It’s a trip on nearly every baseball fan’s bucket list: Traveling to all 30 Major League Baseball parks. This season, a Green Bay couple are doing just that.
Jeff and Patty Landin have been married for 30 years, but they’ve been Milwaukee Brewers fans twice as long.
“I vividly remember falling asleep at night on summer evenings, listening to Bob Uecker call the Brewers games,” Jeff said. “That was like the soundtrack of my life.”
Said Patty: “My family would always go to games. My aunt and uncle would bring myself and my siblings and we had two family friends that we would go RV-ing with down to Milwaukee.”
Fittingly, their 30-park journey began with the Brewers home opener against the Chicago White Sox. The Landins value planning over everything; they say it’s the key to surviving a series of trips like this. They keep a detailed schedule of each game they plan to attend, logging the score of each one. The Brewers won that opening game 14-2 and, less than a week later, the Landins were off to Texas.
While the Landins build in breaks to their schedule − their last game was June 27 and their next game is July 23, for instance − some stretches of the trip can be grueling. Near the end of June, they saw four games in six days across Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Chicago.
“We added all these little side trips to the baseball games,” Jeff said. “It was a pretty intense six days.”
The Landins drive to some stadiums and fly to others, depending on the distance. However, not every game they go to involves the Brewers.
They realized while planning the trip that following the Brewers around the country wouldn’t get them to every ballpark, so they’ve had to settle for games with other teams. They still wear Brewers jerseys to every game, and they’ve managed to find other Milwaukee fans in unexpected places.
In May, they took in a game in Kansas City where the Royals played the Cleveland Guardians.
“All of a sudden, this guy comes in from our right, sits down … and he’s wearing a Brewers shirt,” Jeff said. “I was like, what is this guy doing here?”
Jeff eventually discovered that the man had spent time living in Menomonee Falls, where Jeff was born.
“We talked Brewer baseball for about five, six innings,” he said. “Just three random people from Wisconsin at a Kansas City-Cleveland baseball game in early May.”
During their stop in Miami, Patty had an even more personal connection with someone they ran into.
The couple were leaving the Miami Marlins stadium, when someone in a van drove by and shouted “Go Brewers!” Patty shouted the sentiment back and then recognized one of the people in the car.
“They just went past me and I go, ‘wait a second … Jill?’ It was a neighborhood friend,” Patty said, “and I was like, ‘what are you doing here?’”
The women had grown up across the street from each other, and there they were at a Brewers game in Miami.
By the end of their trip, the couple will have actually been to 31 ballparks. In June, they followed the Brewers to Nevada for their series against the Athletics where the games were played at a Triple-A ballpark 12 miles off the Las Vegas Strip. Because of the Athletics’ impending move to Las Vegas, they eventually will play in a stadium on the Strip.
The Landins enjoyed their time at the smaller stadium, noting that due to the limited capacity there wasn’t a bad seat to be found, and they were much closer to the players. But it didn’t come without its own quirks.
“The ball carried ridiculously, like what you thought was going to be just a pop-up all of a sudden was like warning track or even out of the park,” Jeff said, “So, it didn’t feel like real baseball.”
The couple will head back to the West Coast later on to visit the current temporary home for the Athletics in West Sacramento, California. They will play there until the new stadium is finished, at which point the Landins will no longer be able to say that they’ve visited every Major League Baseball ballpark.
Jeff said they’ll visit the new stadium, with one big caveat − only if the Brewers are playing the Athletics in the World Series.
Outside of watching the Brewers, Jeff said he hopes to see Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani play before their journey is finished. The Landins forever will be Brewers fans, so much so that Jeff can’t pick a favorite player.
“It’s like you asked me to pick a favorite child,” Jeff said.
Patty was more decisive: She named her favorites as Jackson Chourio, William Contreras and Christian Yelich.
A little more than half the games the Landins will see will involve the Brewers but, even for those that aren’t, the Landins make a point to take in the pregame rituals for each home team.
“One of the things that I think has been appealing to us is just to kind of see how they approach the run up of the game,” Jeff said. “They all kind of have the same routines, but they’re all a little different.”
One thing that carried over at a few of the stadiums: $1 hot dogs. Patty is a vegetarian, so she doesn’t partake, but Jeff calls it dumb luck that more than one of the games they’ve attended have served dollar dogs.
The Brewers fan they met in Kansas City “put away a lot of dollar hot dogs,” Jeff said. The final number that night was six.
Jeff’s final number of dollar dogs? Six in Kansas City, four in Cleveland. With 14 ballparks left to go, he might just beat his season high.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Green Bay couple on quest to hit all 30 major-league ballparks in 2026
Reporting by Gabriella Hartlaub, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Gabriella Hartlaub, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
