Tour of Despair: Prologue
I’ve been looking forward to this trip for over a year. And, based on how the 2022 season is going, not for the baseball.
Welcome to the Tour of Despair. Four ballparks. Five days. Bad baseball. Lots of coffee.
You know, it would have been a seven-hour drive if it weren’t for the fact that Indiana is America’s orange cone.
I’m used to making the trip down I-41 from Wisconsin’s Fox River valley to Milwaukee. Despite its close proximity to The Good Land, I hadn’t actually been in Chicago that wasn’t O’Hare — airports don’t count — in almost 20 years. And Chicago’s traffic and construction scene was bad, but nothing like what I experienced in Indiana, where one may well be better off taking the byways for the next 37 years while they figure things out.
Also, thanks to the myriad backups and a makeshift highway infrastructure around Indianapolis that makes St. Louis look like a well-designed marvel of engineering ingenuity and forethought, I missed a window where I could have snuck in a stop at the Milan ‘54 museum.
Thanks, Indiana.
Cincinnati in August isn’t typically like this. 63 degrees and bright, bountiful sunshine without the swampy humidity that wrings the moisture from you and makes you hate life mowing the lawn, or stepping outside for more than five seconds. I’m Finnish -- yay, NATO -- and if I want a sauna1, I’ll go take a steam in a sauna, thank you very much.
The Milwaukee Brewers television broadcast team mentioned that the weather was unseasonably comfortable in St. Louis this past weekend as the Brewers got their butts handed to them by the Cardinals. ‘twas a good omen for the first leg of my tour.
This wild idea started a year ago, when this MLB season’s schedule dropped and I was able to successfully line games up where I could get a chunk of ballparks knocked out in a minimal amount of time. I reached out to my friends and former counterparts at Bronx to Bushville, seeing if there was any interest in meeting up and doing this thing together.
There wasn’t.
In the time since then, I lost a job, got a job, the pandemic sorta kinda went away, I started writing this here Substack, stopped writing said Substack, started writing a weekly column at Brewer Fanatic, ended up in Cleveland this past spring and getting Jacobs Progressive Field checked off anyway and have now visited my seventh state this summer. Being locked in on two sides by great lakes, it’s not exactly easy to get out and around from where we live in Wisconsin.
This is also a last hurrah of sorts: somewhere between being severely slowed down near Merrillville and completely stopped at multiple somewheres in what I think was Indianapolis, I started to feel extremely guilty about taking this time off.
I love my day job. I love my family. Not being home, and not traveling for work and not having them along feels selfish. Never mind that my kids would not survive a trip like this, or that my wife doesn’t feel the same way about baseball that I do, but I suffer from dad guilt nonetheless. And the truth is that I won’t be able to do this again for a very long time. Thanks, Mom, for providing reinforcements. Thanks, wife-mama, for your forbearance. Please, children, please don’t destroy the house. Or the city.
So long, young adulthood. You were real. It’s family vacations from here on out. Or maybe I somehow get a kid to come with me on a wild ballpark goose chase and sit at a random coffee shop while I write about the journey.
Speaking of! Today’s caffeination is provided by the fine folks at Wyoming Community Coffee of Wyoming, Ohio, which is not to be confused with Mexico, Missouri, or Brooklyn, Wisconsin. I asked them what kind of coffee I should have if I was dropped off here sight unseen — true story! — having come from eastern Wisconsin.
The staff here were bewildered. And amused. And their house roast is delightful. WyCoCo is much more fun to say than you think.
I spilled a little. Saucers are hard.
A dispatch from the game — and the poor souls who paid to attend Reds-Phillies in 2022 — coming tonight or tomorrow.
SOW-nuh. NOT SAH-NAH.