(Please read our Covid 19 Statement first - Ed) Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Diego, Phoenix, San Fransisco, Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Chicago again, Pittsburgh, New York, New York again, Philadelphia, Seattle, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Denver, Oakland, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and St. Petersburg.
That is our trail and our route, as best as I can remember. For the past decade and a half we have been on a quest to see every Major League Baseball stadium. There are 30 teams...29 in the U.S.A. and one in Canada. There are 24 outdoor stadiums, 6 with retractable roofs, and 1 indoor stadium. 28 feature natural grass, two use artificial grass. 20 are downtown stadiums while 10 are a bit more removed from their city centers. 15 play in the American League...where a designated hitter bats for the pitcher...and 15 in the National League where pitchers come up to bat like everyone else.
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Some are good, some are bad, and others are squarely in the middle. Most have great customer service while one wasn't so nice to us. And, at the end of it all, each one is unique and his it's own personality.
If you count that list of team cities at the top of this article, you'll notice there are 29. We have one more to go, tonight we will cross the last team off of our list as we go to see the Miami Marlins host the Los Angeles Dodgers.
After spending a mostly delightful afternoon in Little Havana, after a little rest we gear up for the game. When we arrived here last week to take our Bahamas cruise, we turned in the rental car and have been relying on public transit and Lyft while here in the city. That poses a bit of a quandary because Marlins Park, although near downtown, is not what I'd call a transit friendly stadium.
Pouring over Google Maps and local transit sites, we decided we'd take Miami's Metro...basically an elevated subway-like system similar to Chicago's...to the Civic Center station. This would put us about a mile north of the stadium where we could take a bus or one of Miami's trolleys.
Once we arrived at the station, we checked the online bus locators, which told us that it would be about 40 minutes before the next one arrived.
"It's not really that far, let's walk," my wife said.
A half hour and a gallon of sweat later, we arrive. The stadium still has about 20 minutes to go until the gates open. Just outside is a party tent called the Fifth Base. The stadium security guards tell us we should wait there. It's air conditioned and the beer is cheap.
Sounds good to me.
The a/c felt very good after that walk in Miami's hot and fetid air. The tall, ice cold Modelos at $6 also helped to take away the heat and to replenish all that we'd sweated off.
Inside, we find our seats near homebase after perusing the park's bobblehead museum, basically a large display case filled with hundreds of little bobblehead figures that are occasionally given away at sporting events. The shelves even vibrate so that the heads bobble.
It is kind of amazing we did find our seat, if indeed we did. We kind of took a guess. The section was right on the sign but none of the seats were numbered. Maybe if we could have found an usher nearby, we could have been sure, but none were to be found.
Then, there was the case of the t-shirt.
For background, about halfway through this project, Tim decided he wanted to buy a t-shirt from each park to commemorate it. That is usually accomplished by a quick visit to the team store after finding our seats.
In Miami, there was a store called "Team Store" behind our seats. It was about a quarter the size of any other team store we've seen and had a very paltry and generic selection of shirts (Tim likes to get one featuring the name of his favorite player on the team).
I asked the clerk in the store, "is this all you have? It seems very limited."
"There's a bigger store downstairs that has what you're looking for, it's directly beneath this one," he tells me.
Since it's kind of a pain to take Tim back downstairs, I ask him who he wants on his shirt and then walk down the stairs of our section towards the field, where a tunnel leads to the concourse below ours.
An usher (!) down there stops me. "May I see your tickets? Do you have tickets to the Diamond Club?"
I tell her no, I'm sitting a few rows up from where we're standing. I point to Tim and Letty to show her.
"I'm trying to get to the team store," I tell here.
"You need to have Diamond Club tickets."
Thinking she's misunderstanding me, I tell her what the clerk at the store by our seats said.
"You need to have Diamond Club tickets."
Now I'm thinking that I just can't go through the Diamond Club seats to get there so I ask in there's another way, "maybe if I go down the escalators behind our seats?"
"You need to have Diamond Club tickets."
I tell her I not trying to get into the Diamond Club, just the store.
"Sir, you need to have Diamond Club tickets just to get into the store."
"You've got to be kidding me," I tell her. "The Marlins don't want to sell souvenirs to their fans?"
"That's all I know, you need to have Diamond Club tickets to get into the store."
I left and went back to the clerk in the store near us and tell him what happened, "That's right, you need to have Diamond Club tickets to get in there."
I tell him again, "I cannot believe the team does not want to sell merchandise to it's fans. There's what...30 people sitting in the Diamond Club? That's enough to support the team store?"
Seeing my frustration, he walks Tim and I to guest relations and tells them what we're trying to do.
"You need to have Diamond Club tickets," I hear the guest relations person say.
I basically launch into the same spiel with her, she calls upstairs to the main office.
"What we can do is escort you downstairs. The head usher will have to sign your tickets, saying you can re-enter the stadium. You'll be escorted to the outside entrance of the store," where anybody can enter from the outside, "and then you'll need to go back through security and be escorted back to the elevator to return to your seats."
And, that is just what happened. We spent five minutes buying the shirt and a half hour negotiating with the powers that be just to make that happen.
Even a nearby security guard told me, "This team and management is the worst in the league."
Hard to disagree.
So, now, we can relax and enjoy the game. Which we do with very expensive snacks and beer.
It's a good game, the Marlins went on to beat the Dodgers 4-2. The crowd was very thin, so the noise level from the PA system and a roving band of drummers was very high trying to rally the crowd. It didn't work...even though their team was winning, the few people that were there were very quiet.
All in all, kind of a disappointing stadium to finish off our quest in. Probably should have made Tampa Bay's stadium the last one, it was a lot more fun, but it is what it is.
This massive undertaking, which overall was a great blast to accomplish, will finish not with a bang but a whimper.
Take heart, though, the rest of Miami is fantastic and we'll be experiencing more of it next time.
Darry Musick
Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved
Photos by Letty Musick
Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved
