Going into this year, I had attended sporting events in 41 different states. Of the nine that I was missing, four of them were in New England. I live in the only state that borders New England so I wanted to start crossing off the ones that I was missing. The only New England states that I’ve done already were Massachusetts (I’ve seen baseball, hockey, and football at Fenway Park and basketball at TD Garden) and Connecticut (for minor league baseball in Hartford). I went to Maine in April. That left Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Hopefully I’ll be able to get to Rhode Island for a Providence basketball game next season (since Rhode Island doesn’t have professional baseball anymore), but that is tricky because it would probably have to be for a weekend Big East game (I would do a nonconference game early in the season, but that would conflict with college football) and tickets would probably be expensive unless they were playing DePaul.
So we’ll see about Rhode Island, but I was able to get to Vermont and New Hampshire on the same trip. New Hampshire was probably the state where I had spent the least amount of time. Of the states where I hadn’t seen sports, I spent a couple of nights in Hawaii and Vermont, I drove through Wyoming and South Dakota, I visited museums/historical sites in West Virginia and Mississippi, and I visited Providence in the mid-90s when my brothers were looking at colleges and I’ve driven through or taken the train through Rhode Island many times. But with New Hampshire, I drove up there when John got married in Massachusetts to have lunch in New Hampshire in 2011 just to cross it off the list and John and I drove through New Hampshire on my first trip to Maine in 2015 (which took a lot less time than it took to drive through Wyoming and South Dakota). Last summer I was supposed to go to New Hampshire, but I got sick and didn’t go. So I wanted to get to New Hampshire this summer. I thought about combining it with a Red Sox game (that was the plan for last summer) or a Worcester Red Sox game, but I figured out how to combine it with a trip to Vermont. And the timing was good since I got to Vermont on the Thursday after the All Star Game, a day with no Major League games or minor league games (except for rookie league games in the Arizona/Florida Complex Leagues and the Dominican Summer League)
Vermont used to have a minor league team. The Burlington Lake Monsters were a single-A affiliate of the Expos, Nationals, and A’s. When they reorganized the minor leagues after 2020, the Lake Monsters were one of the teams that got the ax. They still exist, but now they’re part of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League which has teams in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. I’d rather see minor league baseball, but I’ve done collegiate summer league games before (in Alaska and on Long Island) and there weren’t many other options for sports in Vermont (I wasn’t going up for a University of Vermont basketball or hockey game or something). I thought about going to Beansie’s Bus, which is a food truck that was featured on Man v. Food. I probably would have gone, but the forecast was really bad and it was a food truck in a park so I would have been stuck in the rain. So I just relaxed in my hotel until the game. It did rain, but it stopped in time for the game (the forecast was still looking questionable for later in the evening). I walked to Centennial Field (about a mile and a half from my hotel) to see the Lake Monsters play the Westfield Starfires.
I checked out the rosters for the teams to see if there were any players from Notre Dame, but there weren’t any. Most of the players went to schools in the Northeast, but there were some players from ACC teams. So I had no rooting interest in the game. The Lake Monsters took a 2-0 lead in the first inning on a home run. The Starfires hit a solo home run in the third, but Lake Monsters had another two-run homer in the fourth to make it 4-1. I had been checking the forecast and it was looking bad. If it started raining, my options were to walk back a mile and a half in the rain or wait for an Uber. The stadium was kind of isolated so I figured it would take a little while to get an Uber and I’d be stuck in the rain waiting. I stayed for four and a half innings (at that point, it was an official game with the home team leading) and then walked back to my hotel so that I would arrive right when the rain was supposed to be starting. As it turned out, that rain never came. And I missed a lot. The Lake Monsters were up 7-2, but then the Starfires scored six in the top of the eighth to take an 8-7 lead. The Lake Monsters scored two to retake the lead in the bottom of the inning and the final score was 9-8. The game lasted three hours and 31 minutes. That was one of the first things I saw in the boxscore and I was surprised because it was moving along pretty quickly when I was there, but I guess all the scoring and pitching changes after I left led to a long game. It was 80° and the attendance was 2,281.
Centennial Field opened in 1906. So I’m pretty sure that it’s the oldest stadium I’ve been to. I can’t think of any minor league stadiums that I’ve been to that are older than Fenway Park. Fenway Park feels old compared to other stadiums, but it doesn’t feel like it’s over a century old. Centennial Field felt over a century old. To get to the seats you have to walk through tunnels where the opening is probably about six feet high. As somebody of average height for an adult male, I could walk through it without crouching, but if I was tall, I’d definitely have to get down to avoid hitting my head. There was definitely more foul territory than you’d have in a stadium built in the last 30 years and the field did not seem that it was as well maintained as a minor league stadium would be maintained. One thing that it had in common with Fenway Park that makes them both seem old was that there were seats that would have obstructed views because of poles. It seemed hard to believe that a minor league team played there not too long ago. But I still liked it. A lot of minor league stadiums feel very similar to each other. This one felt unique. There was a good selection of food and beer and the prices weren’t crazy. I just had a hot dog. At first it seemed like they only had yellow, but then I saw that they had packets of Gulden’s. Gulden’s isn’t my favorite, but I will gladly take that at a baseball game. To drink I had an Elaborate Metaphor Pale Ale from the Burlington Beer Company. I’m usually not a fan of IPAs (India pale ales), but I usually like just regular pale ales. This one seemed a little more IPA-y. So it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was okay. On my walk back to my hotel, I got maple flavored soft serve ice cream at a place right by my hotel. It definitely wouldn’t be my first choice for ice cream flavor, but it was good and it was appropriate for just my second time in Vermont.
If I was sitting higher up, you would be able to see the poles that can obstruct your view.
The next day I took the bus from Burlington to Manchester, New Hampshire. It made some stops along the way. One of the stops was in Montpelier, the capital of Vermont. Its population in the 2020 census was 8,074, making it the smallest state capital (Burlington is the biggest city in Vermont at 44,743 in 2020). It stopped on campus at Dartmouth. I think the only other Ivy League campuses I’ve seen are Yale and Harvard. It seems like the most famous building on Dartmouth’s campus is the library which looks like Independence Hall. It stopped in Concord, which is New Hampshire’s capital (with a population of 43,976). On the way back home the next day, I had to switch buses in Boston and and then that bus drove through Hartford. So I was briefly in four state capitals over two days. I saw the Vermont State House, the New Hampshire State House, and the Connecticut State Capitol from the bus. They all have golden domes that are not as beautiful as Notre Dame’s Golden Dome.
I arrived in Manchester, the largest city in New Hampshire (with a population of 115,644 in 2020). The one thing I wanted to do before the game was get food from Mr. Mac’s, which was featured on Man v. Food. There are a lot of options that look interesting, but since it was a Friday and I usually don’t eat meat on Friday, I got the lobster mac and cheese (I would probably consider lobster to be meat, but I don’t make the rules for the Catholic Church). It was very good and I would definitely have wanted to try some of their other options, but I was only there for a day. Then I walked about a half mile to the stadium to see a double-A game between the New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Blue Jays) and the Binghamton Rumble Ponies (Mets) at Delta Dental Stadium. The Rumble Ponies went up 1-0 on a wild pitch in the first. The Fisher Cats tied it on a groundout in the bottom of the first. The Rumble Ponies had RBI singles in the sixth and seventh to make it 3-1 and that was all the scoring for the game. The game lasted two hours and 58 minutes. It was 79° and the attendance was 4,219.
I liked Delta Dental Stadium. It celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Unlike the very old Centennial Field, it had an open concourse so you can pretty much always see the game when you’re walking around. The beverage selection was good. There was a Sam Adams Brewhouse in left field (and a hotel beyond that which made for a pretty good backdrop). I could have gotten a Sam Adams Summer Ale on tap, but I figured I should try some New Hampshire beer that I wouldn’t normally have access to. So I had a Lemon Blueberry Pale Ale from the Woodstock Inn Brewery in North Woodstock, New Hampshire. It was okay, but it wasn’t the lemon to blueberry ratio that I was hoping for. I could have gone for more lemon and less blueberry. The food selection didn’t seem great. I didn’t have anything to eat. I had kind of prepared for that with the lobster mac and cheese before the game. There weren’t a lot of interesting non-meat options so I was okay with not getting anything. There was a mac and cheese stand that didn’t look like it was open, but I probably wouldn’t have tried it even if it was open since I already had mac and cheese that day.
You can see the Sam Adams Brewhouse and the Hilton Garden Inn beyond the left field fence.
So that was my trip to New England. Hopefully Providence’s basketball schedule will work out so that I can finish New England in 2026 (I might do a Providence hockey game if the basketball schedule doesn’t work). I have one more trip planned for the summer so as long as everything works out with the weather, I should be crossing one more state off the list.
