My wife and I have been on tours of other ballparks when there weren't games. We really enjoyed the tour of the new Progressive Field in Cleveland, but that's because we were the only two old people. There were two tour guides and the younger one took everyone else down to the locker rooms and the dugouts. There were stairs and my wife would have had difficulties with them. The other guide was older and had actually retired from many years in the Cleveland organization. He took us to the VIP elevator and we got to see a lot of the high-end suites, including the owner's one, as well as the press rooms and facilities and other cool stuff. He cautioned us not to take pictures and basically "be cool" because we were in areas that was
definitely not supposed to be open to tours
. I think he was really enjoying the opportunity to have a reason to wander around in those places. When we were finished and came back to the tour starting area it turned out that the rest of the tour folks had already returned and left, seems our tour took a lot longer than it was supposed to
. When my wife tells folks about our trip to Cleveland, she says the Rock and Roll Museum was just OK, but the Progressive Field tour was the highlight, and she is not at all a baseball fan.
Our worst tour was of the new Washington Nationals stadium. We were the only two people on the tour, which should have been great, but the guide was a older volunteer and hardly took us past the upper deck public areas. Every time we'd go by a column that had a poster of an old time Washington player (and
every column had a poster) he'd stop and ramble on about the history of that player. All very nice, but we would have rather seen the rest of the field.
Coolest tour was the Blue Jays stadium in Toronto at the base of the CN Tower. We saw some neat stuff and then got treated to lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe overlooking the field.