Linda and Frank Gigliotti’s first date was a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.
“I should have known then,” Linda said. “Forty-five years later, our life is consumed with baseball.”
This weekend, that first date will come full circle when the longtime Plymouth couple travels to Cooperstown, New York, where Linda will be inducted into the Sports Travel and Tours Baseball Stadium Hall of Fame.
Her name and photograph will be added to a book honoring fans who have attended games at all 30 Major League Baseball ballparks. She joins nearly 150 other inductees, including her husband.
Frank earned the same recognition nearly decade ago. By then, Linda had accompanied him to enough stadiums she reached an inevitable conclusion.
“I said, ‘Gee, I’m about halfway through. We might as well just keep going,’” she recalled.
Frank’s quest began as new stadiums started appearing around the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “I said, ‘That looks like a really nice stadium. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could visit some of them?’” he said.
Some soon became all.
He visited his first few parks independently before discovering Sports Travel and Tours, which arranges baseball trips combining several stadiums with sightseeing excursions. Travelers fly to a starting city and then travel by bus between ballparks—watching baseball movies and competing in trivia contests along the way.
The Gigliottis said they have visited cities they might never otherwise have explored, taking side trips to places including NASA in Houston and Fort Worth while attending games in the region.
For Linda, who enjoys baseball but does not claim quite the same level of devotion as her husband, seeing the country has been an important part of the experience.
“I enjoy going to different parts of the country that I wouldn’t see otherwise,” she said. “Baseball is just an added extra.”
The trips have produced some unexpected encounters. While walking through Fort Worth wearing a Red Sox shirt with Dustin Pedroia’s name across the back, Linda was approached by a man who asked whether she was from Boston.
“He said, ‘My son used to play for the Red Sox,’” she recalled.
The man was the father of former Red Sox pitcher John Lackey.
Asked to choose favorite ballparks other than Fenway, Frank selected Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, with its riverfront setting, bridge approach and expansive view of the city skyline.
Linda chose Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where the historic warehouse gives the stadium an older character and fans can walk easily to the waterfront.
For Frank, baseball began far from Fenway’s grandstands. Growing up in Watertown, he played in the street and spent summer days at a neighborhood ballfield. At a time when children were granted far more independence, he and his friends would take public transportation into Boston to see the Red Sox.
His favorite player remains Carl Yastrzemski. Linda’s is Pedroia, whose jersey she still wears.
“He had the heart,” she said.
The couple has worked or lived in Plymouth for more than four decades. Both are retired educators whose careers included positions at Cold Spring Elementary School, Federal Furnace Elementary School and Nathaniel Morton Elementary School.
Although Linda has now completed the 30-ballpark challenge, the Gigliottis’ baseball travels are not necessarily over. New stadiums create new destinations, and temporary homes count as intriguing additions.
Frank and their son recently visited the minor league stadium where the Tampa Bay Rays played after hurricane damage left Tropicana Field unavailable. The couple is also planning a trip through Seattle, Sacramento and San Francisco, including a game in Sacramento, where the Athletics are playing while awaiting their planned move to Las Vegas.
“If a new major league stadium opens up,” Frank said, “I would like to go to it.”
For Linda, however, this weekend belongs to the journey that began 45 years ago with a first date at Fenway—and eventually carried them together around the major leagues.