The Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch of Baseball

As we prepare for our journey, we are constantly looking for tales from other baseball travelers who have attempted this pilgrimage.  It takes a particular kind of passionate person to undertake this feat.  One such individual is Reggie Deal.  The 39-year-old baseball-loving Texan is completely blind, but that has not stopped him from following his dream.  Yesterday Reggie began his journey in Arlington, TX, as he watched his Rangers lose to Tampa Bay on Sunday Night Baseball.  With the assistance of his wife, he will spend the next 30 days traveling around the country, attending one game each day.  He says in an interview with MLB.com that he has been planning this trip since his college days at Texas A&M and he feels very fortunate to have this opportunity.   Check out his full interview here:

 http://www.mlb.com/cutfour/article.jsp?content_id=30037254&partnerId=aw-8069789785427422001-996

Reggie’s story really shows how baseball is such an enriching and fulfilling holistic experience. Box scores show who won and lost, statistics give an assessment of a player’s talent, and television broadcasters present educated analysis of the action, but there is nothing quite like attending a game in person.  The sound of baseballs hitting wood and leather, the smell of the freshly cut grass, the feel of the well-worn metal seats, and the taste of Cracker Jacks are all aspects of the game that Reggie loves.  For any die-hard baseball fan, a day at the ballpark is a day in heaven.  Anticipation of such events will get him up every morning for the next 30 days.  It was memories of these experiences that drove my friends and I to begin planning our trip on a snow-covered January night. I am proud to place myself in a select group of baseball enthusiasts alongside such a remarkable man as Reggie Deal.

Good luck on your trip Reggie.  It’s going to be a blast.

Tickets for Charity

Thanks to Patrick Adelstein, who has generously volunteered his season tickets for the Dodgers-Giants game in LA, we have the enviable problem of multiple tickets for the same game (so far we have only bought tickets for three game, one of which was the game at Dodgers Stadium). 

We just listed the old seats on StubHub; there were only $10 per ticket, so we have decided to donate all of the proceeds of the resale to the Tickets for Kids Foundation.

People to whom we owe thanks so far

Before we get too far along in our planning, I just thought I should mention that I personally could not have gone without the help and direction from Tim Mosehauer at EIA and Middlebury Professor Karl Lindholm, as well as everybody on the review board that decided to grant us funds, and the alumni who contributed those funds. We also likely could not have secured any funds without the willingness of Jesse Golomb (TheFanManifesto.com) to secure a professional relationship with Damon that allowed us to go forward knowing we could publish some of our work on a well-read sports blog. I think this list will grow quite quickly, but it is important to keep these people in mind for their help in making this trip possible.

A Taste of Chi-Town Rivalry

Come August 10th, we'll find out once and for all if you can find decent pizza on the North Side

Bittersweet Caroline

Nick Underhill, a blogger at my favorite biased sports blog, River Avenue Blues, thinks its time for the Red Sahx to nix the 8th inning tradition of playing "Sweet Caroline" and singing along ("So good! So good! So good!") following yet another collapse. You can never really take these biased bloggers who are really just trying to be provocative too seriously, but he does make one really good point: the golden age of 2004-2007 is a thing of the past. No more Manny being Manny; no more Kevin Millar or Bill Mueller; no more Theo or Tito.

It's definitely way too soon to rule Adrian Gonzalez, Big Papi and Youk's team out of being a top contender in the AL, but with Jacoby Ellsbury and Carl Crawford's injuries and Bobby Valentine's persisting existence, it is safe to say the aren't THE team to beat that they thought they were set up to be after signing Crawford, Gonzalez and John Lackey.

Why I absolutely and unequivocally (yes it's redundant) love Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons perfectly captured why our trip this summer is going to be special and why our homage to baseball and its culture is unique in sports.From his most recent mailbag:

"We have been having the same conversation about Freddie Lynn since I was 13. He should have stayed. These are the things you think about when your entire life is flashing before your eyes. Football is more popular, basketball is more marketable, hockey is more exciting, soccer means more throughout the world. But baseball has a way of making you think about everything that ever happened to you, every conversation you ever had, every place you ever lived, everything."

Perfection

I just witnessed (on television) the first Perfect Game in my 10-plus years of watching baseball. Of course it came against the Seattle Mariners — who else? 

While witnessing a perfect game or a no-hitter during our trip would undoubtedly complete our trip and make it that much more memorable, we understand that in just 30 games the odds that we are present for a feat of tis nature are incredibly low.

Which is why we will be making a series of 'prop bets' and calculating the odds of seeing certain things during our trip. For example, what are the odds that we see someone hit for the cycle — hitting a single, double, triple and home run in the same game — during our trip? 100-1? 500-1? 1000-1? These are the things that we want to know before we leave so we can be prepared to understand its significance within our overall trip if it does happen. 

But we'll also create fun lines for over/unders. How many home runs will we see during the 30 games? Or total runs? Hit batsmen? Baseball is great because it is a game dominated by statistics. During our trip we will keep you all updated with the coolest and wackiest stats we keep during our trip.

Biblical Baseball?

Here's a New York Times article about a class at NYU called "Baseball as a Road to God." Oh, and its taught by Dr. John Sexton, the President of NYU. In his words: "The real idea of the course is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball's not 'the' road to God. For most of us, it isn't 'a' road to God. But it's a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being." This is definitely an article worth checking out. Prop to Mimi Fahs, one of our loyal followers, for showing me this.

I guess Phil Rizzuto was really on to something with his famous "Holy Cow!" home run calls

Funded

The 30 in 38 Project got a HUGE boost in the form of $4000 grant funding from the Middlebury College Center for Education in Action. The funding will go towards helping pay for gas, hotels and tickets as we write/blog/film this adventure.

Happy Centennial Fenway Park!

The Fenway faithful gathered to celebrate the legendary ballpark's 100th birthday today, but their opponent, my hometown Yankees, crashed the party by playing the same way they have since 1912. The Bronx Bombers slammed five homers en route to the W.

Rep Your City!

We'll be driving through 34 states (plus Washington D.C.!) and hundreds of cities, and we want to hear your favorite song about your town, city, or state. Tweet @30in38project with your name and favorite songs and we'll give you a shout out when we play blast them as we drive through your neck of the woods.

The saga begins...

The 2012 season has only just begun, but for Jeff, Owen, Damon and I the planning process is well underway. Our blog is up and running, our applications for grant funding have been submitted, and we are going city by city looking for friends and family to stay with and keep our hotel costs to a minimum. So if you live in a baseball city and have a free bed, futon, or even a large carpet, please don't hesitate to let us know!!