Number of states: 44
States remaining: 6
First game: July 2, 2025 (Newport Gulls 6, Ocean State Waves 5)
I had it all planned out. Summer 2020, I turned 50, and I was going to head out to New England for a huge trip. I’d finish off the last few states I hadn’t yet been to, thus making 50 states at age 50 (loved the symmetry of that), and in the process, I’d see the Pawtucket Red Sox play ball to cross Rhode Island off of my list. As we all know, it didn’t turn out like that. The scheduled last season for the PawSox, 2020, was wiped away by COVID, and they moved to their new, corporate, gleaming, same-as-everyone-else home in Worcester. I got my 50th state visited in 2022 rather than in 2020, but didn’t make it to Rhode Island. And as I visited Rhode Island in 2025, it left me two baseball choices that I could see: the Ocean State Waves in Wakefield and the Newport Gulls. Ocean State was visiting Newport during our visit, so we headed down to tony Newport for some baseball. The net result was one of the strangest nights of baseball I’ve ever experienced.
Cardines Field is old. The writing on the outside shows it’s old: cleared away in 1891 and has been hosting baseball games ever since. For a while now, it’s been the host of one of the best teams in the wood-bat New England Collegiate Baseball League. The place’s age shows in all the usual good and bad ways. For one, I’d say most of the park is obstructed-view seats. To put it simply, there’s not a good seat in the house. Indeed, there’s not even a seat in the house: it’s all wooden bleachers set behind a hilariously narrow aisle at the front, by the frequently-holey chain-link fence.
Foul balls are therefore dangerous and strange in all sorts of ways here. In addition to the possibility of one going over or through the chain-link fence to your head, this place had the most immediate access to roads I have ever seen. Like many old ballparks, this is set directly on the road. The main drag in town, the aptly-named America’s Cup Avenue, runs parallel to the third-base line. Foul balls over the stands landed right in the middle of a busy street. I never heard an accident caused by a caved-in windshield, but it was more than a little possible.
Of course, Cardines Field’s integration into the neighborhood is kind of cool. In my pre-game walk around the ballpark, I noticed that every house I passed had some kind of plaque on it commemorating which 17th- or 18th-century blueblood had owned the house. These historic homes have certainly seen a few baseballs rattle their roofs, as the field, which postdates the houses by a bit, was clearly set up to be among the houses on the footprint it was given. This led to a couple of hilarious architectural quirks. For one, there’s a house in straightaway center field. That means there’s a bizarre pie-slice cut into center field from the outside where some old house sits. The outfield fence (and it is all fence, the chain-link kind) starts running straight towards home plate somewhere in center field, then zips out, right next to a light pole that is in the field of play. The fence runs away from home plate past the light pole, but once it gets back to a still-very-short 340 feet, the distance from home gets even shorter as you head towards right until we get to the comical 280-foot distance at the foul pole. Cardines Field compensates by putting astonishingly high fences and nets there: my estimate is 50 feet, mostly covered in ads. A growth of ivy is out at the deeper part of right center, but that doesn’t appear to be where a batter’s eye should be. One street, Cozzens Court, actually dead-ends at the center field wall, and if one wanted to, one could watch the game right there for free. Adirondack chairs are set up in a couple of the backyards, and a playground sits outside of left field, complete with warnings about the dangers of playing there during baseball games.
It was quite a setting. The family took some time to decide where to sit. What might have been the best seats behind both dugouts (the dugouts are both along the first-base line) were obscured twice.. In addition to the protective netting, the team stores its L-shaped batting practice protector on top of the dugout, so it’s nearly impossible to see through both. Rather than netting down the lines, there are chain-link fences, and it’s tougher to see through those the deeper one gets down the lines. After testing out seats down the left-field line, we chose seats down the right field line.
Once there, the game began, and things somehow got weirder.
During the top of the first, a massive group—150 or more—of tween campers from a girls-only camp arrived. They wound up taking up the front five rows of most of the left-field side. And nobody—least of all the girls—had any idea what they were doing there. I don’t think anyone watched anything on the field at all, save some shouting at the third baseman in a failed attempt to get a ball. “Number 1! Number 1!” they shouted at third baseman Colby Wallace. For three innings. It was a good thing that they never learned his name or he would have had more issues with the serenading. (Maybe. Colby had two errors, although I felt both were harsh scorer’s choices.) The high-school aged counselors bagged on the game and filed everyone out at the end of the third inning, and they left, probably confused as to why they were ever there. The atmosphere calmed considerably there, as did the ability to walk around the aisle-less bleachers.
Michelle, my wife, entered us in a “who traveled the farthest to get here” contest run by the Newport Visitor’s Bureau. My wife and son each scanned a QR code, gave an email (and probably will receive Newport-related email for the rest of their lives as a result) and our hometown, and were told that the three people who had traveled the farthest would be on the field for a competition at the end of the third inning. We thought we had it in the bag.
Not so much. In the middle of the fifth inning, they announced the winners:
1. Sean Combs, from “Bangkok, China.” (This was the very day the verdict came in in Combs’ sex-trafficking trial, so his presence in Newport was just as likely as Bangkok’s presence in China.)
2. A name I have forgotten, from Helsinki, Finland.
3. Phil McCracken from Sydney, Australia.
So we lost to Bart Simpson twice. Maybe three times. Hugh Jass from New Zealand is gonna be PISSED when he learns about this contest!
Sean Combs and Phil McCracken didn’t show up on the field at the end of the fifth inning, even though they were called. The “contest” was therefore one person, and it wasn’t us. They asked her one question: how many feet did Ted Williams hit the longest home run in Red Sox history? My brain cooked and I came up with 504 feet. Her guess: 50 feet. The actual answer: 502 feet. She won the prize set from the visitor’s bureau. The guess of 50 feet—a pop up short of the pitcher’s mound—was a winner.
Two theories. It’s possible that Phil and Sean were fictional (who could have guessed?) and that the 50-foot-guesser was actually Finnish. It’s also possible that all three were fictional, and that when nobody showed up for the promotion, they just had to grab the closest person willing to go on the field. Either way, it’s a good bet that we were actually among the three fans who had traveled the farthest to get there.
I dunno. Maybe Phil and Sean were in the bathroom looking for Hugh Jass.
We had a few college-wood-bat moments as well. Players were everywhere. I saw one Waves player getting into his uniform in the parking garage before the game. I also ran into players both in the bathroom and going to get concessions. They might as well have sat among us, since there was so little dugout space.
The PA guy provided another few memories. One was during the seventh-inning stretch, when the PA guy somehow forgot to play “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” playing AC/DC instead. He boomed out “This isn’t what people want to hear!” The breaking of the fourth wall felt strange. He then said “I was worried we might have to bring in someone from Cranston.” Local joke I don’t understand—points for that! PA guy also had to holler at a motorist past the left field wall. They pulled up to the playground there and had their headlights on. It was apparently a distraction, because the PA guy shouted for the car to turn its light off. After a delay of a few minutes, the lights were off. Michelle was wondering what would have happened if he had simply refused to turn off the lights. That’s not against the law, right? Having headlights on in a parking lot? I’m interested in that answer.
But the coup de gras of the PA guy came in the ninth inning. As the PA guy was announcing the name of the batter in the ninth inning of a tie game, the music came on over him. It’s an accident—understandable hiccup. But PA guy wasn’t having it. “Would you have the courtesy to wait until my announcement is done to play the music?” he boomed, chewing out the music person for everyone in Newport to hear. This is something I have never, ever heard at any ballgame I have been to.
Meanwhile, a group of about 10 tweens started to play a game. They looked out over the back of the top row at people on America’s Cup Avenue below us. Someone had an idea to throw things down there. To the people on the street? At them? I’m not sure. I wasn’t there. But I was right next to a half-filled water bottle that sailed over the bleachers from the street and landed five feet from me. That was…another first.
So this will score somewhere in the middle. The quirks and local feel are strong here, but the game ops and discomfort will drag things down. Al in all, I’d rather have gone to the Pawtucket game, but this was still an experience I won’t soon forget.
BALLPARK SCORE:
Regional Feel: 8/10
Lots of Rhode Island everywhere: ads, promotions, and ballpark guy making Cranston jokes (Feel free to tell me the information I’m missing about Cranston). Being a couple of blocks from the bay and on America’s Cup Way also helped.
Charm: 2.5/5
I like the oldness of all of this, and there were moments of charm, but there were also moments of just charmless struggles.
Spectacle 2.5/5
Weirdness in the promotions!
Team Mascot/Name 4/5
I didn’t get a shot of Gully or Gully, Jr., but they were excellent. Not as visible as we’d like (I don’t remember actually seeing them), but I liked their presence, especially since actual gulls were on the outfield grass for much of the game.
Aesthetics 2/5
The outfield view was nice—all those houses. But beyond that, this was old and weird and it was hard to see the field.
Pavilion area 1/5
The aisle was so crowded that it had to be single-file: we had to step out of the way to let people by. Meanwhile, you’re blocking people’s views as you head to the concession stand.
Scoreability 4.5/5
I missed a pitching change, but I think that’s on me: they did a fine job of putting up hit/error decisions and announcing subs very clearly and in a timely way.
Fans 2/5
Can’t get past the kids, both the inattentive camp girls and the harassing-passersby dudes.
Intangibles 2/5
A lot happened tonight, but the weird and confusing outweighs the good.
OVERALL 28.5/50
BASEBALL STUFF THAT HAPPENED HERE:
The Gulls win in dramatic comeback fashion over their state rivals, the Ocean State Waves. Michael Gupton singled home pinch-runner Shane Williams with two out in the ninth for the winning margin.
Ryan Novak hits the only home run of the night, over the slightly-less-tall ivy fence in right-center. He was on replacing Cade Brown in left field—Brown had left after appearing to injure his fingers getting tangled up in the fence trying to make a catch in the second.
Aiden O’Connell’s three-and-two-thirds of scoreless relief enable the Gulls to come back and win, and nets him the win.
Gavin Greger has three hits, including two doubles and an RBI, for Ocean State.
(Written July 2025.)