The authors describe their travelogue as “30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever.” Visiting so many major-league ballparks in such a short period required writing an algorithm to create the optimal itnerary, which still provided plenty of travel challenges and adventures.
“In any game, an astute observer can learn a great deal by paying careful attention to the Jumbotron. Knowledge comes often in the form of statistics or trivia about each player, or perhaps a summary of a memorable game played exactly 20 years prior. But a game at Nationals Park was about more than baseball. It was about educating the electorate. For example, who knew the word ‘wonk’ was ‘know’ spelled backwards, implying that a wonk was someone who knew things forward and backwards? We were not aware of this, and were not expecting to learn this fact at a baseball game. In no other ballpark would the Jumbotron be ceded to a political science professor to give minilessons. In D.C., where the city industry was ‘civics class,’ it was natural that the mascots were eleven-foot-tall presidents named George, Tom, Bill, Teddy, and Abe. The fans adored the government references, apparently finding nothing odd about past presidents joining the echelons of other mascot luminaries like the green blob from the Red Sox or the green blob from the Phillies.”
