Hello, Ballpark Chasers. My name is Matt, I'm from the greater Pittsburgh area, and I live and die with the Pittsburgh Pirates (mostly die, until recently).

I go to 35 or 40 games a year at PNC Park. I love seeing other ballparks too, and I've done a few weekend trips to see the Pirates play on the road in nearby stadiums. It's always been my dream to take a road trip and see all 30 parks, though. I hope I'm at a point someday that I'll be able to do that.

Every fall, when MLB releases its next year's schedule, I always pore over it and plan what my itinerary would be and what games I'd see if I were really going to do it next year. And then, as the games on my virtual tour happen the following season, I follow along to see what "virtual me" is up to that day.

Then, a few years ago, I decided to see if I could write a computer program that would calculate what the optimal tour would be, in terms of shortest distance driven and fewest days on the road. The program produced better results than what I was able to achieve doing it manually.

So I kept working on it, and it eventually evolved into a website. You choose a start date and a start/end point from a list of 100 cities throughout the U.S. and Canada, and it provides a set of the shortest/timeliest possible tour itineraries that would take you to see all 30 ballparks, and also get eight hours of sleep a night and avoid ever having to go 80 mph on the Interstate to make it to the next game on time (because drowsy driving and speeding are irresponsible and I would never advocate doing a 30-parks-in-30-days-type tour because of that).

Anyway, I know that people pitching their websites on social media is annoying, but I thought that the Ballpark Chasers on this site might have a special interest in something like this. (And there's no advertising and no pop-ups; I'm not making money on this, I'm just doing it as a hobby.) So in case you're interested:

www.bestballparktour.com

(Also, I'm not a web developer, I do back-end programming, so this is not the fanciest-looking website you will ever see. Aesthetic apologies in advance.)

So anyway, check it out if you're so inclined. It's nice to be here, and I look forward to getting to know you all.

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Comment by CASA Rodriguez on April 28, 2016 at 3:40pm

hi Matt - Thank you for putting that together it would be truly helpful if we had some choices (if you can somehow build out some options. For example we have been to some of the stadiums so for example we dont want to go back to all of the parks. Maybe a spreadsheet that has the option to choose which you want to include would be beneficial. Just a thought. If you can do this, that would be awesome !! thanks for sharing regardless !
I cant wait to go see a Pirates game one day.

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