Round the Bases on a Bucket List Tour of All 30 MLB Stadiums
Meet the ballpark chasers, an ambitious group of travelers who dedicate their summers—and often their lives—to seeking serenity in the grandstands.
The crack of the bat. The roar of the crowd. The scent of warm hot dogs and spilled beer. The pure elation of jumping from your seat, hand shielding your eyes from the sun as you watch a fly ball clear the outfield wall. For the country’s 171.1 million Major League Baseball fans, those sounds, smells, and sights come together each year to form their summer sanctuary: the almighty ballpark.
As with most religions, the overwhelming majority of casual followers are content to worship at the altar of home runs and shutouts just once or twice a year, filing into the pews on important holidays or special occasions when fellow congregationalists come to town. But for a select group of particularly devout fans, the ultimate show of devotion is making a pilgrimage—30 of them, to be exact. These are the ballpark chasers, starry-eyed travelers on a quest to honor America’s pastime by visiting every active MLB stadium on the map.
It’s a community Craig B. Landgren knows well. He’s the president and founder of Ballpark Chasers, a social-networking website he started more than 15 years ago. A platform for all things baseball tourism, the site serves as a resource for aspiring chasers, connecting them with fellow pilgrims via blogs, message boards, travel guides, and more. Between its onsite users and very popular private Facebook group, the community has amassed more than 90,000 members to date.
“I grew up in Colorado, so while I didn’t have baseball for most of my childhood, I’ve always been a real big fan,” says Landgren. “My first Major League ballpark was Kauffman Stadium [in Kansas City], and as a kid, seeing the big fountains in the outfield, I got the itch to want to see them all. With baseball, every ballpark is so unique.”
If you think sitting through a minimum of 30 baseball games spread across 15 US states and Canada sounds like a slog, you wouldn’t be wrong. Baseball is notoriously slow—it’s a sport where players spend half their time standing around chewing on sunflower seeds and where each of the regular season’s 162 matches can easily stretch past the three-hour mark. But for the pious, that almost meditative pacing is part of what makes baseball—and the act of ballpark chasing—so special.
Baseball is a lot of things to a lot of people. It’s a game of statistics, percentages, and personalities as well as the subject of countless films, books, plays, and articles. It’s romantic, uplifting, and often heartbreaking. And for the indoctrinated, it’s universally entwined with history, both on a national and personal level.
“My mom is a huge baseball fan and so is her mother, so it was passed down through my maternal side,” says Asonta Benetti, an Arizona-based freelance writer who, along with her partner, has been ballpark chasing since 2021. “Who doesn’t want to spend a drowsily warm Sunday afternoon watching a game? What smells better than the grass and dirt of Opening Day?”
When Benetti met her partner, a shared love of baseball brought them together. Today, that same love motivates their travels. “My better half and I are both huge baseball fans; baseball connected us when we first started dating because we both were so passionate about the sport,” she says. “During 2020, while thinking of all the things we couldn’t do, he brought up the idea to start hitting all 30 parks.”
The couple has been to seven stadiums so far, kicking things off with a 10-day road trip carefully designed to knock off five different ballparks in one go. “That was a fun trip to plan—we had to download all the schedules and do some work in Excel to hit all five stadiums with enough time to drive between each,” she recalls. Since then, however, they’ve scaled back a bit, adopting a quality-over-quantity ethos that allows them to really enjoy the game while also keeping an eye out for “opportunities to squeeze in parks during other trips.”
Landgren, who has 17 ballparks under his belt, mirrors Benetti’s philosophy, relishing the pleasure of attending a game instead of buying into a mad dash to catch ’em all. “I met a guy that did them all in 23 days—he set the world record,” he says. “Some people are so obsessed. For me, anytime I travel, I really like to see the city and do the tourist stuff. I’ll see a couple games but take in the sights, too.”
To make things even sweeter, Landgren visited five of his 17 parks accompanied by members of the online community he founded. “I got a lot of feedback that people wanted to meet up when they traveled,” he says. “So every summer for five years, we met at a different ballpark around the country.”
Landgren’s fellow chasers shared his holistic approach. “We would do some sort of tourist activity within that city,” he continues. “For example, that first year in Denver, we went to the National Ballpark Museum and did a private tour, then to a restaurant to have lunch, and then took in the game that evening.”
Just as there are different approaches to organizing a ballpark chase, there are differing opinions about what exactly qualifies as a visit. When Reddit user raymalaspina asked others on the r/mlb Subreddit about their “‘rules’ when chasing all 30 stadiums,” he was met with an onslaught of answers, ranging from food and drink musts (“Gotta get a hot dog”) to mandatory souvenir purchases like mini bats, ball caps, fridge magnets, and team baseballs.
Even Major League Baseball itself has gotten in on the action. In 2010, ballpark chaser Tim Parks found himself on a dual mission to visit all 50 states and 30 MLB stadiums. Unsatisfied with his hodge-podge collection of ballpark memorabilia—“There was never one specific thing that I purchased, just something that proved I was there, which to be honest, I could have bought on the internet,” he writes—Parks drummed up the idea for an MLB-specific booklet that could be stamped like a passport inside each stadium. Major League Baseball agreed to license their name for the project and stock the stamps, and thus the official MLB BallPark Pass-Port was born.
Not every chaser adheres to such a straightforward playbook. In fact, a core aspect of this particular pursuit is that everyone’s approach is different. “Our motto is ‘Your chase, your rules,’” says Landgren, whose personal must is “always getting a good local beer and one of the favorite ballpark foods.” Bettini also incorporates a drink into her routine, but it’s really all about the seats. “We buy lower-level seats out in the right field each time so we can compare the view from each park as fairly as possible,” she says.
The one thing most chasers can agree on is that you must witness some actual gameplay. “I have to take in a regular-season game,” says Landgren. “If it gets rained out or whatnot, as long as I got to see some baseball played within that ballpark, that’s good for me.”
In other words, the game is what matters. And just about any game will do. One key element that sets ballpark chasers apart is their loyalty not to a specific team but to baseball itself—a foreign concept when it comes to other sports. Imagine a die-hard New York Giants supporter not only voluntarily attending a Philadelphia Eagles home game but loving every second of it. This scenario plays out in baseball stadiums all over the country.
You may also like
“I had season tickets for the Diamondbacks for years, and it’s a nice stadium but probably not my favorite,” says Benetti of her favorite team’s digs. “I have to admit that Wrigley Field managed to burrow into my heart. The energy in the bleachers is really incredible—if you love baseball, you have to appreciate that stadium.”
Landgren, a Cincinnati Reds fan through and through, agrees. “Wrigley and Fenway have always been my favorites,” he says. “Even though they’re not the new fancy parks with all the thrills, being within those ballparks and just taking in all the history really struck me.”
Despite its 150-year-old roots, Major League Baseball isn’t immune to change. In addition to recent controversial moves like instituting wider bases, pitch timers, and other tweaks in an attempt to make the game more exciting, stadiums themselves are constantly coming and going. It can be tough for ballpark chasers to contend with, especially when considering whether to limit themselves to active parks or count a beloved retired stadium toward their grand total.
“Some people do a total count, some people never go over 30,” says Landgren. “I won’t go over 30, so my count is 17. But in another year or two, it’ll go down to 16 when the A’s lose their ballpark and move.”
Having to start over whenever a team breaks ground on a new home field might sound like a setback, but if you’re passionate about such a slow and steady game, extending your pilgrimage to include another stadium is just part of the fun. “In a perfect world where money’s no object, maybe I could take an entire summer off, get an RV, and go around the country with my family seeing all 30 parks,” Landgren muses. “But that’s not my thing. I’m fine taking my time.”