From The Inquirer archives: Living the dream with a tour of baseball stadiums

This article originally appeared on July 30, 1993.

By Jeff Samuels

Last night it all began. In Seattle. What better place to begin 28 days of sleeplessness?

As soon as the Twins-Mariners game ended, the four of them piled into their rented van and started driving. For 21 hours and 1,164 miles. Until they got to Anaheim for tonight’s Twins-Angels game.

And then it would be on to Oakland tomorrow, Denver on Sunday, Chicago on Monday, Minneapolis on Tuesday, Cincinnati on Wednesday, Baltimore on Thursday, Miami on Friday … and on and on and on. For 28 days. And 17,339 miles. And close to $14,000. And the equivalent of 13 days on the highway.

All so they can go back to college in the fall and tell their buds they were the first to see games in all 28 major league ballparks within 28 days.

“This is not something we thought we would be able to do five years from now,” said Princeton junior Mark Johns, who planned the trip. “This is partly about being a baseball fan and partly about taking the ultimate cross country road trip.”

Right, the ultimate. So tight are the time constraints that the four students — the others are Princeton’s Chris Looney and Mike Casagranda, and Dartmouth’s Brent DeRiszner — will have to do almost all of their sleeping in the van while one of them drives. “We may stop at a hotel just to take a shower,” Johns said. “We could be pretty smelly by the time it’s over.”

And then there are the potential problems. Like bad weather; one rainout will require a total reworking of the schedule. Or trouble with their ’93 Ford Aerostar. Or some unforeseen snag; the potential here is enormous, particularly on the 1,255-mile, Oakland-to-Denver leg, during which they’ll need a Saturday game of no more than 2 1/2 hours and an all-night average of 59.8 mph to make Sunday’s 1:35 p.m. start.

Or the biggie: not being able to handle the bills when it’s over. Major League Baseball is providing the tickets, but so far the students’ pleas for financial help — they’re using the trip as a fund-raiser for the Make-A-Wish Foundation — has yielded only one donation, of $5,000, from Ten-K Sports Drink.

Ah, but just think of the rewards awaiting them. The recognition. The satisfaction. The chance to silence, once and for all, 43-year-old Wayne Zumwalt, of Colorado Springs, who read about the students’ trip and decided to beat them to it — but did 8,000 miles by plane.

“The way we look at it, he cheated,” Johns said.

Oh, yeah, and the memories.