Baseball: a Homerun for Family Fun

There's nothing like the crack of a wooden bat hitting a hard leather ball, followed by the collective gasp of the crowd as it eagerly tracks its path. Then there are the smells of popcorn and cotton candy, the crunch of peanut hulls at your feet, men in paper hats hawking beer from the aisles and peppy organ riffs between at-bats. It's as much a carnival as a sport, and there's no better place to catch the show than the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area, home of the Major League Tampa Bay Rays, the Minor League Dunedin Blue Jays and Clearwater Thrashers and three 1800s-style Vintage "base ball” teams.

This season, the show has played as a Cinderella story. The Rays, which had the worst record in the majors last season, had the best record of any team by Memorial Day, an unprecedented turnaround.

You can cheer them on to victory at Tropicana Field in downtown St. Petersburg, where they play at home the next two weekends (http://tampabay.rays.mlb.com). As an added incentive, weekend games come with perks and goodies. On Saturday nights throughout the summer, hang around for free postgame concerts with performers including LL Cool J and Loverboy. On weekends, kids can score anything from a free Carl Crawford T-shirt to a Dioner Navarro poster, and on Sundays they get to run the bases after the game. (The Rays also offer weeklong summer baseball camps for little sluggers.)

For a more traditional game, check out the Pinellas Vintage Base Ball League, where the game is still spelled as two words and is always free to watch. Players follow 1880s baseball rules and wear bulky, period-style wool uniforms (which is why they don't play in July and August). Catch the last game before their summer break at 10 a.m. June 21 in Highlander Park in Dunedin (www.dunedinmuseum.org).