No Worries Tour 1992

Preparing for a trip around the country circa 1992 took a little legwork. Al Gore's invention would have come in handy. It's not like you can just jump in the car and show up in Oakland because you were just in San Francisco and hope there's a game that day. We found a database of every Major League Team and actually mailed them a letter about our quest. We thought it was a fairly novel concept at the time and so we requested VIP service (or at least 3 free tickets into the game). Surprisingly, about half the teams wrote back to say they had set aside three tix for the game we wanted. That was good enough for us.

We contacted just about everyone we knew that lived near any of the stadiums (within 100 miles). We anticipated camping in the cities where we had no contacts. Keep in mind, this was a low-budget four month trip - no hotels. We did rent an Oldsmobile Bravada (who wouldn't?) so as to not put any additional wear and tear on our 10 year old Honda Accord. Plus we needed the extra room for all the CD's we brought with us (an iPod would have come in handy).

So it was my brother Jase, my cousin Sem and I. Sem and I were almost 25 and Jase was 22. The assigned seating was that I had shotgun and one of the other two could drive. I mean someone had to be able to change the CD's every few minutes, and plus, I was good at it. Somehow Sem's country CD's always got buried under stuff in the way back and Jase could never reach them...

Our agenda for each game required that we get to the stadium when it opened, which was usually two hours before game time. We watched BP, sampled a Hot Dog and a pretzel.

Our trial run was the May 31st game at the Kingdome featuring Randy Johnson vs. Roger Clemens. We didn't expect anything better than the last seats in the outfield from the M's - so when they gave us seats in Row 9 behind home plate, in front of former Sonic's great Jack Sikma, we were truly amazed!

A Griffey homer (his 9th of the season) accounted for the only run of the game for the M's. Kevin Mitchell - who was great for the Giants but terrible for us - faced Rocket for the first time and grounded out to second base. We call that a "Bradley", in honor of former backup catcher Scott Bradley (a disgrace to the #9) who had a knack for hitting every ball to second base. M's lost 7-1. Anxious to get one final good nights rest, we headed home in anticipation of our long drive to San Francisco in the morning.