The only church that truly feeds the soul, day in and day out, is the church of baseball.
- Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), Bull Durham

They’ve come to the East Coast from as far away as Washington and California, 20 pilgrims joined for a 36-inning, four-city Canterbury Tale, worshippers eating hamburgers and hot dogs in an alley behind the site of the manger where Babe Ruth was born. They have gathered for a five-day trip by bus from Baltimore to New York City to Cooperstown, New York, to Boston — four nights in hotels; many hours on long highways and in traffic; vast opportunities for souvenirs, photographs, and indigestion; two museums; three classic ballparks.

More than their teams, more than their favorite players, what baseball fans love are ballparks. Each park, each stadium has its own feel, its own idiosyncrasies, its own architecture, atmosphere, and foodstuffs. True aficionados keep track of how many ballparks they’ve been to — one fellow on this tour has seen major league games in 24 stadia, current and defunct.

The love of ballparks has brought Mark, Susan, and Alex from their small town in Ohio to the brick house in Baltimore where George Herman Ruth Jr. was a babe. More precisely, it’s 18-year-old Alex’s love of the game and its places that drew the threesome. "It’s what he wanted for his high school graduation present," says his mother, Susan. "A lot of his friends were going together to Myrtle Beach [South Carolina], but he found this tour and wanted to do this with his parents." She knows, as Alex might not, that this is possibly the last vacation trip he’ll want to take with his mother and father. She’s proud that this was his idea, and she has two younger boys at home who already are lobbying for the same kind of gift when their turns arrive. Baseball is a game of traditions, and traditions have to start somewhere.

The three follow the trail of painted baseballs on the sidewalk to the entrance to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles. This magnificent brick-skinned structure started the current golden age of ballpark design by combining the intimate feel of ballyards of the past with modern comfortable amenities like wider concourses and obstruction-free sight lines. Unlike the enclosed circular stadiums of the 1970s, Camden Yards is open to the cityscape. The view is dominated by a large brick warehouse that was built in 1905 for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad — the longest building on the East Coast, a sideways monolith that gave the new park an immediate architectural context. The Eutaw Street concourse (pronounced "Utah") turns the pathway between the warehouse and the back of the outfield stands into the liveliest street fair in baseball America. Lemonade stands, scorecard peddlers, Boog Powell’s Barbecue (sometimes manned by former Orioles first baseman and noted gourmand Boog Powell himself), and Bambino’s Ribs vie for the attention of incoming fans.

At their seats on this steamy evening, Mark and Alex settle in for the serious business of watching the game. They notice when the pitcher’s pacing slows, a sign that he’s losing his stuff, and they provide a scouting report on many of the hitters. ("Watch out for this guy — he can tattoo a pitch from knee to shin.") They’re alert to the nuances of the game, the infielders cheating toward second base with a runner on first, the third baseman angling his body as he creeps toward the batter in a first-and-second bunt situation. ("See how he’s turned like that, Alex? That’s so he can see if the runner’s taking off from second.") Susan, meanwhile, chats with her neighbors in the left-field seats and takes the advice of one experienced traveler to skip the ribs and hot dogs and go right for the $10 crab cakes. ("They’re worth every penny.")

The Orioles fall to the Minnesota Twins, 7-3, and the group heads back to its hotel rooms to get some rest. There’s another game tomorrow. There’s always another game tomorrow.

DAY TWO
Traci and Tonya are sitting in the front of the bus as it rolls toward New York. "I have to find a sign that says ‘Yankee Stadium is the House That Ruth Built,’ so I can cross out ‘Ruth’ and write in ‘Gehrig,’" Traci says excitedly.

Lou Gehrig is Traci’s favorite player. She has a room in her Charleston, West Virginia, home that’s dedicated to the Iron Horse, as the seemingly indestructible Gehrig was known in his prime. She has two Gehrig replica jerseys, cards, signs, and film cels that show him making his speech in which he declared himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," despite the crippling disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which would take his life and bear his name forever. Traci got interested in Gehrig when Baltimore’s Cal Ripken Jr. was gunning for the consecutive-games-played record, which Gehrig had held at 2,130. Ripken’s streak reached 2,632 before he ended it, but he had no genetic barriers in his way. Traci has muscular dystrophy — "a thing," she calls it, as Gehrig had his "thing."

Traci admires the way Gehrig "got up every day, steadfast, and went to work. He did it even as he was coming down with his thing, and he did it in the shadow of Babe Ruth."

Just seeing Yankee Stadium is justification enough for the trip for Traci. She calls it "the mother church of baseball." The bus is still in Delaware, but her palms already are sweaty with anticipation. Tonya, who’s come from Charleston with Traci, has her eye on the Fenway Park visit. She’s a Nomar Garciaparra fan. "Nose-mar," Traci calls him, chiding Tonya about her devotion to the Boston Red Sox shortstop with the Roman profile.

The bus is filled with nappers catching up on sleep lost to the 8 a.m. departure. It’s a day game in New York, a 1 p.m. start, so they’re on the move early. After a decent interval and a rest stop in New Jersey, the tour hosts, Bill Canavan and John "J.D." Davis, drop a video into the onboard VCR, and the air is filled with a blooper reel from Major League Baseball Productions. Most of them are familiar — if you’ve seen a "funny" play once, you’ll see it a hundred times — but it passes the time and distracts the group from the threatening skies over the eastern seaboard.

For many on the trip, this is their first visit to New York, and they’ve heard scary things about the neighborhood in the Bronx, but the hosts are reassuring, noting that there’s no area more thoroughly patrolled than Yankee Stadium when a game is on. "If you’re going to walk around the streets," says J.D., a former law enforcement officer, "as long as you can see the Stadium, you’re fine. If you can’t see the Stadium, you might want to get back to somewhere where you can."

A helpful New Yorker shepherds Traci and Tonya through the crush of day-camp groups at the entrance gate, but they’re too late to make the line for Monument Park, the area near the bullpens where the Yankees have plaques honoring the players whose numbers have been retired. (The line is closed an hour before game time.) Three monuments used to stand within the field of play. They were in memory of Ruth, Gehrig, and their manager, Miller Huggins. Those markers are now in Monument Park. Former Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens rubbed the Babe Ruth one for luck before every start.

For all its historical significance in the game, Yankee Stadium strikes many in the group as disappointing. The grandeur that made it the first ballpark to be labeled a stadium has largely vanished, lost in a mid-1970s renovation. The arched grillwork that ringed the facade of the upper deck is now a mere decoration on the wall behind the bleachers. The elevated No. 4 train can be glimpsed through a sliver of space between that wall and the right-field stands, but for the most part, the city is shut out of view. The interior is without ornamentation, its vast canyon-like dimensions a monochromatic blue rising from the green field at bottom.

After the country fair atmosphere of Camden Yards, the compressed air of Yankee Stadium is a bit of a shock. "I didn’t like it," Tonya says after the game. "It was too … claustrophobic, too closed in."

"Just imagine what it’s like for a visiting team," someone adds.

"It’s a lot like New York," says Allan, a lawyer from northern California who grew up on the Chicago Cubs and the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. "It’s big, rough, a little grimy, loud — and it’s got a lot of energy."

Traci sees the park with different eyes. Asked how she likes it, she thinks for a second, then a broad smile creases her face. "Yeah," is all she says.

DAY THREE
"The thing to remember is that it isn’t a school field trip," J.D. says. "We find the tour pretty much runs itself."

His colleague Bill adds, "Some people ask, ‘Are we all going to go to breakfast together?’ We go to the games together, we travel between cities together, and besides that, you’re on your own. I don’t think adults have to be told where and when to have breakfast."

It takes a lot of planning to make a tour seem to "run itself." Sports Travel and Tours has arranged for game tickets, a comfortable bus with sound and video system, hotel rooms in two price categories, welcome receptions, and admissions to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The company, based in Hatfield, Massachusetts, runs 23 different organized group tours, ranging in length from a weekend to a 13-day, 10-ballpark odyssey. (Some of the trips run concurrently: The "Nor’easter" tour, for example, is joined on this Friday night by another 25 people taking the "Triple Play" tour of Yankee Stadium, Cooperstown, and Fenway Park.)

J.D. and Bill are two of the most popular tour hosts, and it’s easy to see why. They’re clearly good friends, they’re comfortable with each other, and they know that if they seem to be enjoying themselves, everyone else will too. "I can just look over at Bill and know what he’s thinking," J.D. says, "and Bill can do the same thing with me. It makes for a very easy camaraderie."

Bill notes, "You can tell when somebody’s not having a good time. And we try to take care of that person and make things better. It’s usually a spouse who’s not a baseball fan. We’ll go out of our way for that person, arrange theater tickets, do something that lets them know we’re paying attention and want them to have a good time too. We did that on one recent tour, and when the woman rejoined the group the next day, it was like a cloud had lifted."

The two hosts are sitting on folding chairs at the back of Section 32 on the main level of Yankee Stadium. "When you go to as many baseball games as we do, you learn to avoid stadium seats as much as possible," J.D. explains. Their flock is spread out in the section in front of them, and they’re enjoying some relaxed hours before taking on the task of guiding 45 people from the stadium to the bus without losing anyone to the Bronx streets. "Keep an eye on Lorraine," Bill reminds J.D. about an elderly passenger traveling alone. "She’s got ‘wanderer’ written all over her."

They’ve spent the previous night and day giving advice to tourists about what to see and how to get around New York City. Most New Yorkers couldn’t get visiting out-of-towners from Midtown to the Statue of Liberty to Ground Zero and back, but Bill and J.D. know that’s going to be the most common route for their charges, so they’re ready with subway advice, bus routes, and tips about safety.

The game tonight is a corker, with the Yankees holding off the Seattle Mariners 9-7, but the high point came before the game, when a contingent from the Nor’easter managed to slip onto the end of the line for Monument Park just before the cutoff. Traci beamed as Tonya snapped her picture alongside the monument to her hero inside the House That Ruth Built For Lou.

After the Yankees have sealed the victory, Bill and J.D. hurry out to the spots where they’ll count heads until everyone is safely on the right path to the bus. All present and accounted for, the hosts can relax until it’s time to count again the following morning.

DAY FOUR
From Midtown Manhattan to Cooperstown is just under 150 miles as the crow flies, between four and five hours of driving time (because the crows didn’t lay out the roads), and about a hundred years in atmosphere. The leafy village is home to a Farmers’ Museum that recreates a working 19th century farm; the Glimmerglass Opera, featuring new stagings of classical as well as sometimes overlooked operas; the Fenimore Art Museum, located on the site of novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s home; a Main Street whose length Olympic gold medalist Edwin Moses could cover in under 50 seconds, even if it were lined with hurdles; and baseball’s own Mount Olympus, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

The main attractions for the throngs that pack the Hall of Fame every summer include the Gallery on the first floor (where each enshrinee is honored with a plaque containing a relief likeness and a statement of his most noteworthy accomplishments) and exhibits upstairs devoted to the history of the game. The first-time visitor wanders happily among the displayed objects (the letter agreement that governed the first World Series in 1903; a ball from every no-hitter since the Hall was formed in 1939; the glove used by Willie Mays to make his famous catch in the 1954 World Series; uniforms in heavy flannel from the 1920s, and flameproof double knits from the 1970s), while panels lead the attentive reader through the years, decade by decade. If you were to read every word on every wall, you could easily spend an entire week without leaving the building.

One visitor who had been there several times before found himself missing the old haphazard collections of items that used to fill the display cases. The museum is much better organized now than it was 10 years ago — but in the modern curatorial style, it instructs rather than letting the pilgrim stroll and discover. You are guided by the unseen hand, bowing before the greatness of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, the courage of Jackie Robinson, the flames thrown by Nolan Ryan. It has become an oft-told tale, but in the modern age, it is difficult to see ballplayers as the heroes they had seemed in a simpler past. We know them from television, not from the street corner, and a trip through the Hall of Fame feels more like viewing a documentary than visiting old friends.

Down Main Street, where the memorabilia shops have crowded out the town’s other businesses, this feeling is further reinforced with the sale of merchandise aimed at the visiting customer — er, fan — that could just as easily be found in any shop near any ballpark in the country. Replica jerseys, T-shirts, pennants, videos, caps — an array of objects not ready for prime time on QVC confront the visitor at every turn.

In this state of disgruntlement, this veteran visitor steps into a shop called National Pastime. But a few steps into the store, once past the obligatory racks of current baseball cards, there is something — no, many things — that had long ago been consigned to the attic of old memories. All-Star Baseball — the table game with the spinners, and a disk for each player. A Yankees cardboard megaphone. (They once sold popcorn in these things. You ate the popcorn, then punched out the narrow bottom of the cardboard cone and shouted through it.) An actual box of lemon Jell-O, with a baseball card on the back (Earl Battey, former catcher for the Minnesota Twins), part of a set issued with Jell-O and Post cereals in 1963.

Among the Washington Senators tickets and Yoo-Hoo bottles, the bumper stickers and card games, the Coke bottle liners and Hall of Fame busts, the bat-shaped pens and league schedules — amid all the things that were given away, often by gas stations, and thrown away, usually by your mother — this cynical observer finds all objectivity melting away, replaced by a goofy grin. These are the things that we owned, that we held, that we used and played with. You might have sat on your father’s lap in the seat that’s on sale from Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, or from Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. For that matter, your father might have sat in his father’s lap there, or your grandfather in his. The Hall of Fame is a repository of the artifacts of the immortals, but National Pastime (www.baseballantiques.com) is a living museum of the fans’ connections to baseball’s past. The prices might seem high ($10 for an RC Cola can with a Hall of Famer’s picture on it; $295 for that Yoo-Hoo bottle), but the memories are priceless.

The bus loads to head to Albany for the night’s rest, full of shopping bags and bats in shipping cases and people weary from six hours of strolling. One visitor has been lifted by her glimpse into Stan Musial’s locker; another posed beside the plaque of his childhood hero, Sandy Koufax; and one rediscovered his youth on the back of a Jell-O box.

DAY FIVE
It’s a straight roll from Albany to Boston, covering the full length of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Tonya has a Garciaparra shirt on, of course; Traci has thoughtfully shed her Gehrig gear, and is also turned out in garciapparel.

For many of the people on the trip, Fenway Park is the biggest draw. They liked the idea of seeing New York and the imposing home of the Yankees, but they know that Fenway’s life expectancy is limited, and they want to see it and absorb some of its atmosphere while they can.

On another hot and humid day, Fenway works its cramped and offbeat charms. The group is sitting along the right-field foul line, three-quarters of the way up the grandstand, where the legroom is slightly less than in the coach section of a discount airline, and where a square construction post blocks the view of left field. (Traci tells Tonya she can see Nomar’s back on one side of the pole, and his nose on the other.) The seats face straight ahead, into center field. In order to watch the pitcher and batter, fans have to turn their chins nearly to their shoulders.

Despite these discomforts, there’s a strong sense that this is the way baseball ought to be. A truck driver from Cleveland, Tennessee, is chatting with a retired investment banker; a social worker trades stories with a cotton farmer; a writer, a lawyer, and a travel agent are recalling their most memorable moments in lives measured out in ticket stubs. A peanut vendor lobs three bags full of roasted Goobers over 15 seats, directly into the lap of his intended customer. A modern scoreboard looms over the bleachers in center field, but it’s easy to ignore it and concentrate on the ancient hand-operated model located on the famed "green monster," the 37-foot wall that backs up against Landsdowne Street in left.

The travelers offer praise for the variety of culinary options (steak or turkey tidbits from the Hilltop Steak House; clam chowder — the white kind, of course — from Legal Sea Foods; Cuban sandwiches served up in honor of that ageless mound master Luis Tiant, at El Tiante’s), in addition to the traditional hot dogs and nachos and cotton candy. (Tonya’s been wolfing down cotton candy at every stop, the sugar rush helping her cope with the no-smoking policies in effect at all the games.) Mark and Susan and Alex have settled into their pattern for the trip — Mark and Alex watching and studying and dissecting, Susan reading and chatting and wishing the easy times with her men could go on a few more days, months, years longer.

The Red Sox trail throughout the game, but put together a rally in the bottom of the ninth. Bill and J.D. fidget in their seats, knowing that the group has to leave the ballpark not long after 5 p.m. if they’re going to get to the airport in time for everyone’s flights. It’s 4:49 p.m. when the Sox bring the tying run to the plate with none out. The crowd, anticipating a dramatic comeback, starts to buzz. The visiting Orioles have their best reliever on the mound, but he’s not throwing strikes, and the Sox are putting runners on while the minutes tick away. The happy, imploring, beseeching cheers grow louder with every missed pitch, every foul ball. When they load the bases with two out, and Nomar Garciaparra — mighty Nomar! — steps up to the plate, Red Sox Nation is in full-throated roar, a crescendo that lifts everybody out of their seats and into rhythmic clapping and frenzied shouts of "No-Mah! No-Mah! No-Mah!"

And in the heat of the moment, this beautiful baseball moment that can only exist in a game played without a clock, one observer is reminded of the climax of Jane Wagner’s play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, as embodied on the Broadway stage by Lily Tomlin. A group of aliens have come down to earth, and they’re looking for "the goose bump experience" they’ve heard about. They find it not in the Alps, or at the Sistine Chapel, but in a theater, at a play. "You really liked the play that much?" they’re asked — and they say, no, what gave them the goose bumps was the audience, a group of strangers sitting together and laughing and crying about the same thing.

Nomar swings at a pitch in the dirt, strike three, game over. It’s 5:03 p.m., and the busload of no-longer-strangers gathers their goose bumps and heads on back in the direction of their nonbaseball lives.

Baltimore (Washington, D.C.)
• City Clubs of Washington, D.C. Monthly wine tastings feature sommeliers and vintners as guest speakers on food and wine pairing and more.
• Piedmont Club. Haymarket, Virginia. With 12 par-5s, the 18-hole Tom Fazio-designed course is a fair test for golfers of all skill levels.
• The Tower Club Tysons Corner. Vienna, Virginia. The club’s business center includes amenities such as high-speed Internet access, videoconferencing, and bimonthly business forums that address issues facing business today.

Boston
• Boston College Club. Associate members may purchase individual tickets to Boston Red Sox games through the club — which is a short cab or train ride from Fenway Park — and enjoy reserved seating in the ballpark’s exclusive .406 Club.
• Ipswich Country Club. Ipswich, Massachusetts. The club’s 18-hole golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., is nestled in the heart of New England’s Pitchpine Woodlands.

New York
• Athletic & Swim Club at Equitable Center. Located in the heart of New York City, right off Times Square and a block from Rockefeller Center, the club offers the finest pool in the city.

Baltimore (Washington, D.C.)
• Club Quarters, Washington, D.C.
• The George Washington University Inn, Washington, D.C.
• The Henley Park Hotel, Washington, D.C.
• The Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City, Washington, D.C.
• The Ritz-Carlton Tysons Corner, Vienna, Virginia
• The Willard Inter-Continental, Washington, D.C.

Boston
• Club Quarters
• Le Meridien Boston
• The Ritz-Carlton Boston
• Ocean Edge Resort & Golf

New York
• Club Quarters, Downtown
• Club Quarters, Midtown
• Flatotel
• Grand Havana Room
• The Michelangelo
• Rockefeller Center Club
• Swissôtel New York