Fort McHenry to first pitch
About a mile-and-a-half. About 250 years.
I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is what Sundays look like at love, journalism — dispatches from the notebook, unfiltered, from whatever year I happened to be living in.
Today’s edition comes from a recent road trip.
The fireworks had already happened. I came four days later.
Not the Fourth. July 8th and 9th. The bunting is still up, pyros popping in the distance, but otherwise hard to tell anything happened. Steam and humidity. The party's over.
Baltimore is a baseball cathedral.
It also makes a mean breakfast. Bravo to The Blue Moon Cafe. The cinnamon roll French toast arrives like a dare. Icing running, turkey sausage, eggs, coffee. I got through half of it. No Cap’n Crunch — the thing Guy Fieri made famous here almost twenty years ago stayed on the menu, not on my plate. Glad I listened to my server’s recommendation.
I’d travelled my favorite way: off the highway. Route 1, the old road, the one Washington and Jefferson would have gone back and forth on. Google AI narrated. It flagged a vital pitstop of the 18th century. I busted a left on the way home to get the shot.
Fort Look-Out is a different kind of marker. I didn’t go to Fort McHenry. I went to the place built for looking at it — the same rise where a painter stood in 1829 and put the bombardment on canvas, working from memory of a fight he wasn’t old enough to have seen.
The pavilion was empty when I got there. Victorian, overcast, nobody around.
About a mile-and-a-half from that hill to first pitch. Two games in under 48 hours. PCA went deep more than once. First pitch got moved to 1:30 p.m. on account of rain. France and Morocco needed the afternoon too.
History everywhere, the trickle of Chicago fans that makes day games special.
Declaring independence 250 years ago started the country’s clock. Now, it feels like any other day in America.