Father-son duo drop by Petco Park, the latest stop on their ballpark bike tour to fight childhood cancer

Scott Pesch, 59, and his son Ethan, 23, are in San Diego on Monday for a baseball game, though neither has a particular affinity for the Cubs or the Padres.

The duo, originally from Eureka, will spend the evening at Petco Park after more than a month on the road and roughly 1,500 miles of cycling as part of a 9,563-mile cross-country ride to every Major League Baseball stadium in the United States and Canada.

San Diego marks their fifth stop of an eventual 30-ballpark journey. Nearly three years in the making, the trip moves from stadium to stadium in support of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Ethan rides a Salsa Warbird gravel bike, while Scott pedals a Canyon road bike built for long-distance racing.

“Our longest stretch so far has been about 900 miles,” Scott Pesch said. “We average roughly 100 miles a day. From Seattle to Sacramento we rode nine straight days, seeing the Mariners before heading down to the A’s. Our longest day has been about 110 miles.”

“The most I’d ever ridden before this was 65 miles,” Ethan Pesch added. “So doing that Seattle to Sacramento stretch was a lot on my body. For him, it was nothing. I don’t understand how he does it—he’s in great shape—but it’s physically taxing. It’s also mentally taxing because you have to do it every single day. There’s that residual effect on your mind.”

For the Pesch family, the cross-country ride has become a kind of rite of passage into adulthood. Scott first completed a similar journey in 1994, and decades later, with Ethan—the eldest of his three children—having recently graduated from the University of Arizona, the timing felt right to recreate the experience side by side.

Scott Pesch, a commercial real estate broker who has stepped away from work for the duration of the ride, said the trip has deepened his relationship with his son.

“I’m not retired, but I’m taking these six months off,” he said. “I’m really getting to know Ethan better. Work is kind of gone right now, and I’m focused on the trip with him. We bicycle together every day. There are good days and bad days—it’s very challenging—but I’m getting to know my son pretty damn well, and it’s only getting better.”

“There are good days, there are bad days,” Ethan Pesch added. “You just have to keep pushing, because at the end of the day, once we make it to Miami and reach our goal of raising money for St. Jude’s, that’s going to be a surreal moment for both of us.”

As of Monday, the pair has raised more than $33,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, largely through outreach on social media via their Instagram account @bike2ballparks.

“Our short-term goal is the bike ride itself—taking it in small segments,” Scott Pesch said. “If you think about the whole thing, it becomes overwhelming. Our first goal is to get to $100,000, but we’d love to give a check for a million dollars.”

“We started this thing organically. We had zero followers on Instagram,” Ethan Pesch said. “Combined we’re over 4,000 now.”

The connection to St. Jude dates back more than three decades, to Scott Pesch’s time as a student at Cal Poly Humboldt. His favorite professor, Dr. Richard Stull, lost his daughter Camilla to cancer at age 12.

Reading her obituary, Scott said he was overwhelmed with grief—as a parent, he added, it is impossible to fully imagine that kind of loss.

Scott said Stull later shared something Camilla told him before she died: “Dad, please don’t let people forget about me,” Scott said. “And I just thought, oh my God. I couldn’t believe it.”

“That’s a way of people not forgetting Camilla,” he said. “That’s the extra—that’s the good stuff.”

Becoming a parent, he said, reshaped his outlook. “Once you have kids, you put things in perspective,” he said. “Before kids, I was selfish. You’re only thinking about yourself. But when
you have kids, things switch. I can’t imagine losing my kids. That’s where I put myself when I think about people who have gone through that. And that’s the reason why we’re doing this.”

Scott, his wife and Ethan, later traveled to Memphis to visit the St. Jude campus in person.

“We wanted to feel what we were raising money for,” Scott Pesch said. “You can read all the brochures, look at the website, but if you don’t go there and feel it—the people giving care to young kids—you don’t really understand how effective they are.”

From San Diego, the next leg is 13 days and 847 miles of riding to Phoenix, where they will take in a Diamondbacks game. They are set to finish their trek in Miami on Sept. 26.

“My only little pet peeve is that I like to start on time,” Scott Pesch said. “If we’re leaving at 8 a.m. because we’ve got a 100-mile day, then let’s leave at 8 a.m. He’s a little more lackadaisical, and that’s okay—it kind of helps balance out my type-A behavior.”