Norfolk, VA

Park # 72

What I Remember

It seems kind of silly now, it was 30 years ago and really should not have mattered much even then. But what I mostly remember from our stop at Tidewater 30 years ago today was how indifferent, bordering on rude, the Tides staff was to us. One guy in the front office, when we told him what we were doing said, “why would you want to do something like that?”

99 percent of the minor league teams were very accommodating of us, they gave us programs, various memorabilia and even sometimes hotel rooms. The Tides were the exception, they couldn’t spare a program and wouldn’t let us out to the parking lot to get money without buying another ticket, but we did collect a pocket schedule.

I remember Metropolitan Park being a decent stadium in a great location and Harbor Park, which was opened by the Norfolk Tides two years later was a big improvement. I liked that park a lot on my 2003 trip. But in 1991 the team seemed to find great pleasure in enforcing ridiculous rules…as you will see in last year’s video about this stop below.

The Game

Tidewater Tides 9 Toledo Mudhens 3

The home run ball, which you will see featured in the end of the video below was hit off the bat of Todd Hundley, who like his dad Randy Hundley, ended up having a 14-year career as a major league catcher.

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

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.