Baseball Stadium Wanderlust: Tapping Into the ‘Route 66 Mentality’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 07.31.06 | 4:11 PM ET
Cass Sapir is in the midst of a road trip to watch baseball games in all 189 of North America’s major league and affiliated minor league stadiums. Alan Schwarz recently caught up with the 27-year-old documentary filmmaker and his 2002 Honda Accord at a game in Frederick, Maryland (stop No. 126), and his story in Sunday’s New York Times offers an interesting look not just at Sapir’s quest but the American tradition of the summer baseball road trip.
Schwarz writes:
Spending $18,000 of his money to finance the tour—and interrupting his filmmaking for the Discovery Channel and the PBS series “Nova”—Sapir has joined a long line of so-called normal people who devote a summer to the baseball road trip.
One man is driving around in a lime-green Mercedes powered by vegetable oil to promote alternative fuels. Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Dennis Miller have visited several ballparks this year to celebrate Hanks’s 50th birthday, and dozens of college pals have embarked on nomadic pilgrimages to every major league park east of the Mississippi and the like.
Jim Siscel, a retired Seattle-area schoolteacher, made it to every stadium recently, but it took him four summers. “He’s crazy,” Siscel said of Sapir, “but he’s younger than I am!”
Legend has it that one man did make it to every park from the rookie-level Pioneer League through the majors, the way Sapir is set to do, in the mid-1990’s.
“There’s a wanderlust that’s unique to baseball stadiums,” said Dave Chase, president and general manager of the Pacific Coast League’s Memphis Redbirds, a mid-May stop for Sapir. “People love being outdoors in ballparks and connecting with the country. It’s the Route 66 mentality.”
Sapir, who is using the trip to raise money for charity, plans to complete his feat in about 158 days.
Related on World Hum:
* The Endless Road Trip
* Road Trip Tips From “The Cruise”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
