was a $5 coupon at the concession stand. Scott, the brighter of the two (which is essentially like being deemed queen of the pigs), sauntered slowly around his bat. Kevin, on the other hand, took off spinning like a banshee. When the PA announcer said “go”, Scott stood up kind of dazed. Kevin, on the other hand, attempted to bolt for the finish line. Two problems. First of all, Kevin cannot “bolt”; he can “lumber”, at best. Second, though his feet were pointed toward home, his disoriented torso made a beeline for the dugout…through the coaching box, across Scott’s path, and, finally, tail over tea kettle - SPLAT! - onto the warning track. While the PA announcer bellowed “He’s down,” Scott strolled down to the finish line. Adding insult to injury, a female member of the Muckdogs’ pep squad helped Kevin to his feet, pointing him and his bloodied forearms toward the first aid room. After serious consideration and group discussion, the other Brothers landed solidly on the side of not having Kevin euthanized, though his stud value remains seriously in question.  Thus was born "The Great Batavia Bellyflop" that will ever live in BIB history.  But, unfortunately, there is no photographic record of Kevin's great accomplishment, as Mark, the Designated Cameraman, was laughing far too hard and couldn't even begin to snap any of the pictures.

Amid vows that “we will never speak of this again”, the Brothers piled into their SUV and headed for Herkimer, New York and the “America’s Best” motel. It wasn’t. The theme continued into morning breakfast at the Herkimer Waffle House, which offered more flies than a home run derby. An inauspicious beginning to the final day of BIB 2006, but we knew it had to get better as we headed to the Mecca of BIB-dom, Cooperstown, New York. Near Cooperstown, Gerry introduced us all to Dreams Park, where his boys had actually played. It’s a picturesque park with 18 fields of major league quality, built exclusively for kids 12-and-under. Despite the age restriction, there is no limit on uvula size. After visiting the National Baseball Hall of Fame itself, we spent some time wandering the shops nearby. Cooperstown seems to have grown up a bit since the last time we were here together, some 15 years ago. None of us recalled seeing so many shops last time around. One of them had a batting cage, where Gerry demonstrated 10 times that he couldn’t hit an 80 mph curveball. He demonstrated it by swinging and missing 20 times at a 40 mph curveball. Waiting for Gerry to get done swinging at the air left us a little tight on time to get back to the airport in Syracuse. Not being able to find Route 28 North coming out of Cooperstown elevated our status to “concerned”. The minutes will show, however, that Scott redeemed himself by being the only one to successfully identify the whereabouts of Route 28. Suspiciously, though, his otherwise accurate directions included the phrases “big island” and “just past the volcano”. When a traffic jam on the way to the airport brought us to a near dead stop, we were in a full-fledged DEFCON 1 situation. Some fancy rerouting on the backroads and a fortuitously-timed thunderstorm to delay outgoing flights got us to the Albany…er, uh…Syracuse airport in time.

BIB2005: Floridays!

Are we nuts! Must be, to schedule a Florida schwing in late July...but do it we will! The Brothers In Baseball spent BIB2005 in the South of Florida, starting in Tampa/St. Pete and heading down to Miami, with a couple of minor league games thrown in for good measure. We managed to drive about a thousand miles in Florida without seeing a single beach or getting a glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean! Check below as Kevin just published the "full and official" BIB2005 Trip Report.

But we did get plenty of Gators--watching gators behind a fence, watching gators next to our little airboat, holding gators, eating gators...enough gators for the rest of Scott's life!

Gathering on July 29th, we headed over to Tropicana Field for the Friday night game between the Devil Rays and the Royals. We have never seen such a light crowd at a major league baseball game, considering it was a Friday night, hot and humid outside, and quite pleasant inside. On the 30th, we headed north a bit to check out the Ted Williams Museum, then headed out towards Orlando to the must-see GatorWorld. That night, we stopped in at DodgerTown in Vero Beach, but the tarp was still on the infield during a rain delay for the Vero Beach Dodgers game, so by 8pm with still no game, we piled in the car to St. Lucie and saw the Mets and Sarasota Reds first pitch, they themselves victims of a rain delay. Sunday saw us move on to Miami and the Everglades, where we took an airboat ride before hopping over to ProPlayer Stadium (or is it Dolphins Stadium now?) for the Marlins afternoon game with the Washington Nationals.

We were impressed with the constitution of the common Marlins fan--there is virtually no shade in the entire stadium, and without a cloud in the sky, the 90 degree temps and sky high humidity just sapped our will to sit in the stands and watch a Marlins game. But thousands did, but if you wonder why it doesn't look like there are many fans at Marlins' day games, figure roughly half have taken shelter from the sun in the concession areas inside the concourses. Why Major League Baseball would have the Marlins play ANY day games was beyond us, by the bottom half of the first inning. Why, you ask, didn't we start in Miami with a Friday night game and end up in Tampa/St. Pete with a Sunday day game in the dome? Because Kevin had his family close to Sarasota for a vacation, and they left on Friday night out of Tampa, so the rest of us came in to Tampa on Friday afternoon to start the trip.

Keep scrolling down for Kevin's always brilliant BIB2005 Trip Report!

News! Kevin attends the 2005 Comerica Park, Detroit All-Star Game!

Kevin becomes the second BIB to attend a MLB All-Star Game! Kevin has been to the South Atlantic League All-Star Game in Charleston, SC, and now he matches Gerry in attending the All-Star Game festivities in Detroit on July 8, 2005 on a "business" trip. And he gets a double by being the first BIB to see a game at the new Detroit Comerica Park. In other news, Mark, on a family vacation swing to San Diego, picks up another ballpark, San Diego's new Petco Park on June 24th, 2005 and Scott, our San Diego native, picks up Petco later in August.

To Go See Kevin's Pictures, Click Here!

News! Gerry attends the 2002 All-Star not-quite-a-full Game!

Gerry becomes the first BIB to attend a MLB All-Star Game! Kevin has been to the South Atlantic League All-Star Game in Charleston, SC, but it's not quite the same. In other news, Scott, on a family vacation swing into Florida, picks up another ballpark: the Juice Box aka Tropicana Field on July 15th, 2002 and Kevin picks up his third Cincinnati stadium by attending a thumping of his beloved Reds by the Padres at the new Great America Ballpark on April 25, 2003.

To Go See Gerry's Pictures, Click Here!

Our 2005 Trip

As if The Hell-a-Heat-and-Humidity tour of Texas weren’t enough two years ago, we decided that late July was the perfect time to circumnavigate the better part of Florida. Thus was born the BIB 2005 Tour: Floridays.

Scott had the good sense to plan the trip starting on Friday night in Miami and wrapping up under the Tropicana Field dome on Sunday. With a minor league night game sandwiched between, he figured we could cleverly avoid the brutal July South Florida heat. What he didn’t figure on was Kevin inverting the whole trip to accommodate his family vacation which was wrapping up in Tampa the same Friday that BIB 2005 was starting. Aside from setting us up for the teeth of the Dolphin stadium heat on Sunday afternoon (more on that later), it did make for a comical scene at the Tampa airport. Kevin dished off his family and kids like a no-look pass to the Delta ticket agent and in one continuous motion enthusiastically gathered up the BIB brothers in the “soccer mom” van (a first for the Brothers) to head off to see the D-rays host the Royals.

Tropicana Field was a pleasant surprise, with remarkable personality for a domed venue. Perhaps we should pause here to mention that, while waiting for Kevin and Scott to arrive at the airport, Mark and Gerry had spent the afternoon in Ybor City, Tampa’s “Latin Quarter” entertainment district. There they’d discovered their mutual admiration for fine cigars. As soon as they found out that Tropicana Field was home to the major leagues’ only Cigar Bar, they were like kids in a Cuban store. They disappeared around the third inning in a tobacco-induced haze and a bizarre discussion about the relative merits of “cutting vs. pinching”, while Mark was brandishing some sort of little circumcision-sized guillotine. Scott and Kevin didn’t track them down again until the ninth inning, and only then by following the trail of cigar remnants (“Excuse me, Mr. Usher, but can you help me? I’m looking for a piece of ash.”). Tampa Bay 6, Kansas City 3, Surgeon General 0.

Checking the BIB Archives, we had attended a major league game with lesser attendance, but, then again, that the massive Tampa/St. Pete metroplex could muster so few fans to attend a Friday night game in an air-conditioned dome in the midst of south Florida’s heat and humidity and bugs is beyond comprehension. We have never been to a game that seemed so sparsely attended with such a lifeless crowd. Major league baseball needs to get the hell out of Florida—yes, Mabel, it’s nice for spring training, but they just don’t seem to support the real deal.

After the game, it was about an hour drive through thunderstorms to the beach condo where Kevin had been staying with his family. This was convenient in that it was a free place to sleep for the night. It was horrifying in that it had only two bedrooms (one with a king, one with two twins) and a sofabed in the living room. There was awkward silence on the way as we each pondered who would have to share the room with the two twin beds. Kevin had been sleeping on the king all week and was pretty attached to it, so he declared first, leaving three guys vying for the coveted sofabed. Scott, began to vacillate between “gee, ain’t it great to be together again” and “if I have to sleep anywhere near one of these guys, I might just snap” looks. Mark tried to break the tension by making some joke about “spooning”, which served only to make Scott take on a “Billy-Bob-Thornton-in-Slingblade” sort of persona. At that point, Mark and Gerry signed up for the dual twin beds, rather than tempt setting off the Bipolar Express. Nothing like a night at the beach and the sounds of the Seasnore, eh Gerry?

Saturday morning, we waived the usual laminated menu requirement for our breakfast establishment in favor of the relatively high brow (by BIB standards) “Broken Egg” restaurant in Siesta Key. The attraction here was that Dick Vitale lives nearby and frequents it for breakfast (lest you think we’ve gone soft and were really looking for quiche or something, Gerry did buy an autographed item or two). No Dickie V, but almost as much fun was a mouthy waitress who gave us a bunch of lip for trying to order things that weren’t on the menu.

From Siesta Key, we hit the road to Hernando, Florida. If you’ve ever vacationed in Florida, you may have passed through Hernando…that is if you ever accidentally veered 100 miles off course from civilization and were looking for the perfect place to reenact a scene or two from “Deliverance”. The attraction was an otherwise nondescript building that calls itself the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame. Once inside, we found memorabilia a-plenty and a film called “When it was a Game” that featured the Grantland Rice poem “Game Called” that Scott now insists must be read at his funeral.

Following the museum, we were hungry, but time was now of the essence, as we still needed to get to Gatorland in Orlando before visiting Vero Beach for a game that evening. We could find nothing in Hernando [note that ending the sentence here wouldn’t be all that misleading] that simultaneously met the speed and volume requirements for this particular BIB lunch.

In a rare move, the BIBs decided to delay a meal until we arrived in Orlando. This turned out to be a gross error in judgment (okay, that part wasn’t so rare). By the time we got to Orlando, we were both starved and short on time. The combination of the two left us in steamy-hot Gatorland, where the the most appetizing fare was alligator nuggets from a concession stand. For all of us but Scott, that is. Scott was partial to the alligator ribs. He must have been envisioning a reptilian version of Tony Romas. What he got was something you couldn’t get them to eat on Survivor. It was this creepy looking baby crocodile carcass with more cartilage than actual bone…and more bone than actual meat. Coupled with the almost unbearable heat and the fact that we’d spent our first few minutes in the park watching alligators devour dead chickens, it was a potentially barf-making trifecta.

We did get to enjoy watching some professional gator wrestling (pronounced “ras-sling” by most who frequent this sort of thing) and some poor guy named Andy struggling through his second day on the job at Gatorland. Nothing like a little OJT handling a potentially lethal reptile. My first job was a crock too, but not literally. We were pretty sure he would have just chucked the whole thing, were it not for the fact that the only thing hotter than the blacktop pavement was his young female instructor. After a few hours in the mid-day heat and humidity, and confident that we were dripping enough sweat to show up on Doppler radar as an eight-legged storm cell, we loaded ourselves back into the car and headed for the east coast of Florida.

On the way, thunderstorms began rolling through, threatening to rain out our visit to see the Vero Beach Dodgers. The weather wasn’t looking much better when we arrived and we sort of debated whether to actually buy tickets…that is, until Mark found out he could get a senior citizen discount, having recently turned 50. The desire to simultaneously maximize our BIB shenanigans and play this senior citizen angle to minimize spending had us wondering if Hooters might consider a 4:30 early-bird special. We immediately liked the intimacy of the stadium. The dugouts are literally just benches sitting in a three-steps-below-field-level trench on the field (we guess that’s where the term “dugout” came from)…no roof, so the players are out in the open. As the first delay in starting time due to rain was announced, Kevin settled in with some sort of “Death by Nacho” feast that carried him clear through to the second delay in starting time. Fortunately, we found the only half-dozen seats that were covered to wait it out…that is until the brother of the Dodger bullpen coach arrived with his party to point out that those were his reserved seats.

Following that Goldilocks moment, we began to ponder our alternatives should this game never get underway. Scott remembered that the St. Lucie Mets had offered us tickets for a game that same night and were only 30 miles or so away. He had declined the tickets, but maybe we could weasel our way in if the weather there was any better. We called and, sure enough, they had their own thunderstorm delay but were planning to play in about a half-hour. Back in the car, as serious a discussion as we ever have arose around the appropriateness of “counting” the Vero Beach visit, particularly if we skipped out on it to visit another ballgame the same night. We decided it could count, since Mark HAD bought senior-citizen tickets, and immediately our minds started racing…then maybe we could watch half the game at St. Lucie, leave and catch the tail end of a game in Palm Beach. 3 games in one day (sort of)! A total of 5 in ‘05!

We decided that even we weren’t quite that shameless as we arrived in St. Lucie. At the ticket window, Scott was able to resurrect the free tickets we’d denied earlier (the conversation was the rough equivalent of “yeah, I asked out a prettier girl, but she stood me up, so you’ll be okay after all”). We made it to our seats just in time for the first pitch against the Sarasota Reds and were all toasting our good fortune. Kevin was feeling like he had “traded up”, since the St. Lucie Mets fitted cap he’d be adding to his collection was much cooler than the dorky Vero Beach Dodger cap. While purchasing said hat, however, he was approached by what he described as an “unnaturally friendly” middle-aged woman dressed completely in pink from her shoes to her baseball cap. We thought Kevin had conjured up an “imaginary friend”, ala Mark (see Canadian border guard, BIB 2002). However, Gerry encountered the same treatment when he went to snag one of those snazzy St. Lucie Met caps. Unfortunately, Gerry found that while Kevin had left him the crazy lady, Kevin had snagged the last cap in the right size to fit his and Kevin’s freakishly large heads. Sitting down low along the first base line, we tried like hell to buddy up to the Sarasota Reds’ first baseman, Joey Votto, so that he’d throw us a ball at the end of an inning. But alas, he had no balls for us. Henceforth, he shall be memorialized on this web site as Joey “no balls” Votto (let that be a lesson to the rest of you minor leaguers who dare defy us). Mets, 7-4 in a come-from behind win.

After a short drive from St. Lucie, we spent the night at a Doubletree Inn in Palm Beach. Doubletree! We know what that means…free chocolate chip cookies! Except not this night. They were all out. When Scott nearly broke into tears, the guy at the desk offered to provide cookies the next morning at check out…never dreaming, of course, that Scott would be back to collect not only his, but a pair for each member of the party.

Breakfast Sunday morning was at a more traditional BIB venue, Cracker Barrel, before heading out for Coopertown. Not Cooperstown. Coopertown. Singular—just one Cooper down there in the ‘Glades. Home of “the original” Everglades airboat tour. It was way-the-hell out of the way and as we arrived at the shack that passed for a gift shop, it was taking on all the earmarks of a BIB debacle. Then our guide showed up: sun-leathered skin, fingers-in-the-electrical-outlet hair, and an orthodontic amusement park in his mouth. At least the airboats themselves looked reasonably well-maintained, so clinging to that one thought; we hopped on with a half-dozen other unsuspecting tourists. We pulled away from the shore just in time to hear that we’d be delayed a few minutes, since the path ahead was blocked by a boat that had broken down yesterday and was being towed back. While we sat there, watching several four-to-six-foot alligators come right up to our boat, we realized that Scott’s courage around crocs was limited to situations in which a fence separated man from reptile. Beyond those scenarios, Scott is a gator-hater.

Eventually, our guide told us he’d be cranking up the fan on the back of the boat and to hold on to our hats. We figured he at least had a sense of humor when he said the best he could offer if we let our hats get away was to “sort out the colors” on the other side of the fan blade. The airboat ride actually turned out to be quite an adventure, particularly for Kevin, who decided that being “in” the Everglades wasn’t good enough and took up our guide on the offer to actually get out of the boat and get “IN” the Everglades up to his knees (this on the promise that “alligators hardly ever come near this part”). Afterward, everybody took turns holding a small live gator for pictures (except Scott, figuring if our friend Andy from Gatorland could hardly stand to touch the little monsters for pay, he sure as hell wasn’t going to do it for free).

After Coopertown, we applied a couple more coats of SPF99 and headed to Dolphin (formerly known as ProPlayer, formerly known as Joe Robbie) Stadium to see the Marlins play the Washington Nationals. The Marlins’ home field, as it turns out, has all the charm of a Turkish prison. First you get to run the gauntlet of five separate security people at the gate, one of whom asks you to doff your cap so they can see what’s under…for most of us, it’s a lot less hair than in years gone by. In all the post-9/11 hysteria, this had to be the first time anyone has ever checked for “baseball cap bombs.” Then you are confined to only the section of the stadium where your seats are. Once you reach your seats, you discover that those bright orange seats reflect the Florida sun nicely and that exactly zero seats are in the shade. So, the Brethren had a contest—who could stay in the Dolphins Stadium broiler the longest. Mark and Gerry bailed by the bottom of the first inning, seeking an air-conditioned gift shop or cigar bar; Kevin lasted another half inning before seeking shelter; Scott held on through the third inning, winning the battle but losing the war.

Want to visit the gift shop? Be sure to enter only through the “enter” door and exit only through the “exit” door, lest one of the “customer service” agents chase you down and file charges. And here’s a personal favorite – there are “regular” concessions and “employee only” concessions. Signage? Of course not. So you get to wait in the employee-only line for 10 minutes before finding out that you must get your bottled water elsewhere. With all this lovely ambience, small wonder that Scott’s alligator riblets chose Sunday afternoon to come back to haunt. While Scott and Kevin, who himself feared for third-degree sunburn, took shelter at a picnic table underneath the seats, they struck up a conversation with Robert, a stadium employee whose second most interesting trait was that he ran a memorabilia business on the side (the first being, of course, that as a stadium employee, he could get bottled water wherever he damn well pleased—which was good since Scott was suffering from heat stroke by then). Robert was a talkative sort who started by taking Kevin to school on Cincinnati Reds history and regaled Scott and Kevin with his knowledge of historical (not just baseball) memorabilia. He made the visit to Dolphin Stadium almost bearable by producing a cancelled check signed by Virgil Trucks, who pitched for the Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Browns, Chicago White Sox, Kansas City Athletics, and New York Yankees between 1941 and 1958 (including two no-hitters in 1952). He let Kevin keep the check for the official BIB archives.

The seat Nazis finally gave up constantly browbeating everyone over their seating, and by the 7th inning we were able to sit in the top 3 rows of our section that had FINALLY got into the shade, and we settled in to watch the game! By then, we were impressed with the constitution of the common Marlins fan—there is virtually no shade in the entire stadium, and without a cloud in the sky, the 90 degree temps and sky high humidity just sapped our will to sit in the stands and watch a Marlins game. But thousands did, but if you wonder why it doesn't look like there are many fans at Marlins' day games, figure roughly half have taken shelter from the sun in the concession areas inside the concourses. Why Major League Baseball would have the Marlins play ANY day games was beyond us.

Aside from the stadium itself, there was plenty of wonderfully tacky activity around the game to hold our attention. There were the Marlins’ cheerleaders, the “Mermaids”, wearing long black pants that were unnecessarily hot (take it however you wish). And there were the Nationals’ fans who had made the trip chanting incessantly “Go Nats!”

After baking in the heat (Marlins 4, Nationals 2, but who really cared when your brains were cooked by the third inning?), the final insult foisted upon the Miami fan was the “team ball” give-away. Of course, BIBs being BIBs, we cut through the line and pushed our way past little kids and pregnant women to snag our souvenirs in front of most everyone else, but we were lucky, we had the right tickets. Ah, yes, the seat Nazis had their final revenge! They positioned themselves at the bottom of the big corkscrew exit ramps at the stadium, handing out the precious souvenirs, BUT, and this was a BIG BUT, you had to have the right ticket for the exit you were using! Of course, pushy us had the right tickets and snagged out balls, but people right behind us were denied the similar goodies because they didn’t have the right section for this exit, so as we rode off in the heat and the haze, paying customers were left arguing with the workers, with masses of humanity backing up the corkscrews, waiting for their balls.

It was time for the 4 hour trek back to Tampa and our morning flights. But first, it was “BIBs, don your bibs” for a stop at Shula’s steak house for some damn fine steak, complete with dessert and all the trimmings. In the oddest feature of this entire sweat-fest, we managed to drive about a thousand miles in Florida without seeing a single beach—although Gerry did get close to a beach at the Siesta Key condo at 4am to avoid his happily snoring roomie—or getting a glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean!

So it will be up to Scott to propose the official 2006 BIB itinerary, but the early favorite is something on Scott’s home turf in Virginia. If things line up right, we may be able to take in the sufficiently quirky Amelia County Beef Festival, Camden Yards, and the Washington Nationals in their second season at RFK Stadium. Go Nats!

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