Bill-on-the-Hill

So what's an "eephus ball"? Well, check out the day's Web Site du Jour, http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Eephus_pitch at that baseball fan's invaluable on-line guide, baseball-reference.com. It's a throwback to an earlier age, a pitch delivered with the high, slow arc of a slow-pitch softball delivery, and occasionally -- very occasionally -- seen in major-league games. Here and in the next few installments, I'll be describing a journey my wife and I took to look for one, in its natural(?) habitat -- major-league baseball parks across the United States.

Rabid baseball fans that we are, Emily and I have a long-standing goal of seeing a baseball game in the home parks of each of the 30 teams in "American" major-league ball. (No interest yet in seeing Japanese parks, but we'll see what longevity and finance permit once we've reached our primary goal.) Because it's difficult to get tickets to many teams' games once the season is in full swing (so to speak), we decided to make this year's baseball pilgrimage early in the season -- last week of April -- when tickets are still fairly easy to get. There are certain tradeoffs in going this way, as will be seen; the weather isn't always the best for sitting in the stands, and the excitement of a pennant race is still months away. But no matter, we decided to set out from our home in New Mexico and see games in the Midwest, specifically Milwaukee, Chicago and St. Louis (we'd seen a game there, but the Cardinals have a brand new stadium that we wanted to check out). En route I also wanted to research some sites on the Santa Fe Trail itinerary, and there was one other, less enjoyable, but important aspect of the trip that I'll get to later.

The first couple of days, my subject for today, were spent simply in getting into the area of these cities. This, alas, is not the most exciting driving one can imagine. Our route took us across southeastern Colorado, through country that makes it hard for the traveler to believe that the glories of the Rocky Mountains are only 100 miles or so away, and then into the even flatter and more monotonous Great Plains states of Kansas and Nebraska. People who haven't traveled this part of the United States by road may have a hard time appreciating how big it is, not to mention how empty. From our front door to Milwaukee, the turn-around point, is about a 1400-mile drive, and for the first half of that, you won't pass through a single town of population 20,000 or greater unless you go out of your way to see one. Our first night's lodging was in the small Colorado town of La Junta, which we chose because of its proximity to Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site, a unit of the United States National Parks system and one of those places on the Santa Fe Trail that we wanted to check out -- and at about 8,000, its population was one of the largest we encountered on this leg of the trip. Bent's is well worth a visit, and by going at this time of year, we avoided such crowds as there are during the summer, apart from two busloads of schoolchildren from La Junta and smaller nearby towns -- this is "field trip" season, after all. For dining in La Junta I can recommend Boss Hogg's, a steakhouse/bar with a "family" feel and acceptable steaks. It's not fine big-city dining, but for road food in this part of the world, it's entirely acceptable. An outside view of the Fort:

The next day, following our Bent's visit, we pointed 'em east and continued into Kansas, then northeast into Nebraska, pursued by a nasty cold front that spawned destructive tornadoes not too far south of our route of travel. Once we were done at Bent's, this day was just drive-drive-drive and I have no tales to tell of doing so. Finally we crashed for the night in an unnamed and not notable chain motel in the larger-but-hardly-huge city of Lincoln (Nebraska), where I'll pick up the action tomorrow. Photos of this leg of the trip follow as soon as I can figure out how to download them on our new computer. Incidentally, apologies if this appears twice; I tried to submit an earlier version yesterday, and it seems to have disappeared into net.purgatory...