This picture is from one of my favorite places I’ve been - the dugout at PNC Park in Pittsburgh.

(Sunday Paper, Year VIII, Issue 24)

Welcome to The City Series!

I was thinking about having some writing where I can occasionally put a couple of Sunday Papers in the bank for the summer without having to sit down and write a new one each week but also without completely mailing it in and either skipping a week or having something completely out of sync with what I usually do.

Since I’m looking to lighten the load on those weeks because (spoiler alert) there will be some traveling this summer, I thought maybe it should be travel oriented.

Thus, the City Series - where every once in a while (or maybe more often than that?) I will re-visit (in writing) a city I’ve been to for some reason or another.

Most of the cities around the country I’ve been to (another spoiler alert - other than a weekend in Quebec City I’ve never left the country) have been because of a trip to a ballpark…so I thought to kick things off we’d quickly touch on the Major League Baseball cities I haven’t been to.

Haha. Imagine I listed all of the cities in the country I haven’t been to? (Side note - that made me wonder how many cities there actually are in the country. Do you know? I’ll let you guess and I’ll give the answer at the end of this section.)

We haven’t done as many ballpark trips in recent years as we used to, so these numbers have been kind of stagnant for a long time. But we did hit Atlanta last year, and I realized as I went to the Mets-Blue Jays game last week (in New York) that Toronto is the only city from the American League and National League East divisions that I haven’t been to. (And that’s not even an American city, now that I think of it, so I’ve been to all of the ‘East’ cities in the United States.) But there are also cities like Detroit and San Francisco, where I’ve been to the city but not gone to a ballgame.

So, where haven’t I been?

As things currently stand, picking from Major League Baseball, you will not be reading about:

Toronto, Ontario
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Kansas City, Missouri
Arlington, Texas
Anaheim, California (though they call themselves Los Angeles)
St. Louis, Missouri
Denver, Colorado

So all told, that’s not bad. There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball, and 28 cities. (Counting Anaheim, I guess. Chicago and New York each have two teams.) I’ve been to 21 of those 28 cities. And again, not all of those ballparks. (Miami is another one where I’ve been to the city but not the park.)

So who knows what will happen as the City Series unfolds - maybe something will develop and I’ll add another ballpark and another city.

But for now all of our summer plans involve repeat city trips.

And of course, for me, it all culminates with a return trip to Chicago.

So as I train and travel and make repeated trips to New York for the Mets, I hope you enjoy the (yeah, it’ll be more than occasional) trips down memory lane as I re-visit some of the places I’ve been.

And, don’t worry, I’ll certainly be popping in every so often with real-time updates on this summer’s travel and the training too. (There are, according to a quick Google search, about 108,000 cities in the United States.)

What I’ve Been Enjoying

I wanted to write about this last week but then I felt the need to defend Ted Lasso and figured this wasn’t going anywhere…plus we can give it some renewed heat this week after what I’m sure was an overwhelming first-week response.

Matt was interviewed on the Basic Folk podcast and it was a lovely conversation and the hosts said some really nice things about him and his music and that always shows good taste in my book. You can find the interview here.

Notes

*That picture at the top of the post is from our ballpark tour of the Pirates’ ballpark in Pittsburgh. I wrote this about the trip I took there back in 2016 - the eighth edition of this current iteration of the Sunday Paper.

*There’s a link in that post to the previous iteration of the Sunday Paper. It reminds me that there were three iterations of the Sunday Paper. That link doesn’t work anymore, so one of those iterations, I think, is totally gone from the internet.

*I am not going to let the Mets ruin my summer…but they are doing their best to do so.

*It feels good to be in the thick of training again. 8 miles on Saturday for the first long run of my training cycle. And if you’re following along on the Instagram account, you got a sneak peek of a new running challenge in effect for this training period.

*How do I follow your Instagram account/the other social media accounts I should keep tabs on for you, John? Well, I’m so glad you asked. The links can be found at the buttons below.