Baseball is the national pastime for a reason. From coast to coast, north to south, each pocket of the country has its own unique connection to the sport. Here at MLB.com, in celebration of the semiquincentennial this weekend, we’ve been taking a summer road trip across America, featuring one baseball story from every state.
You can follow along right here.
These aren’t necessarily the baseball stories you might expect to see. They don’t always feature your local big league team or the superstars you’ve been watching all season long. The sport may not be represented at the Major League level in every state, but its impact is still felt everywhere from the Minors to college summer leagues to softball powerhouses and all the way on down to high school ball.
Take the Legion Collegiate Academy Lancers as an example, a high school team in Rock Hill, S.C., a suburb just down I-77 from Charlotte, N.C. Their Senior Night is an especially poignant one, with players taking on-field batting practice thrown by their fathers, and then running the bases one final time with a message playing over the speakers narrated by their mothers, who await them for a warm embrace at home plate. They call it “the last childhood lap before college and adulthood starts.”
It’s stories like these that might otherwise go undetected, and they are the ones this project is attempting to highlight.
That also means digging deep into the past, sometimes traveling all the way back to the 1800s for what is widely recognized as the first baseball game ever played, taking place in New Jersey. Or honoring the many Negro Leaguers who barnstormed their way across the country in the 1930s and ’40s to places like Miami’s Dorsey Park, where legends like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson took the field.
You’ll come across other iconic names you know, like Tim Lincecum or Mickey Mantle, but they won’t be the same old stories you’ve heard before. Did you know the one about Mantle’s first professional homer, which landed in the monkey exhibit at a Kansas zoo? We didn’t think so. And no, we’re not monkeying around.
Then there will be names you might be hearing for the first time, like Joe Bauman, the one-time home run king who owned a gas station just down the road from his home field in Roswell, N.M. Or Gary Redus, the man who spent a summer in Montana with the Billings Mustangs and set a still-standing Minor League batting average record. He has his mom to thank for that.
The journey will take you to some of the most picturesque places you could possibly imagine, from the Appalachian mountain ranges of North Carolina to a purple turf field made of recycled tires in Idaho to a quaint ballpark in Alaska that plays a game every year at midnight ... without lights.
Each of the stories you’ll find here now – and for the next two months leading into Labor Day – are like the red seams of a baseball, threaded together to form the rich history of this sport and, in turn, this country.
And now’s the time to celebrate it.