vision of the kind of life I wanted to lead dramatically in the early days of my radio career. On that original list – along with all kinds of goals like “get nationally syndicated,” “run my own radio station” and “go to Australia” – was to “go to all MLB stadiums in one summer.”
To be honest – and because I’ve lived a very charmed and wonderful life – virtually every item on my 1994 bucket list had been accomplished or adjusted. On the original list, I had “go to Wimbledon.” I never made it there but it’s just not important to me anymore.
Quite frankly, neither was visiting every baseball stadium and I had to rack my brain to think of the handful that I hadn’t seen over my 30 years in sports journalism and covering baseball.
My wife is also no stranger to sporting events. At her diagnosis, we’d been married 11 years and had gone to many Super Bowls, World Cups, Stanley Cups, Kentucky Derbys and just about anything else that’s piqued our interest and lured us to an adventure that surrounded sports and travel.
And don’t get me wrong: we love baseball, but it was just a very random thing for a very sick woman to request – the Major League Baseball All Star Game? The other stuff on her list from the spring were: safari in Africa, the Seychelles, Paris, New Zealand, Yellowstone Park and the Taj Mahal.
She made it clear that the All Star Game was a serious request so I added it to the list.
At the time, many Ravens players had reached to me and done live radio shows to encourage folks to come out and get on the bone marrow registry to honor my wife and to save a life.
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In my mind, it’s just a natural for sports to tie into doing good things. What could be better than trying to save other lives as Jenn would be going to the registry to ask a stranger to save her life?
As her post-transplant health stabilized and improved, just as miraculously the Orioles started winning baseball games in July and August at a record pace and my brain started to go on overload about what could be accomplished when we got Jenn back to full health.
How could I somehow merge the idea of going to 30 ballparks in 30 days in the Summer of 2015 with swabbing for the bone marrow registry?
I googled the released of the previous year’s MLB schedule and knew it was coming in early September so I awaited the chance to piece it together while I formulated some ways it could be effective. But more than that, I needed to know if it was possible.
I had searched for several weeks, looking for anyone who had actually done 30 ballparks in 30 days and could offer some practical advice. There’s a fellow named Eric Mueller in Detroit who did it three years early and even offered a website with thoughts from his journey. He’s also a great guy and a lifer Tigers fan who will appear later in this tale.
On September 11th of last year, Major League Baseball released its 2015 schedule and I locked myself in the office for four hours and printed out – yep, I went to some old-school 8X10 ditto paper – the daily schedules and started feverishly trying to figure out whether this was possible and logistically feasible. I had color-coded pens, highlighters and papers lying all over the place with one colorful
