Few things are more All-American than enjoying a ballgame with your son. This I’ve known since the time I carted our oldest to his first major-league matchup at the tender age of 8 months. But this summer has revealed one joy that is even greater – enjoying a ballgame with both of your sons.
The older boy, Sporto, has been to enough games that I long ago last track, in line with his general penchant for facts and figures on just about anything shown on ESPN. But our younger son, The Builder, has been more into blocks and bricks than bats and balls for much of his first 7 years – until this summer.
I’ll always remember 1980, the year of the Pete Rose-Mike Schmidt Philadelphia Phillies and George Brett’s flirtation with a .400 batting average for the Kansas City Royals, as the dawning of my baseball consciousness. This has been that year for The Builder. Every chance he gets, the younger boy stops to ask me about proper arm extension on his swing, or mechanics for his pitching motion. He wants to learn to catch, to bat left-handed, to bat right-handed. And I eat it up every time.
When I bought tickets to a few Cubs games this season – for the first time in years – I figured it would again be me and Sporto going to many of them, with the occasional trip for the whole family (Cubs-Sox) and a trash-talking excursion with neighbors from Downstate (Cubs-Cardinals) included. After all, when given the chance to go to spring training with me and Sporto this March, The Builder declined, weighing the potential fun he might have with me and his brother against how many nights he’d be away from Mom. Hey, he’s still little. I get it.
He’d similarly taken a pass last summer when Sporto and I drove to Ohio for games in Cincinnati and Cleveland. For the last five years, we’ve made a point of visiting at least one new major-league stadium each summer, with the implicit goal of somehow eventually seeing a game at all 30. It’s become a bit of a tradition, charting our order by identifying the next-closest stadium we’ve not yet seen, and this year’s was in Minneapolis. St. Louis, Milwaukee and Detroit also marked off the list, Sporto went along each time. The Builder declined.
But this time, something was different. When Sporto and I started talking about the Minnesota trip, the young boy’s curiosity was piqued. “How many nights?” he asked. “How many hours is the drive?” Intrigue had begun to replace the familiar trepidation.
I called my longtime friend in the South Suburbs, a Twins fan who hails from Minnesota, to see if he and his son, one year younger than The Builder, would like to make the trip as well. Sure enough, that was enough to seal the deal – if his younger friend was in; the boy knew he couldn’t possibly say no.
When we loaded into the van on Friday afternoon headed toward the Land of 10,000 Lakes, there was The Builder, overnight bag, ball glove and pillow in hand, off on his first big baseball adventure with his brother, little buddy and their dads. Just as he’d stepped up to stake his claim to some of those Cubs tickets over his comparatively baseball-savvy older brother this summer, The Builder was clearly now hooked on the game just as much as the rest of us. Somewhere along the line he declared himself a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, even rooting for them against my Cubs at Wrigley earlier this season.
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Sporto’s first game was Cardinals vs. Pirates at the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis in 2004, coincidentally the same matchup at the same park where I’d seen my first major-league game 21 years earlier. The Builder made it to his first big-league game last season, the historic Wrigley Field 100th anniversary game against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Sporto has now seen games at eight current major-league stadiums and The Builder just three – also including a game at Sox Park this season – so we still have a long way to go. And though I’ve been to many more stadiums than both of them, I’ll happily make return trips to all to help complete our challenge.
Will we eventually see all 30 stadiums? How many current stadiums will even still be in use by the time we make it all the way around? I don’t know, but we’ll sure have fun finding out.
If we stay true to form, 2016 would take us to Pittsburgh and 2017 to Kansas City. Sporto is already looking forward to the 2020 trip in particular, the first one he reasons that he’ll be able to drive to after turning 16. He estimates that our travels will take us to Toronto that year, not knowing yet that he’ll also need a passport.
I can only hope that The Builder is onboard for these trips going forward now as well. I’d love it if my daughter went too, but she seems to appreciate her girls’ weekend respites with Mom when the boys head out to their ballgames.
Boys, baseball and the thrill of the open road. What more could a father want.
Now, if we can just work on that Dodgers thing.
Twitter: @RobManker
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works and parents in Naperville.