With our road trip just days away, I was having second thoughts. Was this going to be too much baseball? I asked my son. “No such thing as too much baseball!” he answered. I smiled. We were ready.

The last time I did this, a number of concrete, cookie-cutter stadiums still dotted the country, Pete Rose’s legend was still untainted and Barry Bonds was still a skinny kid making a name for himself in Pittsburgh. That was the summer of 1987, when two buddies and I set off in a rusted-out Chevy station wagon, determined to hit every baseball stadium we could between New York and California.

This would be a truncated version: eight games in eight days, covering five cities, six stadiums and 1,800 miles from Washington, D.C., to Chicago and back. I would have to do all the driving this time; my traveling companions — my two young sons — aren’t old enough to drive. My wife, a psychologist, looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, the appeal of cruising the Rust Belt in search of baseball games somehow lost on her. But the boys, who had been tracking potential pitching matchups for weeks, couldn’t wait. “Stadium hot dogs and hamburgers for a week!” screamed Andrew, 12, as we loaded into the car.

I wanted them to remember this trip years from now in happy Technicolor tones, the same way I remembered my own postcollege trek. But beneath the Norman Rockwell veneer, I knew that the game itself had changed in the three decades since then, and not always for the better.

Fans of the Home Team Wherever

“You’re a long way from home,” the woman at the ticket window in Cincinnati said as she glanced at my driver’s license. Indeed we were, but for the next three hours, the boys bled Cincinnati red, whooping it up like fans at a W.W.E. match as two bench-clearing brawls erupted. Wherever we were, we adopted the home team as our own, leaving our Nationals colors at home. (Not hard, the way the Nats have been playing.) In Milwaukee, we were die-hard Brewers fans for a night, schmoozing with the former slugger Gorman Thomas as he peddled barbecue sauce. In Chicago, the boys hollered along with the White Sox fans as a bases-loaded walk won the game in extra innings. In Cleveland, we were Indians converts, as the Tribe pummeled the Twins with 17 runs. And by the time we got to Pittsburgh, they were proud “Bucs” in new Andrew McCutchen T-shirts, as “Cutch” homered.

On my ’87 trip, I’d scribbled game highlights in a bound journal; now, Matthew, 14, wrote them up in real time, posting them on his website for friends back home. The parks had changed significantly since then, too. Gone were the soulless, multipurpose stadiums so common in that era, replaced by architectural marvels like Miller Park in Milwaukee and PNC Park in Pittsburgh. These weren’t mere stadiums; they were veritable theme parks, with whiffle-ball fields, “fun zones,” batting cages, pitching contests and almost anything a kid could want if he got bored with the game. Missed a play while off shagging whiffle balls? No worry: catch the replay on the Jumbotron in center field. “You know, when I was growing up,” I said at one game, “the stadiums didn’t even have ——”

“No, not again,” the boys broke in.

They lapped it all up. The passion for baseball that my father had passed down to me as a kid, taking me each summer to Yankee Stadium near his boyhood home in the Bronx, I was now passing on to my own children. “I decided,” Andrew announced in Milwaukee, “that in 30 years, I’m going to take you and my kids on a baseball trip just like this!”

Yet as I took all this in, I realized there was something lost, something intangible, and it was the innocence of the game itself. Even at their age, my boys seemed more jaded about the game than I had ever been in watching Don Mattingly and Orel Hershiser back in ’87. They had become jaded by the steroid scandals, by the inflated salaries, by the pampered athletes, by the selling of the game to corporations that paid millions to slap their names on all those beautiful new stadiums. Take me out to U.S. Cellular Field, anyone?

It’s a bit facile to look back on a simpler, less tarnished time in baseball. The truth is there has always been shame and disgrace in the game, whether it was the 1919 Black Sox scandal, the decades-long ban on black players, or the occasional dust-up in my youth over spitballers. But the notion that something deeply corrosive had eaten away at today’s game became unavoidable as I examined the game through my sons’ eyes.

In the Black Sox scandal almost a century ago, in which players conspired to fix the World Series, a boy’s plaintive plea — Say it ain’t so, Joe — resonated so deeply because fans were shocked to discover their heroes were cheating. Now the surprise for my kids is to find the players who are clean.

At every stop, we watched someone tainted by performance-enhancing drugs, whether it was the Brewers’ Ryan Braun, the Reds’ Marlon Byrd or the White Sox’ Melky Cabrera — the kids knew about all of them and freely aired their suspicions about others. “Must be on steroids,” they would say of a hitter showing surprising pop. Or “His shipment hasn’t come in,” they would say of a slumping hitter batting .198 while making $15 million.

Outside the park in Milwaukee, we stopped at Hank Aaron’s statue. Hammerin’ Hank broke Babe Ruth’s hallowed homer mark when I was a kid. I told the boys how clearly I remembered Al Downing serving up the pitch that led to No. 715. “Aaron should still be considered the home run champ, not Barry Bonds,” Matthew remarked as we gazed up at the statue. Sadly, he had never known the lightning-fast, five-tool Bonds I remembered. The only Bonds he knew was the bulked-up one accused of doping his way to 762 home runs.

In Cincinnati, we walked past a mural of the Big Red Machine, the best team of my youth. There was Pete Rose. My kids know him because of his 4,256 hits — but they also know him because he was the guy who bet on baseball. “He should still be in the Hall of Fame — lots of guys cheat and get in the Hall,” Andrew said matter-of-factly. Cynical as it was, it was hard to argue with his rationale.

For all the controversies, the kids still had their heroes — at least until we got to Wrigley Field.

A Hard Lesson

Andrew had idolized Buster Posey, the San Francisco Giants catcher, ever since he came back from a season-ending injury in 2011 to win the Most Valuable Player Award the next year. A pair of Cubs-Giants games we would see at Wrigley Field were marked on Andrew’s calendar for weeks, and he came to the park in one of his Posey jerseys and Giants cap, waving an orange sign he made reading: “Posey for Prez!”

It wasn’t a good night for the Giants, with Posey flying out to seal a loss. Afterward, Andrew waited excitedly at a hideaway in the stadium where I’d heard visiting players sometimes emerged after showering to catch the bus. Sure enough, 20 minutes later, a tall, bearded man walked out alone. “Mr. Bumgarner!” Andrew yelled. “Can I get your autograph?” Smiling, Bumgarner, the M.V.P. of last year’s World Series signed balls and caps for Andrew, Matthew and three other boys nearby. Four other Giants soon followed and did the same. Then came Posey, security guards at his side. “Mr. Posey! Mr. Posey!” Andrew yelled. “Could I get your autograph?” I held the “Posey for Prez!” sign over his head. The All-Star waved him off. He always seemed to be smiling in his commercials, but now he just looked annoyed as he walked away. “Maybe he’s just having a bad night,” I offered.

The next day, after another Giants loss, Andrew was back at the same spot, waiting and hoping for a different result. Again, Posey walked right past the handful of boys pleading for an autograph. He didn’t even look up this time. “What a jerk,” Andrew said. I was still holding his “Posey for Prez!” sign. Andrew grabbed it out of my hand, crumpled it up and stuffed it into a garbage can outside Wrigley.

Somewhere amid the trash was a life lesson for a crushed 12-year-old about the way heroes can disappoint us. But that could wait for another day. We had a game the next night in Cleveland, 350 miles away, and we needed to hit the road. The Indians were giving away Michael Brantley bobbleheads, and we wanted to get there early.