There was one more Major League Baseball stadium to check off the list for Sylvester “Syl” McNamee, but when the time came for a trip to Texas, he thought of his wife, who was ill, and turned it down.
His son, Mike McNamee, understood, but he scanned the flight schedule and called his dad back with a bold compromise.
“Are you up for a day trip?” Mike asked his father.
“To Texas?” Sylvester replied.
Mike promised to have his father back to South Jersey by midnight after the two caught a 5-0 Los Angeles Angels win over the Texas Rangers at Globe Life Stadium in Arlington on Aug. 5, 2021. With the trip to Globe Life, Sylvester McNamee, 94, officially visited every current MLB ballpark. When you throw in Veteran’s Stadium, North Philly’s long-demolished Shibe Park, and some minor league ballparks, he’s visited about 40 in total.
Last year, when the Phillies announced a June 2024 trip to England to play the rival New York Mets in London Stadium, Mike McNamee pondered a hop over the pond.
“I had to think. Is it really a stadium? Does it count?” he wondered.
Sylvester turned the idea down, again because his wife, Margaret “Peg” McNamee, was still very ill and he didn’t want to leave her side. They celebrated 67 years of marriage in September. Peg, a former president and secretary of the Glendora Ladies Auxiliary Little League in Camden County, died late last year at 87.
Mike figured baseball, a lifelong passion for his father, might help soothe a broken heart, even if only for a few days. Stadium 41 was next.
“We’re going to London,” Mike told his dad.
Sylvester McNamee said he hasn’t been overseas since he was stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He was born in Philadelphia, in 1929, and used to catch the final innings of Philadelphia Athletics afternoon games after school at Shibe Park.
“They used just to let you walk in at that point,” he said.
McNamee, a former roofer, later moved to Glendora, in Camden County, and started a family there with Peg. Today he lives in Franklinville, Gloucester County, and half of the wall in his basement office is filled with baseball memorabilia, ball caps from every stadium, autographed photos and baseballs, and Phillies shirts. He was a lifelong Little League coach and firefighter in Glendora, too, and another wall of accolades in his basement honors his years in both.
The McNamees were always a baseball family. They went to the first Phillies game at Veterans Stadium when tickets were $3.25, and the last game, which cost them over $400 apiece. The first steps toward visiting every ballpark started off small, with road trips to New York to see the Yankees and Baltimore to visit Camden Yards. At the Yankees game, in 2003, Sylvester posed with a guy who knocked him over — ”he was a giant” — for a foul ball. The man gave Sylvester the ball and they posed for a photo.
“I like to say this is the guy that mugged me in New York,” he said.
Then came the classics, like Fenway in Boston, Wrigley Field in Chicago, and some modern marvels, like the Pirates’ PNC Park in Pittsburgh. More often than not, they traveled to see the Phillies play.
“We went out to St. Louis and caught the Phils,” Mike said. “Then we went out and see Kansas City and Detroit play in Kansas City for a night, you know, and we kind of took a couple in, in those areas, and the ball kept rolling.”
So which stadium is Sylvester’s favorite?
“The Phillies’, of course, but Boston probably, because it’s a classic,” he said. “That’s what baseball is all about.”
The McNamees also liked St. Louis’ Busch Stadium — but Tampa Bay and Oakland, not so much.
“A dump,” Sylvester said of Oakland. “The press box was held together with duct tape.”
Mike said they’ve got some London landmarks on the itinerary before and after the Phillies games, maybe some fish and chips, and even a train up to Scotland.
But Sylvester’s only planning to grab one souvenir: a ball cap.
