BaseCrawl Post
UPDATE! BaseCrawl videos debut in May
Welcome back to BaseCrawl! This site remained dormant during the off-season, but we're back to deliver the goods on a project we began a year ago.
To our past visitors, sorry we haven't written in a long time. If you've just recently wandered to this site, here's the skinny. We are three very ordinary guys who pulled off every baseball fan's ultimate fantasy: we hit all 30 Major League ballparks in one season. And, like so many other basecrawlers out there, we documented our baseball road trip and created a Web site to share it.
Our basecrawl was also journalistic in nature. You can learn more about our project here. The fruit of this labor was approximately 30 video segments on the people and places of America's pastime, and we plan to debut these short docs beginning in May. They'll be rolled out over the course of the 2009 Major League Baseball season, in the same spirit as our original basecrawl.
We've made several improvements to this Web site during the off-season. You can cycle through all our updates by using the buttons at the bottom of this page, or by clicking the links to the games we attended on the right-hand rail.
We'll have another update or two before the videos debut, including one on our ticket scalping fiasco.
BaseCrawl's second teaser trailer
We have two BaseCrawl updates today.
First, Troy has written a new blog titled "I thought I had seen it all ..." He reveals EXACTLY
how much it cost to gas up a vehicle and drive it 17,000 miles to every Major League
ballpark in one summer. He also writes about the secret to pulling off a baseball
road trip on a relatively small budget, and all the people who made it possible.
This blog features a slideshow, too, that you can find right here.
The other update, of course, is our second "teaser"
for our forthcoming series of documentary shorts. We were not short on inspiration
or motivation, but as we dove headfirst into new territory, all three of us found
video journalism more challenging than expected. This teaser reveals some of the challenges
we met, the stupid mistakes we made and the overall buffoonery involved in stumbling
through something for the first time. In a way, it also underscores the challenges
we still face as we attempt to put it all together in the editing room.
Here's the description for the video:
"Three friends -- a math professor, a freelance journalist and an unemployed
ecologist -- set out to chronicle a basecrawl through all 30 Major League ballparks
in one summer. But the inspiration and motivation driving their documentary is tempered
by technical problems, poor preparation and a general lack of experience. Yet they
didn't let little things -- like learning to use the camera -- get in the way of
their attempt to bring humor, insight and a unique perspective to America's storied
pastime."
You may notice that our "Video Pods"
tab at the top of this page is now working. You'll eventually be able to scroll
through all our videos there. These videos are currently being hosted on MySpace and
YouTube, and may be found elsewhere shortly. Expect most of our video
pods to be hosted by Current.com,
the pioneering user-powered network that's democratizing journalism and filmmaking.
BaseCrawl's first teaser trailer
We are proud to unveil the first real video associated with BaseCrawl. We don't
mean to be a tease, but this is just a sneak peek of our project. There's a second
teaser trailer on its way, too, that we'll post soon.
If you're curious, all the footage you see in this teaser was shot with "Gobbles,"
the name we assigned Camera No. 2. It contains no footage from "Timmy,"
our Camera No. 1. We're still busy converting that footage to a digital format.
The video pods are coming ... eventually. They'll begin appearing here concurrent
with the 2009 baseball season, possibly as early as spring training. There will
be one video pod associated with each game we attended during the summer, for a
total of 31 (including the
College World Series). But these pods will not be about the games themselves.
They'll be about the people we met, the stories we heard and the baseball culture
we observed. Each pod will range between 3 and 8 minutes. If you want to see an
example of the style and format, feel free to check out a non-baseball video pod
Troy submitted to Current TV regarding the 2008 election here.
Daren has also written a heartfelt eulogy to BaseCrawl, reflecting on his emotions
and thoughts now that our journey is over. It's called "I hate hot dogs" and gives subtle clues to his current
whereabouts. Also be sure to check out his rankings of all 30 ballparks.
Again, if you've made your way to this site and followed our adventures, we cannot
thank you enough. Please stay tuned ...