Josh Pahigian completely updates his 'Ultimate Baseball Road Trip' for fans visiting stadiums around the U.S.
Where are the best seats in the new Yankee Stadium? Who are the seven Red Sox whose numbers have been retired? Where's a good sports bar in San Diego close to Peco Park?
You can find the answers to those questions and much more in the new second edition of The Ultimate Baseball Road Trip: A Fan's Guide to Major League Stadiums (2012) by Josh Pahigian, long-time adjunct faculty member in the University of New England's Department of English and Language Studies, and co-author Kevin O'Connell.
In 2004, Pahigian and O'Connell set out to create a comprehensive guide to all the diverse and fascinating ballparks throughout the country. What they created - part travel manual, part ballpark atlas, part baseball history, part restaurant and city guide - was every baseball fan's epic adventure.
"We were grad students together at Emerson College back in the late 1990s and always talked about doing a baseball trip," Pahigian explains. "Then, after we both got our MFA degrees in Creative Writing in 2001, we took off and did it. Now, more than a decade later, the book remains widely popular, and we got to do the whole trip again at our publisher's request and on our publisher's dime so that we could write this entirely new edition."
On this their second Ultimate Baseball Road Trip, the authors updated their information on every venue from Boston to LA, and they wrote brand new chapters for the brand new parks - the new Yankee Stadium, Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park, the new Busch Stadium in St. Louis, the Mets Citi Field, San Diego's Peco Park, Nationals Park in Washington D.C., the Twin's Target Field, and Miami's Marlins Ballpark.
Plus they've added lots of information on how new technology has enhanced the fan experience and changed the game. And they've recorded their own real-time stories and dialogue at the parks, among the local fans and hanging out in the Big League cities. They've also included more than 100 photos.
Pahigian is the author of seven books on baseball, including The Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball's Most Essential and Inane Debates, 101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out, The Ultimate Minor League Baseball Road Trip, the Spring Training Handbook and The Red Sox in the Play-offs. He and O’Connell also collaborated on Why I Hate the Yankees. Pahigian’s first novel is due for release by Maine-based Islandport Press in October 2012. It’s a thriller set in Old Orchard Beach, entitled Strangers on the Beach.