The Whitecaps: minor-league baseball (and a 4,800-calorie burger)

Just northwest of Grand Rapids, in Comstock Park, sits LMCU Ballpark — summer home of the West Michigan Whitecaps. The Whitecaps are a minor-league team and a farm club of the Detroit Tigers, which means the ballpark is a great place to catch future big-leaguers on their way up: Tigers stars like Nick Castellanos, Tarik Skubal, and Riley Greene all played here first. They’ve been a West Michigan tradition since 1994. But the Whitecaps are almost as famous for their food as their baseball. In 2009 they introduced the “Fifth Third Burger” — a giant 4,800-calorie stack of five patties, chili, and five slices of cheese — which got them on the TV show Man v. Food. Every season since, they’ve rolled out a new over-the-top snack to try to top it. The team also leans into goofy fun (they once had puppies hand-deliver opening-day tickets). And baseball runs deep here: long before the Whitecaps, Grand Rapids had teams with names like the Gold Bugs, and the Grand Rapids Chicks — from the women’s league made famous by the movie “A League of Their Own” — played here in the 1940s and ’50s.