About the BaseCrawl Project
About this Project
We're three friends who found a way to pull off every baseball fan's ultimate fantasy: We embarked on a mission to attend one game at every Major League ballpark in a single season. It took us 75 days, 17,000 miles, 38 states and several cases of beer.
Before our basecrawl became a reality, it went through many incarnations. At first it was just a wild idea for a vacation. At some point, though, we decided spending the time and money necessary to pull it off deserved a legacy beyond a colorful scrapbook.
Finally, we decided to make this journey a platform for journalism, storytelling and a series of documentary shorts — the ultimate mixture of business and pleasure. Troy Foster, a former newspaper reporter and editor, formed a media company to be the vehicle for BaseCrawl. Daren Many, an ecologist between jobs, planned the logistics and Nolan Rice, a math professor, provided the comic relief. Each of us were able to delay adulthood for one more summer.
We used our basecrawl as the backdrop for a bigger story — a story that's not so much about baseball as it is people. From a storytelling standpoint, our interest was never the games we saw, the pennant race or the players on the field. It was the people who bring America's pastime to life — people like the four saxophone players we met outside Busch Stadium, the zany fan clubs we encountered in Houston or The Guy who watches every Cleveland home game from a rooftop.
This Web site remains an organic creation that's continuing to evolve. Each of us kept blogs while we were traveling, we have hundreds of photos spread across several photo galleries and our ultimate goal is to release more than 30 "video pods" during the 2009 and 2010 Major League Baseball seasons.
From a journalistic standpoint, we originally chose to do this project in a format compatible with Current TV, the pioneering network that continues to empower fledgling filmmakers. Although Current TV is going through a transition in 2009, it's still our intention to bring you BaseCrawl in a short-form documentary format, with three- to eight-minute videos that showcase the people and places of America's pastime.
We were guided by our sense of adventure, our sense of humor and our humility. We never took ourselves too seriously, nor did we attempt to draw a lot of attention while we were touring these ballparks. If you've made your way to this site, we hope you look around, laugh, cry and maybe learn something, too.
If you're a fan of baseball, or travelling in general, maybe this will inspire you to plan your own basecrawl.
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