I Want To Be in That Number
Tempering excitement by setting a realistic budget.
Talking about how much a person gets paid is a longstanding cultural taboo, but it’s something I need to address in a post about sabbatical budgeting. I earn a modest but comfortable salary, something close to the national average. Certainly not lavish, but enough to get by and enjoy some of life’s niceties. Probably not the kind of disposable income to do something wild and audacious like visiting all 30 MLB ballparks in a single season.
Usually a trip like this is something that baseball fans plan to do after retirement. You spend decades working and saving and dreaming of this epic trip, your reward for a lifetime of labor and obligation and hardship.
If my trip were happening, say, 20 years from now, I could save up a small amount every year, put it in an investment account with a nice rate of return and cash out when it’s time to hit the road. The earned interest alone would let me take advantage of some luxurious options without putting a huge strain on my retirement nest egg.1
But my sabbatical leave was approved last August and starts this coming July, so I have to accelerate the schedule just a bit. I’m working on saving roughly a quarter of my comfortable-but-by-no-means-ample annual income to fund two months of vagabond existence.
Budgeting is probably the least sexy part of this voyage, but failing to budget is the surest way to sink the ship. I know I’m not terrible with money, but I also know that, without setting constraints or boundaries, I can turn two months on the road into a financial wound from which I’ll never recover.
So let’s break it all down, shall we?
I have three goals for this sabbatical trip:
Attend a game at all 30 Major League Baseball parks in 2024.
Be a living, breathing human being at the end of it.
Come back to normal life refreshed and refocused.
In service of those goals, I need to spend money on the following:
Tickets to each game
Transportation to get me to each ballpark
Lodging in each city (and places between)
Food and beverage
“Fun stuff”
Miscellaneous expenses
Tickets
There’s a reason why this blog is called “Bleachers and ‘Bleeds”: good seats at most Major League Baseball games aren’t cheap. Even for a lower bowl outfield box seat in most stadiums, I’d be looking at $40-80 each. Multiply that by 30 and it becomes a significant expense for somebody without extravagant means.
So I’m planning on taking in these games from the cheap seats, the outfield bleachers, the nosebleeds, standing room only… wherever the best deal is. Even then, I’m looking at an average of about $25 per game2, or $750 for the whole trip.
I don’t need to be in the front row to have fun at a ballgame. In fact, some of my favorite ballpark visits have been out in the outfield seats and the upper decks with the real fans, like this time that four of us bought the purple foam Charlie Blackmon beards at a Colorado Rockies game and ended up on TV because we’re idiotic man-children.
Transportation
I’m from the Midwest, and it’s well rooted in our tradition that there’s no point in flying somewhere if you can drive there instead. We’re thrifty with our money and tend not to value our time, which is how you end up spending 6 hours in a car and $50 on gas to get to Chicago instead of 90 minutes on a plane and $100 for a ticket.3
Driving 17,000 miles across the country and back means buying a lot of gas. My wife and I own a small SUV that gets about 22 miles per gallon and a compact hatchback that gets roughly 30 mpg. The mileage difference between the two works out to close to a $700 savings if I take the hatchback. Still, I’m looking at over $2,000 just in gas assuming an average $3.50 per gallon, which is just a wild-ass guess considering it’s a summer in an election year (no, the President doesn’t set or control gas prices, but weird things happen depending on who the oil companies want to have the job.)
Cars bring all manner of other expenses too, including tolls, parking and maintenance (17,000 miles means a minimum of three oil changes.) The Pennsylvania Turnpike is the most expensive toll road on the planet, and it sits between me and two of my destinations: New York City and Philadelphia. I spent $25 on an E-Z-Pass transponder: considering how much east coast driving I’ll be doing, this made a lot of sense, not to mention that several states give toll discounts for paying with E-Z-Pass rather than cash or credit.4
Parking near stadiums is an expensive racket to be avoided at all costs. I much prefer to find a cheap lot or even free parking somewhere else in the city, then ride public transit to the ballpark. Instead of shelling out $15-30 to park in a lot near the park, I’ll cut my costs in half by parking near a light rail, streetcar or shuttle bus line (some of which are free to ride on gamedays or all the time.)
All told, my transportation budget for this trip is just a shade under $4,000, though I’m looking for savings opportunities wherever I can find them.
Lodging
Finding a place to put your head down for the night is often the most expensive part of travel. I’m personally budgeting $5,000 for it, as I’m scheduled to spend 50 nights away from home on these travels. Truth is, I might be underbudgeting at $5K, but I have a fair amount of experience in finding deals on hotels and rental properties. I won’t be in any place long enough to rent an Airbnb/VRBO – except the week I’m in southern California waiting for the Dodgers to start their homestand in early August – but I tend to have a good eye for those places too.
As a cost-saving measure, there’s the option of hitting up friends and family whom I haven’t seen in ages to see if I can crash on their couches. On paper, that’s free, but I don’t plan to show up empty handed. If my host is a baseball fan, I’ll gladly add some dollars to my ticket budget above and invite them to come to the game with me. I have connections in probably half of the cities I’m visiting, but most of my friends and cousins are in their 40s like I am and might be over the “punk house” phases of their lives. A lot of them also have kids and aren’t in the regular habit of hosting itinerant freeloaders who call them up on a whim begging and pleading for a place to stay.
So I’ll be sure to give y’all plenty of notice. If it doesn’t work out, hey, no worries. That’s why I made a budget.
Food
In nearly all of my previous travels, I’ve been as excited to explore the local cuisine as I am for the sights and the happenings that brought me to that particular corner of the world. I’ve developed a fascination with food and a very curious palate.
Dining out has the potential to sink my budget if I can’t control my gustatory urges. I’m allotting myself $50 per day for food and drink, or roughly $2,500 in total. There are plenty of opportunities to eat cheaply on the road, but $50 is a particular challenge when considering the price of ballpark concessions. We live in the age of the $7 hot dog and the $12 beer, after all.
To stay within my budget, I may or may not have any food at the ballparks. I’ll definitely get iconic food items like a Dodger Dog in LA and a Fenway Frank in Boston, and I may grab a unique offering like a Hot Doug’s5 sausage at Wrigley Field. By-and-large though, I’m not impressed by the trend toward outlandish ballpark food strictly from a cost/benefit standpoint. I’d be happier to support a small business outside the stadium rather than the corporate concessionaire operating inside.
I’m also planning to keep a cooler in the car stocked with cold cuts and beverages for those long drive stretches between cities. I don’t eat fast food in my everyday life6, and I don’t want to be beholden to them while I’m traveling if I can avoid it. Healthy for the body, healthy for the budget.
That said, there are a few bucket list foods that are on my “eat-tinerary,” budget be damned. Central Texas barbecue is my weakness. Honestly, all barbecue is my weakness. It’s also hard for me to turn down a real New York bagel. Or an Upper Midwest fish fry. Or green chile anything. Yeah, ok, this part’s going to be hard.
Fun Stuff/Miscellaneous Expenses
I’m pretty nostalgic, so I’m going to need a little souvenir from all the ballparks and some of the other stops along the way. It’s hard to put a number on these impulse buys so I need to put some thought into what these little trophies are going to be. Stickers? Pins? Patches? I don’t know… I’m not there yet. I do know it’s not going to be T-shirts. I have too many T-shirts.
“Miscellaneous” is what it is. You never know when you’re going to need another stick of deodorant. You should know how often you’ll need to do laundry. I love a laundromat, even though I haven’t used one in over a decade. Cheap entertainment for one of the travel days on the schedule.
The Bottom Line
All in, I’m looking at somewhere between $12-13K to visit all 30 MLB ballparks in 2024. Since I’m trying to throw this all together on a relatively quick timeline, it means implementing an austerity budget for the first half of 2024. I’m already saying “no” to a lot of fun opportunities that would eat into my trip savings plan. I’ve got a decent credit line if it comes down to that, but I’d rather not be paying this sabbatical off for years: that would defeat the purpose of using the time to relax, have fun and relieve stress if I know that I’m going to suffer for it after the fact.
Will it be a challenge to save all this money in such a short timeframe? You bet. Am I above taking some sponsorship bucks or picking up a side hustle to defray some of these expenses? Jury’s still out. Will I change this Substack to a paid subscription for additional revenue? No way. But if you want to buy me a gallon of gas or an overpriced stadium beer, I’m @fortrecovery on Venmo.
Soundtrack:
Nerd.
$25 per ticket including service fees for buying tickets in advance. These hidden fees are criminal. Some ticketing companies like Ticketmaster have said they would show “all-in” pricing, but even that pledge is dubious and misleading. A recent purchase of a bleacher seat at T-Mobile Park showed a “total price” of $17.75 ($15 ticket plus $2.75 service fee), but the actual charge for the ticket was $21.88 including taxes. At checkout, Ticketmaster said the service fee was $3.03, so they can’t even be trusted to get that part right. Some of this cost can be mitigated by purchasing the ticket directly from the box office on the day of the game. For a few of these stops, however, I’ll need to have tickets secured well in advance in case the game sells out (I’m looking at you, Fenway Park.)
Fun fact: the New Jersey Turnpike doesn’t accept credit cards. Tolls are E-Z-Pass or cash only. My wife and I learned this when we pulled up to a toll booth with no cash and no transponder. The NJ Turnpike Authority’s contingency plan is to have the driver pay the toll online or by mail after the fact. We discovered later that day that we had about $30 worth of rolled coins in the glove compartment. I’m guessing that wouldn’t have passed muster with the toll collector anyway.
Hot Doug’s is my all-time favorite restaurant. Every sausage was like a high-concept gourmet meal inside a bun, and all at a reasonable price. I scoff at waiting more than 30 minutes for a table at any restaurant, but I probably waited in the 1-2 hour Hot Doug’s line a dozen or more times. When Doug announced the closing of his beloved “sausage superstore” in 2014, I was crushed. A few years later, he set up shop at Wrigley Field. My friend and I got tickets for a Cubs game in 2022 and got to the park early just to grab some hoity-toity sausages. I was crushed again when I learned that only people with bleacher seat tickets were able to access the Hot Doug’s stand. Long story short: I know which section I’ll be sitting in this summer.
Except for Raising Cane’s, and even then, that’s maybe once every other month or so. Sometimes you just have to scratch an itch. Sponsor me, chicken daddy?