Matt and Carolyn LaWell Embark on 26,000 Mile Baseball Road Trip
The road from Tampa Bay to Pensacola is a long one – 444 miles up U.S. 19 and then onto I-10 as it hugs Florida’s gulf coast and traces the panhandle. Go too far and you’ll wind up on the previously oil stained beaches of Gulf Shores and inevitably in one of the rocking chairs that take residence on South Alabama porches and wait on South Alabama breezes.
Eventually, Matt and Carolyn LaWell will brave the back country roads in Alabama that funnel into the more populated streets of places like Birmingham and Huntsville, but for now they’ll burn through the miles with Florida still in mind. They’re only two weeks into this winding journey through America’s Minor League stadiums that, if uncoiled, would wrap the earth with the tread marks of their Honda Element, but routine has already become paramount and there isn’t much time for rocking chairs.
Ideas birthed like gypsy children on dorm room floors rarely come to fruition. However, occasionally dreamers are paired with ambition and things have a way of unfurling. When time and circumstance can lend a hand, trips like the one Matt and Carolyn are on aren’t nearly as far-fetched as the millions of other stillborn thoughts that come from those carpet and linoleum covered expanses you can find on the floors of college housing across the country.
“Carolyn and I actually met in our first class at Ohio University. It was an 8 am Spanish class, so it was sort of amazing that we were even awake, and then we were talking in Spanish, so you’re half-awake and speaking Spanish,” Matt said. “We became friends and I eventually came up with (the trip) when I was 19 years old in the summer of 2003. I was just looking on a map and, like adventurous teenagers do, I wanted to plan a road trip.”
The two friends would eventually become husband and wife, but it would take nine years and countless sacrifices by both Matt and Carolyn for them to make this dream come true. They downsized from a townhouse to a small one-bedroom apartment and gave up cable, scrimping and saving with A Minor League Season in mind.
It took 18 months of tireless planning before they would settle on a 119 city odyssey covering 26,000 miles. There was also the endless frustration of building a website, but with the support of friends and family the journey began on April 5 in Jacksonville, Florida.
For two weeks they criss-crossed the peninsula, visiting ballparks that served as temporary homes to the game’s biggest stars in the weeks prior to their arrival. Long days gave way to restless nights, but from one day to the next, Matt and Carolyn recounted stories of their trip.
Matt has a hot dog fetish, and the mystery meat filled casings have been the subject of multiple blog posts. Carolyn has pegged herself as the tour manager and the plights of the 26,000 mile road trip have been well documented in her writing.
However, the people they’ve met along the way have been the driving force of this adventure, and as they rumble up U.S. Route 19, fading in and out of cell phone service, it’s the people whose stories they’ve told that become the topic of conversation.
“We’ve talked to a groundskeeper who got into the game because he loved it, and now he can’t stand to watch more than a couple of games a year,” Matt said. “We found a food and beverage guy who is also the No. 2 in stadium operations for his team.
“He gave up a career in the NFL, with the Seattle Seahawks, because he loved minor league baseball and he wanted to own a team when he was in high school. Now he basically wants to run the team and eventually his own restaurant and I don’t think you get to meet many characters like that in the Majors . . . This guy just gets to have fun and develop ridiculous hot dogs wrapped in bacon and covered in pulled pork and onion straws.”
***
As husband and wife, Matt and Carolyn have an appreciation for storytelling that goes back to their days in Athens, Ohio. They both majored in magazine journalism at Ohio University, so, in some ways, it serves as part of the foundation that their relationship was built upon, and make no mistake about it, if you’re spending five months in a car with someone, that foundation has to be strong.
Even though the trip was ultimately the brain child of Matt’s college dream, Carolyn was always supportive, despite the fact that it meant putting things at home on hold for the time being.
“It didn’t take long for me to get on board with this idea at all,” Carolyn said. “I think the reaction at the time was, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’ We had to push it off for a bit, and there was a time period where it looked like something that we were going to do, but we weren’t sure exactly when we were going to do it.”
They received unwavering support from friends and family, and with their help, a plan started taking shape in the summer of 2009.
“A few years ago, when we thought that maybe we would get to do the trip in 2010, we got our parents together and we all went out together and we told them,” she said. “Right away, they were all very excited about it. Everybody has just been so helpful and encouraging. We’re out here and we’re doing this and it is exciting, but back home we’re missing cousins being born, weddings, and all those other things in life that we would really want to be there for.”
Keeping with the schedule has been Carolyn’s burden for the last few weeks now. As Matt dove through filing cabinets at the MiLB headquarters, Carolyn kept tabs on time, knowing that they didn’t have a lot of it.
“I think having two people who kind of balance each other out and offset each other in certain ways is ideal,” Matt said. “Every really successful road trip that I’ve ever read about, with the exception of a few, has really been two people. Steinbeck was an exception, although his didn’t really end well . . . most of the great road trips dating all the way back to Lewis and Clark have been at least two people.”
Today (April 23), Matt and Carolyn are in Mobile, Alabama, watching the Baybears take on the Jacksonville Suns. First pitch is scheduled for 7:05 pm, but the majority of the legwork will probably be done in the hours leading up to game time.
There is a story to be found somewhere in this web of people who make these nightly productions possible, and Matt and Carolyn do whatever they can to find it in the short period of time they have to search for them. They’ll speak with players and ticket takers, coaches and vendors, and then they’ll pass what they’ve learned on via their website, AMinorLeagueSeason.com.
Often times, the tales they tell have a way of only vaguely relating to baseball, but that’s not surprising considering the circumstances. This trip is as much about the roads traveled and the people met as it is about legging out a double or hitting the cutoff man, if not more. And, quite honestly, baseball lends itself incredibly to that.
Our nation’s relationship with baseball has been polychromic. We love it unconditionally, but we’ve been having an affair with football for the better part of the last half-century. Yet, despite the fact that at various times throughout history we’ve become somewhat inattentive, baseball has been a fixture of our summer afternoons and nights for nearly 150 years.
It’s the setting for many of our greatest stories.
And while the Majors are the gravitational center of the baseball universe, as a country we relate to the plight of the Minors more wholeheartedly. The people are more reflective of the typical American, and as writers, that’s what made this the right idea to take from dream to reality for Matt and Carolyn LaWell.
“From a storytelling standpoint, the people you meet in the Minors – take nothing away from the Majors, which has a lot of great characters – but the Minors are just so rich with character that it was almost easy to say yes to doing a season of Minor League Baseball,” Matt said.
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The Grand Army of the Republic Highway (aka U.S. Route 6) is the longest stretch of continuous highway in the United States, stretching from Bishop, California, to Provincetown, Massachusetts. This includes a 16 mile stretch that essentially starts in my front yard and ends a couple of blocks away from Silver Cross Field in Joliet, Illinois.
An outcropping of brick that pops out of this concrete jungle across the street from where the Metra takes commuters to and from Chicago every day, Silver Cross was built in 2002 and was the home of the Joliet Jackhammers for nine years before they became financially insolvent.
Now it is the home of the Slammers, a reference to the famed prisons of Will County. They’re the defending champions of the Frontier League, an association of independently operated franchises with no affiliation to Major League Baseball.
The road trip is considerably shorter for me than it is for Matt and Carolyn LaWell, but in the dozens of times I’ve made that drive down U.S. Route 6, the stories have seemed to trump the box score as same as they do for Matt in Port Charlotte or Carolyn in Port St. Lucie.
Thousands of fans congregate for fireworks on Fridays or cheap beer on “Thirsty” Thursdays. The baseball is fun, but it’s just a part of the setting, whereas in the MLB it’s the main attraction.
Matt and Carolyn’s trip won’t take them to Silver Cross Field – although I do hope to catch up with them in Peoria in June. However, their own story is just as interesting as the ones they’ll tell this summer.
It’s inspiring because they made the leap from reverie to reality. They’re out there chronicling the day-to-day operations of one large piece of Americana – Minor League Baseball.
“We made the conscious decision to move forward from, ‘I want to do this’ to ‘We’re actually doing this,’” Matt said. “Having that mentality – that mode of thinking – where not only was this a good idea, but we were actually going to go through with it. That was the most important step.”
Matt and Carolyn LaWell are trying to figure out what Minor League Baseball means today. What sort of significance does it have in the grander scheme of American sub-cultures?
Apparently somewhere between Jacksonville and Toledo, and on the 26,000 miles and change of roads traveled between the two, there is A Minor League Season’s worth of answers to be found.
You can read the detailed exploits of Matt and Carolyn LaWell on their website, AMinorLeagueSeason.com. You can also follow them on Twitter @AMinorLgSeason.
Ryan Wooden covers golf and SEC football for www.RantSports.com. You can follow him on Twitter @ryan_wooden and like him on facebook at Ryan Wooden- Rant Sports.
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