HATFIELD, MASS—July marks the return of what Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred called “a five-day celebration of the greatest game in the world,” and Cleveland is proud to be the host of the magic for the first time since 1997.

Sports Travel and Tours, a sports travel agency based out of Hatfield, Massachusetts, is equally as proud to offer tickets to the action that is the 2019 All-Star Game on July 9, visiting Indians territory after a four-year streak of All-Star Games in National League cities. Momentous occasions call for momentous travel packages, and that’s exactly what Sports Travel and Tours has in mind with its Baseball All Star Game – Four Day Package.

Guests arrive on Sunday, July 7 and check into the Drury Plaza Hotel Cleveland Downtown, a full-service hotel within walking distance of Progressive Field and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s seven floors of ever-changing exhibits. Completely renovated, the hotel offers an indoor pool and whirlpool, a 24-hour fitness center, free soda and popcorn, free breakfasts, and a daily 5:30 kick-back, featuring a rotating menu of hot food and cold beverages.

When Monday rolls around, so does the most-hyped baseball event in the world: the All-Star FanFest. Travelers get a one-day admission to the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland, also within walking distance of the hotel, and they have the chance to meet MLB legends and get free autographs and give-aways.

Next, it’s off to Progressive Field for the All-Star Workout and Home Run Derby, where Sports Travel and Tours fans can settle into upper level outfield seating. Monday’s festivities serve as a taste of those to come on Tuesday, when fans return to the Indians’ home base for the official All-Star Game.

Cleveland is well-known as the host city for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Sports Travel and Tours wants to make sure fans can check the destination off their bucket lists and has included admission to the museum in its All-Star Game travel package. Check out its vast collection of rock and roll news, artist interviews, and performance notes.

With all the stops on Sports Travel and Tours’ itinerary within walking distance of the hotel, getting around is a breeze. Still, should guests have any questions on what Cleveland has to offer or what’s in store for them, 24-hour trip assistance is just one phone call away.

Travelers depart from Cleveland on Wednesday, July 10, but if four days of baseball—and Cleveland—aren’t enough, Sports Travel and Tours offers an optional add-on that gives you an extra night’s stay at the Drury Plaza Hotel Cleveland Downtown on Saturday.

Travelers who opt for that longer stay get tickets to both the All-Star Futures Game—an exhibition game at which a team of Minor League Baseball prospects from the United States competes against a team of prospects from other countries—and the Legends & Celebrity Softball Game on Sunday.

As its name implies, the Legends & Celebrity game welcomes actors and actresses, musicians and other stars to the playing field, including some who have sports backgrounds of their own. Last year’s game at Miami’s Marlins Park, for example, featured actress Dascha Polanco of “Orange is the New Black” and actor Michael Cudlitz of “The Walking Dead.”

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HATFIELD, MASS—When Stephanie London was five years old, she could be found with her dad on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, cheering on the Milwaukee Braves, notepad and pencil in hand. “He taught me how to keep score, what to pay attention to,” remembered London, who now lives in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “We watched things like which way the second baseman was going, if the shortstop has his hands on his knees, and we paid attention to the base runners.”

At baseball games around the country now, London still keeps score the way her dad taught her, marking down an “H” if there’s a hit, and a “K” if a player strikes out. No, it’s not the official way, but it helps London pay attention and reminds her of her dad, who died when she was 17.

Baseball inspired London to travel over the past 22 years, since she first learned about Sports Travel and Tours, a sports travel agency based in Hatfield, Massachusetts, through an ad in a sports publication. The sport keeps her on the move to destinations such as London, where London will land for this year’s Baseball in London: Yankees and Red Sox travel package.

“I’ve been to London twice before, but I didn’t see enough,” said London, who is also embarking on the Cultural Highlights of Japan with Baseball & Sumo tour in March and the Major Minor Northeast tour in June. “The addition of baseball will make this next trip even more interesting.”

London started traveling with Sports Travel and Tours in 1997, participating in the East Coast Classic. She always takes at least one trip with Sports Travel and Tours each year and was proud to be inducted into the Sports Travel and Tours Stadium Hall of Fame in 2001—the very first induction—for checking all 30 major league ballparks off her bucket list.

“They let me go first at the induction ceremony because I was the only woman there,” she remembered. “I always say I was the first inductee into the Stadium Hall of Fame.”

London attends the Sports Travel and Tours Stadium Hall of Fame induction ceremony every four years to support other travelers who have met the 30-ballpark goal, many of whom have become close friends. “Many of us have gone to all the major league ballparks, so now we’re working on visiting the minor league ones,” she said, noting she’s been to smaller stadiums in places like Oregon, Maine, and Alabama on Sports Travel and Tours trips.

Sports Travel and Tours selection of international travel packages helps keep things fresh for London, too; this is her first year going abroad with Sports Travel and Tours.

Michael Coldesina, manager of travel industry accounts at Sports Travel and Tours who helped shape the London trip, said the travel package features everything people want to see most.

“The trip comes with a London pass, which allows you pre-paid admission to over 80 different sites and attractions in London and the greater London area,” he said. “Many of those places will have a fast-pass entrance to skirt long lines. You also get a travel card to travel on the subway, buses and trains.”

On Thursday, June 27, guests arrive in London and check into the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel London – Westminster. The hotel is located within walking distance to many main attractions like the Houses of Parliament and the theater district, and floor-to-ceiling windows allow you to take advantage of the sights from the comfort of your room at the end of a long day. The hotel will also provide an English breakfast each morning.

Guests can meet their fellow travelers at our trip reception Thursday evening before a Friday spent sightseeing. Later in the evening, take a leisurely stroll down to the London Eye Pier and hop on a boat for a four-hour cruise on the River Thames. A DJ will provide musical entertainment while you enjoy breathtaking views of London and a complimentary beverage. A mystery baseball celebrity will also make an appearance.

There’s more time to explore on Saturday and Sunday, but there’s also two games between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. The travel package includes 200-level seats for both games at London Stadium.

“This trip brings together baseball’s biggest rivals,” Coldesina said. “A lot of people are really excited about the rivalry and about the opportunity to go to London.”

Coldesina said that when the Sports Travel and Tours staff found out that the Yankees and Red Sox would face off in London, staff saw the opportunity to offer their guests something exciting. He said, though, that this chance will likely not be the last because many major sports leagues are expanding their reach internationally.

“The NFL is doing the same thing,” Coldesina said. “In 2007, they started offering one game in London each season, and now they offer three. They want to get to the point where they’re offering a full round of NFL games. That’s 16 games.”

Baseball in London travelers will wrap up the trip on Monday, July 1, but Coldesina said many will opt to add pre-trip and/or post-trip hotel nights onto their stay. Travelers who need help figuring out where they want to go during their leisure time can seek advice from the local guide at the daily hospitality desk in the hotel lobby.

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HATFIELD, MASS—Cindy Christen can’t remember a summer in which she didn’t spend time at a baseball stadium. Her father played amateur baseball while Christen was growing up in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. “I pretty much grew up in a ballpark,” she said. “My parents’ honeymoon was even spent at a ballpark because my dad had a baseball tournament.”

Christen, who still lives in Saint Cloud and follows the Minnesota Twins, is now a devoted Sports Travel and Tours traveler who hopes to visit all 30 major league stadiums to earn induction into the Stadium Hall of Fame.

“I’ve always wanted to tour the stadiums,” Christen said. “My dad, who played baseball into his 40s, passed away 18 years ago. He would have loved to see all the stadiums, so I’m kind of doing it for him and me both.”

Jim Athmann, who was inducted into the Stadium Hall of Fame in July 2017, introduced Christen to Sports Travel and Tours, and since then, she’s been traveling with friends, starting with a trip to Tampa Bay, Atlanta, and Miami.

“Sports Travel and Tours takes care of everything for you,” Christen said. “You just get on the bus and go, without having to think about planning. When we get to the stadium, we always have great seats, and the tour guides provide plenty of background information about the parks.”

This year, Christen enjoyed the Triple Header travel package, on which she and her friend, Judy, visited stadiums in Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Christen especially wanted to see PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“Pittsburgh was a beautiful park,” she said. “Comerica Park in Detroit was also beautiful, which was a surprise to me because Minnesota Twins fans love to hate Detroit. But for the day, I rooted for the Tigers and wore my Detroit shirt.”

Aside from the games, Christen also enjoys the side trips. While on the Triple Header, Christen and Judy visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

“From the baseball games to the side trips, everything is well organized,” Christen said. “Our accommodations are fabulous, and the Sports Travel and Tours staff is willing to help you with anything you need.”

With only two baseball stadiums left before she has visited all 30, Christen hopes to visit the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati in 2019 and Rogers Centre in Toronto in 2020. By then, she’ll have 30 hats and visors, given that she buys one at each stadium she visits.

Christen won’t be alone when she makes it to Toronto, though. Her three sons—ages 19, 24, and 27—are hoping to accompany her as she checks off the last ballpark on her list. She hopes at least one of them would then also be able to attend her induction in the Sport Travel and Tours Stadium Hall of Fame.

“Looking toward the future gives them some time to plan to get there with me,” Christen said. “If they can make it to the induction, that is fabulous too. They think it’s pretty cool what I’m doing.”

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HATFIELD, MASS—When Jim Mathis was growing up in Wichita, Kansas, summer meant baseball.

He was a boy who ran out to get the newspaper each morning in 1949, anxious to see how close Ralph Kiner was to beating Babe Ruth’s homerun record. Mathis lived only three miles from a minor league stadium and took advantage of every opportunity to watch games with his dad as a young boy and, later, with his friends. Mathis also played ball himself, participating in little league, American Legion ball, and on his high school team.

Mathis went on his first Sports Travel and Tours baseball trip in 1994 with his wife, Barbara, after reading an article about baseball tours in the Kansas City Star. Now a 79-year-old resident of Leavenworth, Kansas, Mathis has fond memories of his past four trips and eagerly looks forward to the next.

“It’s a no-hassle adventure,” Mathis said. “You stay in a first-class hotel. You get on a bus and go to games.”

Mathis remembers all his trips vividly. The first included stops in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, ending with two games at the SkyDome, now known as the Rogers Centre. In 1997, the Mathises took a similar trip, featuring games in Detroit, Toronto, and Boston, with a visit to the home of baseball, Cooperstown, New York. The couple also saw a Montreal Expos game before the team moved to Washington, DC, in 2004.

Traveling on his own in 2000, Mathis saw games in Arizona, San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. This year, Mathis got back in the Sports Travel and Tours game on the East Coast Classic trip guided by John Warner. It began in DC, a city with personal significance to Mathis. “At one time, I could say I’d been to every city that had a major league park,” he said. “But then Montreal moved to Washington, and I’d never been to Washington.”

Having checked the East Coast Classic off his Sports Travel and Tours’ bucket list, Mathis can now say, once again, he’s visited every city with a major league park. In fact, he’s been to 39 ballparks.

Though Mathis had been to many of the featured stadiums before he connected with Sports Travel and Tours, that didn’t make the East Coast Classic adventure less exciting for him. In Baltimore, he toured the locker rooms and press box at Camden Yards, saw the statue of Brooks Robinson, and toured the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum, a fan favorite for the travelers. And during the tour of Yankee Stadium, he had his photo taken in the dugout, visited the New York Yankees Museum, and viewed the monuments.

His favorite part of the trip was meeting retired major league umpire Al Clark, who offered a talk about his career and experiences. “He remembered a four-game minor league series in my hometown,” Mathis recalled. “Al felt sorry for the umpire behind the plate because a fan was cussing him out over every play he made. The next night, when Al was umpire, the same fan was there, and the same thing happened. After the second inning, Al walked over to the fan and said, ‘I understand you don’t like my calls.’ Then Al asked the fan about the woman with him, which was his wife. Al said, ‘She’s not as good looking as the woman you had with you last night.’”

That quieted the heckler down.

As is the case with all Sports Travel and Tours trips, Mathis made a fast friend on the East Coast Classic tour. He and another devoted baseball fan, Brian Goddard of Joliet, Illinois, have been corresponding since to plan the next adventure. “He’s talking about taking a Sports Travel and Tours trip to the West Coast, possibly next year,” Mathis said. “If everything works out, I’m eager to join him.”

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HATFIELD, MASS—It’s not often that Sports Travel and Tours travelers get to see the sports travel company’s home base, nestled in an all-New-England kind of town in western Massachusetts with roughly 3,000 residents. But that’s exactly what’s going to happen in June as part of 2019’s Major Minor Northeast tour.

Since 2011, tour guide Gary Laprade has been working alongside Sports Travel and Tours Founder Jay Smith to create trips that incorporate stops at both major and minor league ballparks. After guiding a Major Minor tour on the West Coast last year from Seattle, Washington, to Portland, Oregon, Laprade and Smith will bring this year’s trip back east with stops in all six New England states, starting and ending in Boston.

“A lot of people come to see Boston, but they don’t see the rest of New England, so we put this trip together to cover more ground,” Laprade said. “We’re at the mercy of the schedule of the teams because we want a nice flow where we’re not on the road too much.”

Laprade and Smith considered starting the trip in Burlington, Vermont, but decided it would be easier for guests to fly into Boston. A trip reception will kick off on Tuesday, June 18, 2019, giving returning guests a chance to reconnect as well as meet new travelers.

“This is the eighth year of Major Minor, and we’ve developed a core group of 20 to 25 people, so I expect there will be some regular faces,” said Laprade, who has been a tour guide with Sports Travel and Tours since the 1990s, back when it was called Sports Tours. “Meeting new people is always great, but it’s also nice to reconnect with people I’ve met before. It’s our little family.”

Laprade, who is a retired postal employee, lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and works part-time jobs as a middle school crossing guard and at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. He knows well how to incorporate travel with Sports Travel and Tours into a family experience. His 25-year-old son, Tim Haggerty, helped him lead the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Induction trip this year.

Many of the Major Minor travelers are Sports Travel and Tours Stadium Hall of Famers who have visited all 30 major league ballparks and are searching for a new challenge, Laprade said. Guests see parts of the country they wouldn’t see on our regular trips, such as Burlington, Vermont, the second stop on the Major Minor Northeast tour.

Over the past seven years, Laprade said Major Minor travelers have visited 27 minor league parks.

In Burlington on Wednesday, guests will go to a game between the Vermont Lake Monsters and the Hudson Valley Renegades at Centennial Field before heading south to Hartford, Connecticut, on Thursday for a game between the Hartford Yard Goats and the Bowie Baysox at Dunkin’ Donuts Park. Hotel accommodations for Thursday and Friday will be in Springfield, allowing Laprade to stay close to the Basketball Hall of Fame, one of Friday’s destinations.

Laprade will be right at home there as he shows guests more than 40,000 square feet of basketball history. Next stop, Sports Travel and Tours’ offices in Hatfield!

“We’ll have a barbecue at the office,” Laprade said. “Everybody will get to know the people they’ve only talked with on the phone—in person.”

Then it’s off to Norwich, Connecticut, for a game between the Connecticut Tigers and the Lowell Spinners at Dodd Stadium. In addition to a Pawtucket Red Sox game on Saturday against the Indianapolis Indians in Newport, Rhode Island, guests will also witness the exceptional elegance and stunning architecture of the Newport Mansions.

“Seeing the mansions in Newport this year is the equivalent of visiting Cannon Beach in Oregon, which was featured in the movie ‘The Goonies,’” Laprade explained. “That was one of the side attractions for our West Coast version of the Major Minor trip last year.”

After spending the night in Rhode Island, it’s time to head north for two more minor league games, both involving the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, who will take on Trenton Thunder at Northeast Delta Dental Stadium in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Sunday, and the Portland Sea Dogs at Hadlock Field in Portland, Maine, on Monday.

Guests have plenty of time to experience Portland, as well as the nearby coastal town of Kennebunkport, with both a city tour and leisure time. Take your pick of lighthouse tours and whale watches, or enjoy the lobster that Maine is known for.

The trip’s final day of events, Tuesday, June 25, 2019, marks a return to Boston for the one major league game of the Major Minor Northeast tour. It’s a pairing of the Sox, when the 2018 World Champion Boston Red Sox take on the Chicago White Sox at Fenway Park, the cherry on top of the otherwise minor league baseball experience.

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HATFIELD, MASS—For about 10 years, a brochure highlighting Sports Travel and Tours’ baseball-themed travel packages kept showing up on Manual “Manny” Cotla’s doorstep in South San Francisco, California. Colta would simply tuck the brochure aside, too busy caring for his two daughters to think seriously about a baseball getaway.

In 2018, Colta, now 58, realized his travel dreams with Sports Travel and Tours, a sports travel agency based out of Hatfield, Massachusetts. With his 21- and 25-year-old daughters both in college, Colta booked himself the Four Bagger package, bringing his oldest daughter, Amanda, and three of his friends along.

“Amanda and I had been talking about going to Cooperstown, New York, and I told her about the brochure and the Four Bagger,” he said. “For years, I’d been looking at it and wanting to do a trip, so we got on board a year ahead of time and started saving to go.”

What Colta appreciated most was the ability to sit back and relax while visiting New York City, Cooperstown, and Boston, checking out three stadiums along the way.

“It’s so nice that you don’t have to worry about parking a car or driving in a big city,” he said. “You can just relax on the bus. That’s the great part of it. Plus, there’s so much useful information, frequent stops, and side trips. It’s worth every penny.”

Aside from watching games at the major league stadiums, Colta and his daughter spent time together exploring each city, visiting New York’s Central Park and the 9/11 memorial, walking Boston’s Liberty Trail, and watching a play on Broadway.

“It was really cool to see the East Coast in the summertime,” he said.

Colta grew up on the West Coast and had never seen East Coast baseball stadiums before the Four Bagger tour. Visiting Busch Stadium and the former Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome when one of his girls was playing a tournament in St. Louis was the closest he had come.

Still, baseball had always been a big part of Colta’s life. He coached little league before his girls were born and had season tickets to see the San Francisco Giants. Given his love for this American pastime, Colta had a goal in mind.

“I want to see all the stadiums before they tear them down and rebuild them,” he said. So far, Colta had seen 14 stadiums by traveling independently, and another three on his first Sports Travel and Tours trip this year.

Amanda Colta had joined her dad in his goal, and the two already have their sights set on a 2020 Sports Travel and Tours trip to see stadiums in Toronto, Detroit, and Cleveland.

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