Details, details...
Reading is fundamental, or something.
I don’t know what kids get taught in school these days, but I remember taking a quiz in the second or third grade that was intended to impart a very valuable lesson.
Not to brag or anything, but I was probably the smartest kid in my elementary school classes. I mean, we did grow up in close proximity to multiple industrial chemical spill sites, so the bar was pretty low.
Imagine my shock when a bunch of my classmates were turning their quizzes in before I was even halfway done. Did I miss a reading assignment that left me unprepared? Was this quiz some kind of common knowledge that I was supposed to have learned already?
I pushed my brain and my pencil as fast as I could and handed the paper back to Sister Mary Ann.1 I wasn’t the last to turn in the quiz, but I was perplexed why school was particularly challenging for me that day when it hadn’t been in the past.
Once the final student completed the test, our teacher returned them to us with stunning speed. As she handed the paper back to me, it was accompanied by a click of the tongue and a disapproving shake of the habit. At the top, a big, red “F” drove a dagger into my gifted but prideful eight-year-old heart.
“Some of you are surely disappointed with your grade,” Sister Mary Ann bellowed to the class. “I suggest you re-read the instructions on your quiz sheet.”
Put your name at the top of the paper, then hand it in to your teacher.
Everything that followed was irrelevant, even if it was answered correctly. Most of my classmates got an “A” for handing in a sheet with their name on it and nothing else. My failure to read the directions and my failure to pay attention to the details resulted in, well, failure.
As much as I’d like to say that lesson stuck with me for my entire life, I have to admit that there are times when the sting of my childhood failure has been buried in favor of expedience or even hubris. I’ve read enough stereo manuals translated from German and IKEA furniture instructions with no words at all to know that sometimes the best intended communication still gets lost in translation. Other times, I lean on experience and intuition to speed a process along without following directions to the letter. I also suspect that I might have a hint of ADHD contributing to the problem: a few of my family members have been diagnosed in their adulthoods, and we did all grow up near toxic chemical spills, after all.
In a lot of cases, I can make a cavalier relationship with instructions and details work for me. We live in a Ctrl-Z “undo” world where most actions are reversible and the consequences of a little mistake aren’t dire. I’m a trade association administrator by occupation, not the rocket scientist I thought I wanted to be when Sister Mary Ann was dishing out life lessons. Making a typo in an email isn’t going to send Major Tom careening off into outer space.
I don’t like making mistakes – it’s way more efficient to get things right the first time – and I tend to beat myself up a little bit when I do fuck up. Part of my career burnout experience was letting small failures fester and turn into a massive infection of doubt that eventually crippled my self-confidence. Therapy has helped me correctly assign stakes to mistakes, so I can realize in the moment that nobody’s going to get eaten by a lion because I misspelled someone’s name on a document. It’s also been a good reminder that preparation is the #1 prescription to combat anxiety2 and ward off the fear, anger and depression that can follow.
When I was originally sketching out my ballpark road trip, I was careful to make sure I wasn’t making a challenging journey any harder. I scheduled extra days to accommodate long western drives. I avoided routing that would force me to travel overnight to catch a day game in another city. I made note of Major League Baseball’s penchant for neutral site games off the beaten path or outside the U.S. entirely.3
The first draft of the adventure had me going to 27 ballparks from June 29 – Aug. 30, skipping only New York’s Citi Field, Seattle’s T-Mobile Park and Coors Field in Denver. I had been to the latter two ballparks and just resigned myself to visiting Citi Field for the first time sometime in 2025 or later.
But that doesn’t make for a very compelling story, does it? I mean, if I’m already going to 27 ballparks in a single season, why not figure out how to hit all 30?
So I consulted the Mets, Mariners and Rockies schedules and figured out how to make it work. Memorial Day weekend looked like a great opportunity to drive east, take in a game at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, then carry on to New York City for the Mets-Giants series with ample time to drive home on a holiday Monday.
I knew that Colorado and Seattle4 would each be a challenge, being isolated, far-flung destinations. I also knew that my budget would likely dictate that I try to visit both ballparks on the same trip, so I needed to schedule it for dates when they were both going to be at home (or at least when one team was ending a homestand and the other started one the following day.) It would also preferably have to be on a weekend, since I do still actually have to work a regular job until my sabbatical starts. With those parameters in place, my options were:
Friday, April 26 – Sunday, April 28
Friday, May 10 – Sunday, May 12
Friday, June 14 – Sunday, June 16
The May dates were immediately ruled out due to a work commitment. The June dates are too close to when my big trip starts, and I didn’t want to lose any weekends to do any last minute prep. With April 26-28 being the winning dates, I got to work booking flights, securing hotels and buying game tickets.
Flights to and from my home base in Columbus, Ohio looked reasonably priced, with an assist from my wife who tipped me off to Costco selling $500 Southwest Airlines gift cards for $450. I figured I’d catch an early morning flight to Seattle on April 26, book a hotel near the airport where I could drop off my bag, then take the light rail line into the city for the Mariners game that night. After the game, I’d head back to the hotel for a couple hours of sleep, amble over to the airport in the morning for a flight to Denver, light rail into downtown to a hotel, catch the Rockies game Saturday night, then fly home on Sunday morning. A whirlwind trip, no doubt, but it’d get the job done.
Just one problem: the Rockies aren’t playing at Coors Field on Saturday, April 27. They’re the home team on the schedule, yes, but the game is being played in Mexico City. I didn’t click through to confirm the venue. By the time I realized my oversight, I had already booked three flights, one hotel night in Seattle and bought a bleacher seat ticket for the Mariners Friday night tilt. Sister Mary Ann wept.
A few months ago, a mistake like that would’ve eaten me alive. I’d sulk and stew and wonder why I even bothered trying. I’d allow a moment of failure pollute my entire sense of self-worth. I’d tell myself that I was too dumb to deserve happiness. I’d let the additional stress of having to fix the mistake consume me.
It’s not even that this situation – or any other event that would set me off – was anything significant in and of itself, but the cumulative, unresolved stress that has been building up for years wore down my brain’s ability to assess, process and react to stimuli in a reasonable manner. Logic, empathy, intuition, learned experience, patience… it all goes out the window when your brain starts to operate as if everything is a threat.
After months of working on re-tuning my responses to stress, seeing the words “Mexico City” on the Rockies ticket page elicited little more than an “oh shit” that slipped out between chuckles. I quickly realized the minimal consequences of my mistake, namely, that I’d have to rearrange some flights. As luck would have it, the Rockies were playing a real home game the day before I planned to be in Seattle, so instead of flying Columbus to Seattle to Denver to Columbus, I’d bump the schedule up one day and go to Denver first. No fuss, no muss, other than asking permission5 for an additional comp day off work.
One fun logistical wrinkle: the Rockies game on Thursday, April 25 starts at 1:10 p.m. local time. To save a few bucks on pricy Denver hotels, I decided to treat this game as a long layover: I booked a 7:10 flight from Denver to Seattle and extended my hotel stay there by one night. So that day I’m out my front door at 4 a.m. for a 5:30 flight from Columbus to Denver, then the connecting flight lands in Seattle at 9:05 p.m. PDT. Hopefully I’m tucked in to my hotel bed by 10 p.m., some 21 hours, three time zones, two plane rides, two train rides and one baseball game later.
It sounds ambitious, maybe even impossible, but it’s not significantly harder than what I was already planning to do before I realized my mistake. I was already going to take a 5:30 a.m. flight from Columbus to Seattle, now I’ll just go to Denver instead. I was already going to have to hop on an early flight from Seattle to Denver, now I’ll just fly the opposite route the night before and I can sleep in a little bit the next day. The return flight is a little longer, but I now have the entire following day to recuperate before getting back to work.
See? Ctrl-Z. Undo. No big deal. But I’m definitely double checking the rest of the schedule now to keep the nuns off my back.
Soundtrack:
CD 92.9 FM: A few weeks ago, Columbus, Ohio’s independently-owned alternative radio station announced they were shutting down at the end of January. I was privileged to be a very small part of the 33-year CD 92.9 story as a partner and manager of the Big Room Bar: the live music venue, neighborhood watering hole and rock & roll museum located directly above the radio station’s air studio. While my time there was just a brief couple of years, I was fortunate to get to know the passionate, creative and friendly folks who made CD 92.9 not just a radio station, but a community in and of itself in central Ohio.
I’ve lived in Columbus for about 20 years now and I’ve seen this city change significantly over that time, for better and worse. No matter what derogatory opinions I may have about our city, the commercial radio business or the concept of “alternative” music, I can say one thing definitively: when CD 92.9 leaves the airwaves at 12:01 a.m. on February 1, 2024, Columbus, Ohio is going to be a lot less cool than it is right now.
Please support the people and things that make your community better.
Names have been changed to protect the righteous.
Drugs are good too. I’m not here to knock safely administered pharmaceuticals when they actually help. I’m just not at that point in my journey (yet).
Regular season series will be played in Seoul, Mexico City and London this year, as well as single games in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (in conjunction with the Little League World Series) and Birmingham, Alabama at Rickwood Field, the oldest professional ballpark in the U.S. (built in 1910, former home of the Birmingham Black Barons and the minor league Birmingham Barons, among others.)
Before MLB started scheduling games in other countries, the Seattle Mariners regularly logged the most travel miles of any ball club, due solely to their geographic location.
Forgiveness.