Great American Baseball Trips

10/21/2026

Congratulations to a WONDERFUL human being!

Today, I was proud to present the Governor’s Medal of Freedom to Baseball Hall of Famer and great Floridian Andre Dawson. His distinguished career in Major League Baseball, his contributions to the sport, and his lasting impact on our state have earned him this award.

From his childhood in Southwest Miami, to his college days at FAMU, to his legendary MLB career, “The Hawk” has represented Florida in the best possible way for decades. His generous support of FAMU and its baseball program has helped generations of student-athletes succeed. The Governor’s Medal of Freedom is the highest honor I can bestow on any Floridian, and Andre Dawson truly deserves this recognition.

10/21/2026

Borchert Field, home of the American Association's Milwaukee Brewers from 1902-1952, doing its best impression of the Polo Grounds. The only difference is it appears the groundskeepers at Borchert Field had the good sense to fill up as much space as possible with dirt to minimize lawnmowing.
*from the desk of Baseball History Dork

10/17/2026

I didn’t know this!

⚾ There is almost nothing left in American life that is still sewn shut by a human being, and one of the last of them is probably sitting in a drawer in your house. Every baseball used in the major leagues is stitched by hand. One hundred and eight stitches, pulled tight two at a time, holding two interlocking panels of cowhide around a core.

The work happens in Turrialba, Costa Rica, a farming town where Rawlings moved its ball plant in the late 1980s. More than three hundred people work there, and the plant has turned out as many as 2.4 million baseballs in a year, every one of them assembled by hand. The raw material arrives from a long way off: cork and rubber for the center, cowhide out of Tennessee, and gray wool yarn from New Zealand wound underneath the leather.

When Reuters visited in 2010, the sewers were earning about a dollar sixty an hour, a little above the Costa Rican minimum, with a bonus paid on every ball above a daily figure of 156. Some of them had worn their shoulders out chasing that bonus. The finished balls went to Miami, and out of Miami to the ballparks, where a single one sold for about fifteen dollars.

What stays with you is what the people doing the sewing said about the game itself. Costa Rica is a soccer country, and the plant sits a long way from any of this. Minor Quesada, who had been there seventeen years when Reuters found him, put it as plainly as it can be put: "I really don't understand baseball."

Think about that the next time one goes into the stands and a whole section comes up out of its seats for it. Somebody who has never watched an inning in her life stitched that thing closed by hand, and it traveled a couple of thousand miles to land in a stranger's lap.

10/16/2026

Then vs. Now: Municipal Stadium in KC

Municipal Stadium stood at 22nd Street and Brooklyn Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, opening in 1923 as Muehlebach Field for the minor-league Blues and the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs.

Renamed Ruppert Stadium (1937) and Blues Stadium (1943), it was almost completely rebuilt for Major League Baseball in 1955, when the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City and the city renamed it Municipal Stadium.

Across its lifespan, it hosted the Athletics, Royals, Chiefs, and the NASL’s Kansas City Spurs, as well as the Monarchs through 1955.

The ballpark staged the first 1960 MLB All-Star Game and, in football, the Chiefs–Dolphins playoff on December 25, 1971—the longest game in NFL history.

Jackie Robinson played there with the Monarchs in 1945 before signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and numerous Negro Leagues stars, including Buck O’Neil and Satchel Paige, appeared on its field.

After the Royals and Chiefs moved to the Truman Sports Complex, Municipal Stadium was demolished in 1976.

In the background you'll see Lincoln College Preparatory Academy, opened in 1936.

➡️ Follow for more then vs. now of KC!

Photo Courtesy - John Vawter Collection/Getty Images and Daniel Moreno/Kansas City in Photos

10/15/2026

⚾ There is a medical campus on the near west side of Chicago with a championship buried under it. The ballpark was called the West Side Grounds and it opened on 14 May 1893, hemmed in by Taylor, Wood, Polk and Lincoln, the last of which is now Wolcott. It held about twelve thousand at first and sixteen thousand by the end.

It survived a fire on 5 August 1894 that tore through the first base stands while a game was going on, with the crowd pinned against a barbed wire fence until some of the players tore it open. The Chicago National League club won its championships there in 1907 and in 1908, left after the 1915 season, and the place came down in 1920.

The University of Illinois medical campus sits on it now, and a small sign on Wood Street is the only thing that admits what used to be there. Generations of that city's fans have waited near a ballpark that no longer exists, standing on the only ground where the thing they wanted actually happened.

10/14/2026

Any guesses?

What is the greatest number of pitches that a batter can see in an at-bat without a single foul ball? 👀🤔

10/08/2026

WOW!

⚾ There was a ballpark in Milwaukee where you could not see the whole game from any seat in the grandstand. Not because of a post, and not because of one bad section. The place was built inside a single city block, hemmed in on all four sides by streets and the backs of people's houses, and the grandstand ran along one edge at such a hard angle that you could watch left field or you could watch right field and you had to pick. A writer there put it plainly, that you needed two tickets to see a ballgame, one for each side.

It opened in 1888 as Athletic Park and took Otto Borchert's name after he died suddenly at a banquet in April 1927. The block was bounded by Chambers Street behind home plate, Burleigh Street out past center field, and Seventh and Eighth Streets running down the two foul lines. Those lines were only about two hundred and sixty six feet, shorter than a good many high school fields. The strangest number is in the gaps, where it ran roughly four hundred and thirty five feet to left center and right center, a solid forty feet deeper than straightaway center.

On the fifteenth of June, 1944, a windstorm came through during a ballgame and tore a hundred and twenty foot section of roof clean off the first base grandstand. Pieces of it came down across Seventh Street into the houses facing the park. The roof was never put back, and the place played its last eight seasons with a hole in it.

It was a crowded little park in every sense. A Negro National League club played there in 1923, a women's professional team won a championship on that field in 1944, and the Green Bay Packers used it for exactly one football game. For sixty years almost everything Milwaukee had went through those two hundred and sixty six feet.

The last ballgame was played in September of 1952 and the stands came down over the months that followed. A decade later they ran the interstate through, straight between Seventh and Eighth, which is to say directly down the middle of that long narrow outfield. People driving it have no idea they are in play.