Baseball trip replay

When I was growing up watching baseball in Houston in the late 70s, early 80s, they used to advertise from places like Wrigley Field or Dodger Stadium for travel packages to those cities to see the Astros play. That sounded so cool to me, but I really wanted to see the other stadia as well. Plus, we never got to see American League stadia on TV, except for the All-Star Game, playoffs, and World Series, because we were a "National League" city, so the NBC Game of the Week had an awful lot of Mets, Cubs, Dodgers, and Cardinals games.

I wanted to see them all.

When I started working in the real world, I got a job at Claris, an Apple subsidiary. At the time, Apple was giving paid sabbaticals; you could take six weeks paid plus whatever your vacation time you had accumulated after you had worked there for five years.

My first idea for my sabbatical was to go to Leningrad for several weeks and study Russian, but when the Soviet Union broke apart in 1992, all of the agencies I had been looking at stopped existing.

So I decided to do a baseball tour. I wrote a computer program (the current version of that is on github; the original was in C) to help me with routing since it is a variation of a hard computer science problem called the Travelling Salesman Problem. Claris had been loaned an RS 6000 machine since it was the initial way a developer could port applications from the MC68000 architecture to the Power PC architecture. However, it was sitting unused because those porting efforts moved back to the Mac. So I borrowed it. I input distances and schedules for teams for the 1994 season, ran the program for a week, when it spit out an answer, and got tickets.

That in an of itself was fun. I had to call each ticket office on the phone. I did discover that about 13 of the 24 teams I needed to call (I went to the two Bay Area stadia separately before the trip started) used Ticketmaster, but the rest each had their own way off processing. When I called the Detroit Tigers ticket office (in January), I had to call M-F 9-5 Eastern, and when I got somebody, he took my credit card info over the phone, went over to a drawer with all of the tickets for that game in it, took out mine, and dropped them in the mail.

I then set out and drove for 11 weeks. 20000 miles. Oh, and my ex-wife and I found a house we wanted the Sunday before I left, so I was also trying to manage my part of that process while on the road. Using telephone and dial-up internet. For email. No websites yet.

It was a blast. It was long. And some things in my world changed during the 3 months I was gone.

Starting tomorrow, May 24, 2020, the 26th anniversary of the first day of this trip, I am going to repost my blog entries I wrote at the time. They are generally pretty short. I will also include links to games, and other sites I saw. May not have many pictures, but I will try (I did not have a good camera).

Once it is all done, I will wrap it up with a entry about the trip, how the world changed during the summer, how baseball and world has changed since, and some other stuff.

I may not post everyday, but I will catch up if I have to miss a couple here and there.