Real friends do keep score.
Mark Niesse and Erin McClam met in 1997, as undergraduates at the University of Georgia and lifelong fans of the Atlanta Braves.
Target Field, August 2010.
Over the years, at dozens of baseball games, we’ve exchanged ideas on how to pack the most information about the play into a tiny box. And we’re still learning. It goes beyond just writing down “6-3” on a grounder to short: How do you connect the two outs in a double play? (We use parentheses.) How do you differentiate a garden-variety walk from an intentional one? (Still up for debate.) Keeping score together makes going to the game more fun. And it certainly helps to have someone else around to keep an eye on the action when one of us wants to grab a hot dog.
Besides being obsessive scorekeepers, we are on the ultimate baseball quest — to see all 30 major league ballparks. It began in 2004 with a travel weekend in the Northeast: Games at Shea Stadium and Citizens Bank Park, plus, by sheer luck, the rain-delayed, brawling marathon at Fenway that turned the season around for the 2004 Boston Red Sox.
Since then, our trip has become a fixture of the summer. Together, we’re up to 19 parks, including three that have since been replaced. That leaves 14 active big-league parks that we have yet to see. Our target for celebrating the end of the journey: Cooperstown, N.Y., in the summer of 2016. You can check out a Google Map of our adventures here.
