We hadn’t planned a visit to the new Busch Stadium until the 2007 SABR Convention in St. Louis. But we reached the Gateway to the West via Interstates 75 and 70 early enough to take in the Cardinals-Rockies game after a brief visit to the Gateway Arch and its Museum of Westward Expansion.

As the major league experience goes, a Cardinals home game is one of the best. St. Louis is a great baseball city and now it has a state-of-the-art ballpark. It’s impossible to fully judge the park yet. Parts of the new park are still being finished and most of the adjacent site of the old park is still awaiting its development into a ballpark village complete with a new Cardinals museum. The current Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum remains inside the International Bowling Museum and a short walk from the new ballpark. One signature of the old park, the Stan Musial statue, has been positioned outside the third base entrance to the new park.

The previous Busch Stadium had the best location of the “cookie-cutter” parks of the 1960s and 1970s. The new Busch Stadium preserves that advantage, including a close proximity to the Arch. It is a baseball park in a way that the previous, multi-purpose, facility never was. The new park has the look, if not the intimacy, of the classics like Ebbets Field and Forbes Field.

If you do consider a 2006 trip to the new Busch Stadium, be aware that prices are on the high side and tickets are tough to get. We made do with standing room only.

After the game, a Cardinals victory, we stayed north of St. Louis, a short distance from the point where the Mississippi River meets the Missouri River and where Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery began its journey up the Missouri.

After driving most of the day on Saturday, we arrived at Omaha on Sunday to experience the College World Series first hand. When you can combine a historic ballpark with a major baseball event in an area filled with other historic attractions you’ve got a top baseball destination. The Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa, area with Omaha’s Rosenblatt Stadium, the College World Series, Lewis and Clark sites and proximity to more historic sites belongs on the Magical Baseball History Tour.

Finished in October, 1948, Rosenblatt Stadium has hosted the College World Series since 1950. Though it has been expanded in a patchwork fashion over the years to a capacity of 24,000, it still retains the flavor of a 1940s era ballpark. Rosenblatt Stadium is also home to the Omaha Royals of the Pacific Coast League.

Rosenblatt Stadium is a neighborhood park, even though it is just off Interstate 80. At CWS time it is surrounded by vendors set up on the lawns of homes and businesses surrounding the park. A baseball fan fest, similar but much smaller than the fest for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, takes place in one of the stadium parking lots.

Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo is right next to Rosenblatt Stadium and rated a “gem” in the AAA Tour Book. The Old Market area in downtown Omaha offers a variety of shops and eateries in restored historic buildings. President Gerald Ford was born in this area in 1913.

We avoided the interstate for most of the drive from St. Louis to Omaha. State routes got us to the Missouri capital of Jefferson City. From there, we traveled north up to the interstate and took it past Kansas City (including Kauffman Stadium) into Kansas, then proceeded north, mostly on state routes, to our lodging near Percival, Iowa, about 40 miles south of Omaha.

Lewis and Clark were in the Omaha/Council Bluffs area on July 27, 1804. Lewis and Clark sites in the area include the Lewis and Clark Monument Park in Council Bluffs. Our lodging in Percival was just east of the Iowa/Nebraska border and Nebraska City’s Missouri River Basin Lewis & Clark Interpretive Trail & Visitor Center.

We were sufficiently taken with the atmosphere at the College Baseball World Series to alter our plans and spend an extra day in the area. In two days we saw four games and all eight of the teams to reach Omaha. General admission tickets and more expensive seats seemed to be in good supply from scalpers for the early games of the CWS.

We upgraded general admission seats to reserve seats for two games, but found the general admission area of the left and right field bleachers to be almost as good. Best of all was the baseball and the baseball atmosphere. As it should be, the CWS is the pinnacle of college baseball. It’s a great showcase for the college game.

From Omaha north to Bismarck our emphasis was on the Lewis and Clark experience. Lewis and Clark and baseball collide at Sioux City, Iowa, where the Sioux City Explorers of the American Association play at Lewis & Clark Park. One of the newer parks in the new AA, Lewis & Clark Park is just minutes away from the Sergeant Floyd Monument that honors the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die on the journey. The historic site includes a 100 foot tall monument and an outstanding view of the Missouri River and downtown Sioux City to the north.

Along the river in the downtown area is the newer Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center and the older Sergeant Floyd Riverboat Welcome Center and Museum. The Interpretive Center is one of the best we’ve yet seen on the Lewis and Clark Trail and a major expansion of the center is in the works. Both attractions are a short drive from the Historic Fourth Street section of downtown Sioux City.

We spent Monday evening to Thursday driving north with stops in the Dakota capitals of Pierre (South Dakota) and Bismarck (North Dakota). Both capital cities have outstanding heritage centers that effectively present the history of the areas.

From Bismarck, we departed the Lewis and Clark Trail and drove east to Fargo where baseball would take center stage again.

Fargo, at the eastern side of North Dakota, just across the Red River from its twin-city of Moorhead, Minn., is best known from a baseball standpoint as the home and final resting place of Roger Maris. It also has a long history of minor league baseball. We diverted from our Lewis and Clark course some 200 miles east on Interstate 94 to get a first hand look at baseball in Fargo.

Our first stop was the Roger Maris Museum at the West Acres Mall. Exhibit might be a better word than museum to describe the Maris tribute, but it is nicely done with many Maris artifacts and information about his life and career. At one end of the display is a video room with authentic Yankee Stadium seats from the Maris era where you can view a documentary about the two-time American League Most Valuable Player and seven-time World Series participant. Small banners stretching the length of the display denote each of the 61 home runs Maris hit during the 1961 regular major league season. The mall itself is nice with a plenty of stores and an assortment of eating options in the food court.

A brochure about the Roger Maris Museum points out that he is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fargo. Roadside Baseball also notes the Maris grave site, but the brochure tells us that the cemetery is located on 32nd Avenue North and University Drive. Using a local map, we found the cemetery, one of several at the edge of the local airport and down a one-lane road that is currently pretty uninviting to the average passenger vehicle. At the cemetery, the office was closed so we were on our own to find the grave. The museum brochure provides a picture of the headstone and, with a little driving around, we found the grave site.

Roadside Baseball tells of several other places in Fargo related to Roger Maris including Lindenwood Park near the Red River that separates Fargo and Moorhead. Lindenwood Park is a nice recreational area with several baseball diamonds along Roger Maris Drive and a Roger Maris wall that show Maris in his Yankee pinstripes, a map noting the Maris museum and his grave site, and some statistical information.

We capped off the day by attending the game at Newman Outdoor Field on the campus of North Dakota State University. It was fireworks night and a near capacity crowd of 4,405 fans saw Winnipeg defeat the Redhawks 6-3. The park was built as a joint venture of the Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks, the university, and the city of Fargo and opened in 1996.

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