The Kozlevcars – From El Segundo to . . . Pretty Much Everywhere
Nothing, the average person might conclude, is particularly notable about El Segundo, Calif., other than it being a nice beach town and literal next-door neighbor of Los Angeles International Airport that offers its citizens regular views of aircraft comings and goings.
But there’s a lot more.
The city of approximately 17,000 is a major hub for aerospace, technology, and services firms, and it hosts a major oil refinery as well as an Air Force installation. Three major sports teams in Los Angeles – the NBA’s Lakers, pro football’s Chargers, and the Kings of the NHL – have comprehensive training facilities there.
Not to mention that El Segundo has been home for the likes of influential rock guitarist Dick Dale, Hall-of-Fame pro football executive Bobby Beathard, Mattel co-founder Elliot Handler, current MLB outfielder Lars Nootbaar, former major-league pitcher Scott McGregor, and the four baseball-playing Brett brothers (George, Ken, Bobby, and J.B.).
As well as Mark and Jamie Kozlevcar.
OK, while they may not be as widely recognized as the others, they’re well-known to the Extra Innings Travel family, even though they’re relative latecomers. In just the last two years, they’ve done six trips with the company and have another planned.
Extra Innings Travel president Shane Barclay said, “Even though it was only two years ago that Mark and Jamie first traveled with us, it feels like a lifetime ago because we’ve been through so much in such a short time!”
Just how the couple got to this point stretches back, well, for pretty much a lifetime.
Mark is originally from Peoria, Illinois, which is halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. He grew up as a Cardinals fan, though the first major league game he attended – at age 10 – was at Chicago’s Wrigley Field “because my father was a Cubs fan and had family in the Chicago area. My grandfather was actually a White Sox fan, so it turned out that each of us rooted for different teams. Every other year, we’d go to a game involving one of the three.”
Mark also went to his first minor league game as a 16-year-old in 1983 when the Peoria Suns relaunched in the Midwest League. The club played its first home game on April 19, losing 7-3 to Quad Cities. He remembers that Peoria’s roster included former major leaguers Devon White, Wally Joyner, and Mark McLemore.
“It was a very cold day!” he recalls.
Indeed, records show that the temperature at the 7 p.m. start was 40 degrees with a 10-mile-per-hour breeze. By 10 p.m., the temperature had dropped to 35 degrees.
Jamie, on the other hand, is from Anaheim, Calif., and was raised as an Angels fan in the 1970s and 1980s when the team had the likes of Rod Carew, Nolan Ryan, Brian Downing, and others but endured more losing seasons than winning ones.
“When I was growing up, we all talked about baseball,” she said. “My first game was with my dad, and I remember the cheers and yelling ‘Charge’ and hoping to see the halo [near the top of the Big A scoreboard] light up after an Angels win. Even if you weren’t at the game, you could see it while driving through town, and there was always a mini-celebration in the car when the halo was lit.”
She learned to not get her hopes too high each season, though, as the team earned a postseason berth in just three of its first 41 seasons and lost each time in the American League Championship Series. On their third try, in 1986, the Angels went up three games to one over Boston in the ALCS and led the Red Sox 5-2 in Game 5 with two outs in the ninth inning – only to lose that game, the next two, and their hopes of reaching the World Series.
“After that, I just thought, ‘Oh, so that’s how we lose this year.’ It was the closest we’d ever gotten, but getting to the World Series seemed too good to be true,” she said. “I didn’t think they were jinxed so much as just tragically unlucky and unable to catch a break.”
It wasn’t until 2002 – in the franchise’s 42nd year and well after Jamie had converted to being a Dodger fan – that the Angels reached the World Series against the San Francisco Giants. Then, they rallied from a 5-0 deficit in the seventh inning to take Game 6 and won the championship the next night.
“My expectation was that the Angels would lose,” she said, “but hope was always there, and it somehow worked out. It was a reverse of my childhood experiences with the team, and it was even better because they beat the Giants, who are such a big rival of the Dodgers. I watched every minute of the television coverage of the celebrations. My favorite part was when [third baseman] Troy Glaus ran around the stadium holding the trophy.”
Mark and Jamie’s lives intersected after Mark moved to Southern California in 1987 for a job as an engineer with the rocket division of the aircraft maker McDonnell Douglas, which later was absorbed by Boeing. Jamie was an intern there and later an electrical engineer at Hughes Aircraft.
“That’s where we met, at McDonnell Douglas. I wasn’t looking for anyone, but he was there,” Jamie said with a dry chuckle. “I figured if I was going to hang out with the guy, I had to admit that I liked him.”
Those first few years required a shift in loyalties. Mark switched his allegiance to the Dodgers when he moved to California, and Jamie made the change after the two married.
“She had to convert then,” Mark said with a laugh.
“Actually,” Jamie said, “it wasn’t that difficult. Even when growing up in Anaheim, most of my friends were Dodger fans.” Nonetheless, she says it “still feels like home” when she’s driving by Angel Stadium on the freeway and sees the Big A scoreboard.
The two moved to El Segundo in the early 1990s and have used that as a base for their baseball wanderings and other travels, which are extensive, as they are with many Extra Innings Travel people.
Between the Dodgers and Angels, they attend around 15 games each season.
Early in his time as a Californian, Mark got a huge thrill when he attended the opener of the 1988 World Series and saw Kirk Gibson hit his iconic, game-winning home run that sparked the Dodgers to their Series victory.
“How amazing that was,” he said. “I also remember that [Jose] Canseco dented the centerfield camera with his grand slam homer earlier.”
Jamie has an indelible memory of that, as well – “I was in college, and my father ran out of the house as I was getting home from class and said ‘You won’t believe what happened.’”
Mark also will never forget his bachelor party in May 1995, which took place at Angel Stadium because the Dodgers were on the road at the time – “The Angels lost so badly [12-1 to Boston] that the fans were booing and throwing the giveaway seat cushions on the field during the game.”
Mark has been to spring training all but three years since 1986 – usually in Arizona but in Florida on four occasions – and Jamie has been to spring training 14 times. This spring, Mark and a recently retired friend/Philadelphia Phillies fan did a marathon, attending 43 Phillies games in the Grapefruit League over a month-long period.
“That included 14 day/night combinations,” he said. “That helps you maximize the number of games you can see.”
Whew.
Mark and Jamie don’t consider themselves ballpark chasers, but more like ballpark “counters,” as Jamie put it. They’ve been to all 30 MLB parks, the 12 in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), all nine in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), all five in the Dominican Republic (LIDOM), and a number of minor league parks.
When Mark turned 40, he and Jamie went on an 11-day trip to check off some of the ballparks they had yet to visit. They flew to Cleveland for a game that day, drove to Chicago for a Cubs day contest the next day, continued to Detroit the following day, drove to Toronto for a game on Day 4 and went on to Utica, N.Y., right after that game, spent a day at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, jumped back in the car and went to Boston for Day 6, saw a game in Philadelphia on Day 7, attended a game in Philadelphia on the afternoon of Day 8 and then drove to Washington, D.C., for a night game, then did Pittsburgh on Day 9 and Cincinnati on Day 10 before flying home the following morning.
Mark has several times seen three games in a single day, the last with Extra Innings Travel this year at Honkbal Week in the Netherlands.
Whew.
Last year, the couple spent three months traveling by car from New York to California along with a friend from Missouri. As closely as possible, they followed the Lincoln Highway, which, depending on the source, was either the first or one of the first transcontinental highways in the United States designed for automobile travel. It extended from Times Square in New York to Lincoln Park in San Francisco and went through 12 states.
“We found all of the Lincoln Highway markers that we could along the way, which took us through many small towns and their unique local museums,” Mark said. “We followed the original route as much as possible. We would stop for state parks, national parks, caves, trains, baseball, interesting things from Roadside America, and anything else that looked interesting.”
Mark compiled an eclectic list of 94 attractions they visited – “most of the things we saw.” Among others, it includes the chocolate factory tour in Hershey, PA; the African Burial Ground in Manhattan; the Toy Train Museum in Strasburg, PA; the world’s largest teapot in Chester, West Virginia; a vintage Sinclair gas station in Perry, Iowa; and a boat tour on the Great Salt Lake. In addition to the many non-baseball activities, they saw MLB games in Pittsburgh and Denver; minor league games in Altoona, PA; Omaha; Reno; and Salt Lake City; and visited the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.
“We took our Miata, and he took his Jeep,” Mark said with a laugh. “We saw the Jackie Robinson museum in New York and the Yogi Berra museum in New Jersey, and then we got on the road. That was a really long trip, but we got to see and do so much.”
Whew.
And international, non-baseball travel? Well, Mexico and Canada six times each, Mark to Australia on five occasions and Jamie six, New Zealand three times, Iceland, Turkey, several South American countries, the Panama Canal, multiple Central American countries, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Monaco. This past winter, they spent two months in New Zealand.
“We spent a month on each island and enjoyed some of the smaller towns and less-touristy places,” Mark said.
Jamie added, “We have a rule of thumb that we stay at least one day somewhere for each hour we fly to get there.”
Whew.
And the aforementioned doesn’t include tours with Extra Innings Travel.
“We’ve been to Japan and Korea three times,” Jamie said. “Mark has been to the Dominican Republic twice, and I’ve been there once. Then we went to Holland this summer for Honkbal Week (Haarlem Baseball Week), and we’re going to Korea again next year.”
Again, whew.
The two discovered Extra Innings Travel a few years ago when it was still known by its original name, JapanBall. Their first trip was in 2024, beginning in Korea and continuing to Japan.
We found the company through an internet search,” Jamie said. “We’d always thought it would be cool to see baseball in Japan, but we didn’t do it until we retired. And we didn’t even know Korea had baseball until the [Covid-19] pandemic and ESPN had their games on TV.
“We decided to do a tour since we’d only gone to English-speaking countries before. We talked to Shane [Barclay] about that, and he said it was no problem … that all the people on the tours have two things in common – they love baseball and world travel.”
Mark added that Extra Innings Travel hires “top-notch people, and you get what you pay for. If something doesn’t quite make sense, they’ll re-arrange things to make it all work. It’s pretty remarkable to have really good guys across different countries and cultures. You’ll learn something about baseball and about each country that you didn’t know.”
As Jamie put it, “A good example is the trip to Holland this year for Honkbal. I thought it would be a cultural trip with some baseball. It turned out to be the other way around. The people there were great. In fact, one of the best things about these tours is the people you meet, both the baseball tourists and the local fans that the guides bring along – like the one at my first KBO game who taught me how to cheer in Korean.”
Constant cheering for the team at bat is a theme at Korean (and Japanese) games, and Jamie has found herself obsessed with it.
“I think it’s a connection with when I was a child and would cheer at games in Anaheim,” she said. “I had so much fun cheering at games on our first trip to Korea that I’ve started learning Korean.”
The memories, of course, pile up. Here are a few others:
- Mark began keeping score when he moved to California after the friend he attended games with said he was “too chatty,” and he continues to score at every game. By his count, he’s scored 1,078 games and has filled 44 scorebooks, all of which are carefully stored. Extra Innings Travel tour guide Yuri Karasawa says, “Mark and Jamie are two of the most dedicated baseball fans we’ve had on our tours. Mark always asks if he missed anything when he’s scoring, making sure nothing goes unrecorded.”
- Mark is grateful to have guides who can help with identifying the players in the lineup, since the names are displayed on the scoreboard in the local language. Jamie laughs when she remembers a game at the Fukuoka Dome, home of the SoftBank Hawks, at which Sadaharu Oh was honored – “All the players wore number 89 that day, so it was good to have people who could tell us the lineups.”
- On one of their trips to Japan, the group was delayed, and Mark was in danger of missing the beginning of the game at the Seibu Lions stadium, the Belluna Dome. “But Yuri was able to get me to the stadium just in time for the first pitch,” he said. “We ran to the first car of the train, ran through the station, and sat down about 30 seconds before the game started.”
- While in Korea on the same tour, Mark and Jamie were at the Samsung Lions ballpark in Daegu, and Mark was keeping score while wearing a Dodger jersey from a Korean Heritage night. The game was being televised, and a commentator surmised that Mark was possibly a “Dodgers scout.” There was even a post on YouTube and an article in The Chosun Daily about it. A few days later, he attended a game matching Korean high schoolers versus college all-stars. There were Dodger scouts there, and Mark sneaked down for a quick photo at their table.
- On another occasion, officials at the Chunichi Dragons home stadium in Nagoya canceled a game because a typhoon was headed their way. “We got to the stadium, but the team didn’t, even though the storm hadn’t hit yet,” Jamie said. “So, ironically, we got typhooned out at a domed stadium on a clear day.”
- Ron Mendoza, another Extra Innings Travel veteran, was not on this year’s Japan Tour, but he asked if someone could get him a Nippon Ham Fighters cap in a particular size that he’d been unable to find. Long story short, the Kozlevcars were able to get it done.
Barclay said, “They consistently bring a combination of enthusiasm, kindness, curiosity, and a deep love for the game. I am constantly surrounded by people who are devoted to baseball, but I don’t think I know anyone who has Mark’s combination of knowledge of baseball history and the rulebook. And I appreciate how Jamie is not bashful about having a good time. She doesn’t want to just know everything about the local history and culture – she wants to actually experience it.”