JANE’S ROAD TRIP
In Pictures
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IN THE BEGINNING
My grandmother Celia Zelda Fellenbaum lived one long, loud foul ball from home plate at Yankee Stadium…
Eldredge Park — Orleans, MA
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KANSAS CITY, KS
At Legends Field in Kansas City, the site of my first encounter with the Savannah Bananas, I started to understand why New York magazine said, “Baseball will never be this much fun.”


The Spaceman, their most enthusiastic and recognizable attraction, climbed out of the stands, chugging a beer he had appropriated from a fan and blew me a kiss behind home plate.
NEW YORK, NY
DRIVELINE — KENT, WA
At Driveline in Kent, WA I visited the epicenter of the analytic revolution.



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BOSTON, MA
At the 2023 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston there wasn’t much baseball.
WEST PALM BEACH, FL
It was a relief to get to spring training in West Palm Beach, home of the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros on the day pitchers and catchers reported. Baseball still sounded like baseball.

Sharing the complex that weekend were the Savannah Bananas embarking on their 2023 World Tour. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen but I loved it,” said ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian.



![Hall of Famer Ted "Simba" Simmons [right] had to be dragged off the field in Cooperstown. Hall of Famer Lee Smith [left] said the Bananas ' popularity demonstrates the need to let "fans be a little more active in the game."](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/w_250,h_200,q_lossy,ret_img,to_webp/https://janeleavy.com/wp-content/uploads/4.Ted-_Simba_-Simmons_Lee-Smith.jpg)
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CARY, NC
At the USA National Baseball Training Complex in Cary, NC, I met Scott Hatteberg, Patient X in the Moneyball revolution, now scouting for the A’s. He gets the irony.
Sixteen of the top prep teams in the country had been invited to the USA Baseball National Invitational, which made it the place to be for a big league scout. The boys from Brother Rice High School in Chicago arrived with purpose.

PITTSBURGH, PA
At PNC Park, I met Janet Marie Smith for the Pirates home opener to see MLB’s new rules in action and her enhancements.
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STILLWATER, OK
I toured the new $70 million home of the Oklahoma State Cowboys, which is a recruiting tool as well as a nice place to play.
ATLANTA, GA
At Truist Park I met third base coach and drill sergeant Ron Washington, MLB’s minister of particulars, who helped make Austin Riley into a third baseman.

Infielders Orlando Arcia and Ozzie Albies showed up two hours before the first pitch for their daily dose of Wash’s famous infield drills, ones that made Scott Hatteberg, the washed up catcher, into a first baseman.

I couldn’t tell whether his fungo bat was an autographed Ron Washington model.

Upright and armed with Wash’s pancake glove, they progressed to game like tasks.

The rhythm of repetition, the softness of their hands and the deftness of Wash’s bat control were mesmerizing
COLLEGE PARK, GA
Twenty miles away at Bill Evans Field in College Park, former Braves All-Star Marquis Grissom watched kids from the team’s RBI program compete on a field he played on as a boy. The town turned down a $2 million dollar offer from Grissom’s baseball academy and Morehouse College to remake the field into a modern facility for underserved kids in favor of a $1.5 million mixed use development.
VERO BEACH, FL



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WORCESTER, MA
Polar Park, the last collaboration between Larry Lucchino and Janet Marie Smith, is an aspirational ballpark charged with the responsibility of reviving the moribund Canal Area.
But Smith understood that the industrial design was in keeping with the old industrial neighborhood.
I had been invited to see the Robo Ump in action but was ejected from what the team called the “Taj Mahal” as quickly as Jacob Heyward was ejected for arguing balls and strikes with a machine.

Pretty swanky for Triple A.

In deep right field, there’s an echo of the architectural past and the future home of some of the Woo Sox — a mini-monster like the one at Fenway Park only painted Polar blue.
EASTLAKE / CLEVELAND, OH
At Classic Auto Group Park, home of the Cleveland Guardians Class A Lake County Captains, I caught up with Chase DeLauter [far left], MVP of the Cape League in 2021 and the 16th pick in the 2022 draft.
I asked him to show me his unorthodox scissor swing that made some doubtful about his big-league future, compromised by bad luck and injuries. He had barely faced live pitching since being drafted.



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ELDREDGE PARK — ORLEANS, MA
I promised myself that if the Firebirds made it to the championship series, I’d go back to the Cape for the deciding game. The view from Miss Sue’s bench before the first pitch.
They took a 2-0 lead and were six outs away from the championship when their defense and bulllpen faltered.

When an uncouth player on the Bourne Braves celebrated a home run with an airborne pirouette and screamed in the catcher’s face, the home plate ump warned both benches. Miss Sue let him have it. He was not happy with Miss Sue. “I can’t believe we have to feed them,” Miss Sue moaned.

The Birds got a round of applause as they made their way across from the diamond to the clubhouse in deep centerfield.
CAMDEN YARDS — BALTIMORE, MD
I met Dusty Baker in the visiting dugout in Camden Yards two days after they celebrated their 2023 World Championship at the White House. “He looked presidential as fuck,” said hitting coach Jason Kanzler.
We watched his struggling third baseman, Alex Bregman, take extra batting practice. “He’s tinkering,” Dusty said. “He’ll get it.”
There’s no getting away from analytics which dictated as soon as he turned pro that he had to change his swing. When he struggles, he goes back to what he first learned.

He was having trouble with his “load,” as players like to say, figuring out where and when in the swing to move forward, shifting his weight from back to front.
The decision to build the Orioles’ new home downtown and to set it against the B & O warehouse changed the way baseball is seen and how it is viewed, ending the reign of concrete multi-purpose donut ballparks.
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No championship is official until post-season merch is donned and goes on sale. The era of good feeling was brief. The O’s lost in the first round in 2023-24 and fell apart in 2025.
FENWAY PARK — BOSTON, MA
By June 2024, when the Bananas arrived at Fenway Park for their one billionth consecutive sell-out, they had been enshrined in Cooperstown.


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BEAT THE BOT AT ELDREDGE PARK




![Sudents Henry Wang [left] and Grant Oh [right] brought "Beat-the-Bot" stickers that Coach Nick distributed in the dugout after the game.](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/w_250,h_200,q_lossy,ret_img,to_webp/https://janeleavy.com/wp-content/uploads/112.-Sudents-Henry-Wang-left-and-Grant-Oh-right-brought-22Beat-the-Bot22-stickers-that-Coach-Nick-distributed-in-the-dugout-after-the-game.jpeg)
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