Major league vacations> Book outlines family ballpark travel destinations

BALLPARK VACATIONS: Great Family Trips to Minor League and Classic Major League Baseball Parks Across America, by Bruce Adams and Margaret Engel, Fodor’s Travel Publications, 1997, 292 pages, $16.50.

Peggy Engel and her husband, Bruce Adams, and their kids, Emily, 10, and Hugh, 7, hope to attend a Bangor Blue Ox game in August, if they can fit it into a summer schedule that includes trips to Charleston, S.C., Cleveland and Vancouver, and a multitude of other cities between and beyond.

If they can’t make it from their home in Bethesda, Md., in August, they plan to be here and in Portland in June ’98. What all the places they visit have in common is professional baseball.

What Peggy, Bruce, Emily and Hugh have in common is a love for the game and a book, “Ballpark Vacations: Great Family Trips to Minor League and Classic Major League Baseball Parks Across America.” Peggy and Bruce wrote it, and Emily and Hugh helped with the research.

Clean and attractive information graphics on each of the nearly 100 stadiums they visited include information on league, major league affiliation, stadium dimensions, location and directions, parking, ticket information, game times, tips on where to sit, details on food, visiting team hotel, even Web site information and more. Plus, there’s an essay of several hundred words on the stadium, its history and unusual features.

The cities themselves are described in equally eloquent essays that give advice on where to stay, where to eat, other entertainment in town and unusual shopping available, something for everyone in the family.

For instance, for Portland they note, “Hadlock Field has that just-right combination of old and new that has made Baltimore’s Camden Yards so popular.” They write that the stadium is next to “the handsome redbrick Portland Exposition Building, a 1915 classic” and “Portland’s answer to the warehouse at Camden Yards.”

“Ballpark Vacations” describes 24 trips and the “Seafood, Ships and Fenway” chapter includes 17 comprehensive pages on Pawtucket, Boston and the Cape Cod League in addition to Portland. The only other New England visit is to New Haven, in a “Big Apple Baseball” tour that includes New York and Trenton.

Engel, Adams and the kids are traveling this summer to research revisions for next year; an expanded version is scheduled for the year 2000 after several more new major league parks have opened. In the meantime, the first, unexpanded version is invaluable for the traveling baseball fan, with or without kids.

“This may be the book we write for the rest of our lives,” she says, with one caveat. “Our kids love it. They love traveling with Mom and Dad, but how long can that last?”

Well, the teen-age years are still over the horizon, so this weekend they’re all in Atlanta for the Braves’ interleague games with the Baltimore Orioles. They’re scheduled to be interviewed there by CNN and Fox, and then it’s on to Charleston, S.C., where Emily will serve as ballgirl for the Riverdogs in their new stadium.

“We’re minor celebrities in the minor leagues,” notes Engel.

Engel is executive director of the Alicia Patterson Foundation in Washington, D.C., a former reporter for The Washington Post and a friend of the reviewer. Adams is a former political staffer and co-author of two books on political issues.