Traveling baseball junkies can always get a fix somewhere.

As the weather gets warmer and the major leagues start their seasons, HOW many of you ex-jocks have scheduled a sudden afternoon “meeting” outside the office so you could make it to opening day at the ballpark?

If you had baseball in your blood as a kid—especially if you had your own “Glory Days” on the diamond, as The Boss called them—it’s often impossible to get it out. (And I should know—I’ve been playing recreational softball for 23 years.) Fortunately, even in the off-season or outside the U.S., there are lots of ways to keep enjoying the national pastime. There are even some opportunities to play it yourself.

Just ask Allen “Whitey” Berniker. He runs a home decorating business in Westchester County, N.Y., and his office is lined with photos from one week in his life 15 years ago—when he attended a New York Yankees Fantasy Camp in Florida. Berniker grew up not far from Yankee Stadium when Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and their colleagues dominated the game. They were his boyhood idols. And at Fantasy Camp, they were his teammates and opponents.

“Let me tell you, it was pretty exciting to bat against Whitey Ford,” Berniker said. Besides playing games twice a day with Ford, Mantle, Moose Skowron, Hank Bauer and other former Yankees, Berniker and his fellow campers sat down to meals with them, hung out in the bar with them and listened to their reminiscences about the old times (and to “their bitterness about these guys today making so much money,” he adds).

Many major league teams, and some other organizations, conduct their own baseball fantasy camps in the winter, before spring training starts. The formats are all pretty similar: They last about a week; participants are divided up into teams, with the old pros taking part as coaches and/or fellow players; they play games, hang out and generally mix and mingle. A week at a fantasy camp runs $3,000–4,000 for the training and games, hotel rooms, some meals, uniforms, etc. But for many who attend, the experience is priceless.

“I had a grin on my face from the minute I landed until the minute I left,” said Berniker, who was an all-city shortstop in high school and in his mid-40s when he attended the Yankees camp.

Fantasy camps are usually held in the spring training venues of the professional teams in Florida and Arizona. Teams that hold them have just one or two one-week sessions a year in January or February. If you want to attend in 2007, start planning now: Fantasy camps often sell out months ahead of time. The sponsors stress that you don’t have to have great skills to participate—just a love of the game (and the “tuition”).

At his camp, Berniker and his brother were standout performers. Of the 50 or so campers, he said, “There were maybe a dozen guys like myself who still played a little. There were other guys who hadn’t played a lot since they were younger. And some had little or no experience playing—some were doctors or lawyers who were just there to hang out for a week with Mickey Mantle.” Most were in their 30s or 40s, he noted.

He said the players’ skill levels didn’t really matter. “The Yankees at camp always tried to make sure that the worst person had as much fun as the best person,” he said. “It’s just an added plus if you were a ballplayer.”

To see if your favorite team has a fantasy camp coming up next winter, go to the Web site for Major League Baseball. At the bottom, scroll through the links to find your team’s site; go there, and do a word search for “fantasy camp” to find the details and see which former players will be taking part.

For serious spectators who’d rather leave the arrangements to someone else, a company called Sports Travel and Tours (800-662-4424) offers a selection of pro baseball travel packages in different regions of the country. For example, the company’s East Coast Express tour, priced at $1,495 and scheduled for June 20–25 this year, includes game tickets to six contests in six days at stadiums in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Queens and the Bronx, Boston, and at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Packages include hotel accommodations, all transportation, stadium tours, city tours and more.

If business takes you to Japan from April through September, see a whole different approach to baseball by attending a professional game there (for a taste of this, rent the 1992 Tom Selleck movie Mr. Baseball). Instead of hot dogs, vendors sell noodles and miso soup; instead of shouting insults, the fans are quiet and polite (except for those in the cacophonous, flag-waving organized cheering sections in the bleachers, accompanied by choruses of drums and horns).

Japan has a dozen pro teams in two leagues, with curious names like the Hiroshima Toyo Carp and the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. Six of the teams are based in and around Tokyo; ask your hotel concierge about schedules, game tickets and local transportation. For information on the Japanese game, check out JapanBall.com. The site has also scheduled a Japan Baseball Adventure tour for September 6–14, 2006 at $2,299, with a host of pro games, baseball briefings, insider tours and more.

Everyone knows Cuba is a hotbed of serious baseball talent; but in the current political climate, it’s hard for Americans to go there. That’s where a Canadian company called Hello Cuba comes in (877-687-3817). Once a year, in March, it organizes a special tour to see the ins and outs of Cuban baseball; 2005’s nine-day package, at $1,599, included half a dozen games in the Cuban National Series playoffs. As for the legal technicalities facing American citizens, Hello Cuba promises to help: “It’s uncomplicated and relatively risk-free,” the company says. U.S. citizens are supposed to get a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control to go there (it’s technically against the law to spend money there otherwise), but thousands of Americans visit Cuba without one, the company notes. If you enter through a third country and don’t get your passport stamped by the Cubans—a courtesy they’ll gladly extend—who’s to know?

A large percentage of U.S. pros come from Latin America, and a significant number of U.S. major leaguers go there in the off-season to play in the winter leagues, which include six teams in the Dominican Republic, eight in Mexico, six in Puerto Rico and eight in Venezuela. The regular season runs from November through January, and the leagues wind up in February with the Serie del Caribe, sort of a Caribbean/Latin American World Series. The problem: It’s really hard to find schedules on any English-language Web sites. Again, your hotel concierge might be the best source once you’re down there. For general information on the winter leagues and their teams, go to www.mlb.com and click on International.

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jim glab is a freelance writer based in New York. Email Jim at editor@executivetravelmag.com.