In the wake of all the news about North Battleford product Andrew Albers and his elevation to the major leagues with the Minnesota Twins, I ended up going on a baseball vacation this summer.
No, I didn't see Albers in Minnesota. Instead, I went to Colorado.
How I settled on Colorado for my road trip was interesting. In fact, I had struggled for days to figure out where I wanted to go.
We ended up putting up a map in the newsroom. I was blindfolded, and placed a pin on the map to select at random where I was going to go.
I'm not making this up, this really was what happened. As it turned out, the pin landed right on top of the state of Colorado, which just so happened to also have a major league baseball team.
So, in early August, I headed out on a five-day road journey through Montana, Wyoming and to the metro Denver area, where I planned to take in a Colorado Rockies baseball game and sights along the way.
My first day was spent driving to Montana. I headed off from Billings on the second day, and stopped at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.
That was the famous place where the U.S. 7th Cavalry led by Lt. Col. George Custer and the forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho fought the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as some call it, Custer's Last Stand.
It was a massive battle in which Custer and his forces were badly defeated in 1876. It was pretty quiet, though, when I took a look at the place. I looked at the field where Custer had his last stand, and I toured the monuments and the museum.
I didn't stay too long, as I wanted to hit the road and get to Colorado by the end of the day.
I travelled through Sheridan, Casper and Cheyenne in Wyoming, navigating through all kinds of road repair work and listening to bad sports talk radio the whole time.
When I finally crossed the state line into Colorado, it was non-stop traffic jams and one populated area after another through Fort Collins and Loveland into the Denver suburbs. One of the impressive sights near the highway was a big Budweiser brewing plant in Fort Collins. This was "civilization" all right, vastly different from the wilderness I'd seen much of the trip.
Getting back to the real reason for my journey - the ball game.
I went down to Coors Field in downtown Denver to buy my tickets for the game between the Colorado Rockies and Pittsburgh Pirates. I got upper deck tickets at the very reasonable price of 24 bucks - better than what you'd pay for Riders tickets at Mosaic Stadium.
Coors Field was built back in 1995 during the boom in "retro-themed" stadium building, a boom that was spurred on after the construction of Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Coors Field may be a new ballpark, but it was designed to look like it was built in the 1920s or '30s.
Its design seemed inspired by Brooklyn's Ebbets Field, which is long gone. In any case, you feel like you are at a real baseball stadium - especially compared to Rogers Centre in Toronto, which I always found to have more of an "arena" atmosphere.
Because I was at a major league ballpark, I made sure to grab a hot dog and enjoyed following the out-of-town scores posted on the scoreboard. That proved more interesting than the score in the game on the field.
Going into the game the Rockies had been on a nine-game losing streak and were now playing one of the top teams in baseball, the Pirates. So perhaps it's not surprising the final score was 10-1.
What is surprising, though, is that it was the Rockies who were on the winning end of the score. They got four runs in the first and five in the second and that was pretty much the ball game.
That just shows you that on any given day in baseball, any team can win.
I noticed Coors Field was a good anchor for other shops, restaurants and businesses in that downtown area. The area was packed with activity after the game was over, and I think it's a good example of how a baseball team can be an economic driver for the other things that go on in a downtown.
The trip got me thinking, why don't we have any pro baseball teams in Saskatchewan?
It would do wonders for Saskatoon's downtown, especially, to have a baseball stadium and a team, even if it were only the minor leagues. Pro baseball would be a fun outing for people and get their minds off of the Riders.
I'm also thinking, what about the Battlefords? Lots of cities in Saskatchewan have teams in the collegiate-level Western Major Baseball League.
That league's a pretty big deal in places like Melville, Weyburn and Swift Current. Yet here we are in the Battlefords, home of the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame, with no representation in the WMBL.
People here really ought to consider renovations and upgrades to the seats at Beaver Lions Stadium, and attract a WMBL team here. Heck, we all hear about how we should provide options to get young people off the streets. With all this talk about Andrew Albers, there's also a real renaissance in baseball interest around here.
The WMBL is exactly what we need here in the Battlefords to fill the sports void until the North Stars return in September.
Is it hockey season already? Wow, summer went by so fast.
