Port Charlotte, FL

Park # 42

What I Remember

There were shells on the warning track. Big deal, you say, but in a quest to find something different about 178 baseball parks every distinction counts and this was a pretty unusual one. Unfortunately, our only view of those shells came as we were walking around the stadium, the Charlotte Rangers game that night had already been postponed by rain and wet grounds by the time we arrived at Charlotte County Stadium.

Many years later, this became stop #1 on my son Alistair’s very short list of minor league stadiums (he’s been to two.) We vacation every spring not far from this ballpark and a couple of times I have strong-armed my, mostly disinterested, family into going to a Florida State League game with me. We saw the Charlotte Stone Crabs play here a few years ago.

Alas, this park now stands empty. The Stone Crabs were one of 40 teams eliminated from the ranks of affiliated baseball before this 2021 season began.

The Game

Sarasota White Sox @ Charlotte Rangers Ppd.-Rain

The Box: (Click the arrows to see more images)

There is no box today because, well, there was no game. There is also no program. Although we picked up a program at most of the ballparks we visited in 1991, even those in which the game was rained out, somehow we did not get one in Port Charlotte – or else I have lost it since. But here is a picture of Sue holding the aforementioned shells.

The Trip

A Note about this Site

This site is intended to be a companion to the upcoming book In League with America. Although some games were particularly notable and will appear in the book, most of the results of the 199 games we saw over the course of the 1991 season will not. Our journey was never really intended to be at the games themselves, it was about the places we saw and the people we met along the way.

However, there is now an historic nature to the results from this season. All of the players we saw then, even in the minors, have long since retired. Some of the players we saw at Class A are now members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. These pages, then, will function as kind of a digital appendix with a brief recollection of each day, the result of the game(s) we saw that day and a map of our daily drive.