Crawling toward baseball 'miracles'

About a year ago, my beautiful wife Dina gave me a Father's Day present I highly suggested — the Major League Baseball BallPark Pass-Port.

It's a thick book that encourages its owners to go city to city and have it stamped in each MLB ballpark. In this past year, I've gotten eight stamps, and this summer featured my most epic trip — Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

I'm planning on seeing all 30 stadiums in the next seven years. No major rush. Why do this? I have a zillion reasons — curiosity, history, Americana, memories, my dad and fun. In my mind, baseball brings the United States together in a way I find delightful, meaningful and apolitical.

My two teaching comrades, Alan and Will, accompanied me, and I must give them props as excellent travel companions, great friends and all-around good guys. They accepted my incessant talking and agreed to do some oddball stuff, including throwing footballs at bowling pins in Detroit.

We stayed six nights (two in Toronto, one in Detroit, three in Cleveland) and saw four baseball games, so the trip was set up as a whirlwind, which it was. Toronto is huge, the fourth biggest city in North America. Who knew? In the 2010s, the city embraced globalization, and half of its residences were then born abroad.

One cool thing about seeing Rogers Centre, which used to be the SkyDome, is that its retractable roof closed before the fourth inning with the threat of minor rain. For Toronto overall, as my favorite site, I'll go with Kensington Market, which is bohemian and arty. The iconic Garden Car is pretty legit.

In Detroit, Polish food, soul food, free live music at Nancy Whiskey and a Tigers' walk-off win over the Mariners with two outs in the bottom of the ninth highlighted the Michigan leg of the journey. Then, it was onto the Polish Mansion in Brecksville, Ohio. 

Mama Stevens put Alan to work immediately by having him change the air filters to the heating/cooling system in the attic. I've done that a handful of times. You got to really crouch and walk a little bit like John Bender in the rafters in The Breakfast Club. Alan did a minor inspection and reported zero asbestos.

My mom referred to his air filter replacement as a "miracle," and while that might be overstating the task, I quickly learned that Alan is indeed a miracle worker as he showed up on the Jumbotron at Progressive Field later in the day: 

Actually, that arm and thumbs up on the Jumbotron belong to me.

As a youngster, Northeast Ohio conditioned me to hate Pittsburgh because of the Browns-Steelers rivalry. I assumed the city would be a facsimile of Cleveland or Detroit and have a whole lotta grit and burnt-out warehouses. Boy, was I wrong about that — at least in the downtown area.

It turns out the Pitt is a beautiful town, and its stadium is possibly the most gorgeous in all of baseball. Vistas from the ballpark overlook its bridges, the Allegheny River and revived city. The city truly revitalized when the steel industry left town, and it's so impressive that I was having city envy for my beloved Cleveland. Why couldn't we have recovered like that? PNC Park was so beautiful; it was the type of place where — no joke — we just happened to come across a rainbow:

Gosh, I hardly ever see rainbows. ROYGBIV was not only fitting because of the majesty of PNC Park, but perhaps the stadium felt left out. It happened to be Pride Night at both the Toronto and Cleveland games during our trip, and apparently the Pittsburgh sky is an ally.

Through these adventures, I've become closer with Al and Will, and we're already discussing another trip — possibly Kansas City, St. Louis, Cincinnati or Washington, Baltimore, Philly. We'll see. Will, who is a dependable, understanding and all-around awesome gentleman, had the "visit every stadium" plan before I did. He's further along than me and is now at 17.

I have no real regrets with the trip, but maybe spending more time in each city would be cool. We left some major attractions, including the Hockey Hall of Fame and Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, on the table. However, maybe all was fine because it's hard to leave our wives for more than six nights.

When I received the MLB PassPort, I already had seen games in nine stadiums, but four of those stadiums are defunct — the old Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium, Oakland Coliseum and Baltimore Memorial Stadium. I really had only five under my belt, so I figured I could revisit those and get stamps at all 30.

I'm 52. The plan is to see these stadiums in my 50s; I vow not to rush. However, I've been a rushing-around guy most of my life, yet now I'm trying to enact Mae West's famous words: "Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly."