Rockford, IL

Park # 122

What I Remember

I had to watch the video again to remember some of this stop. Marinelli Field was a nice enough stadium in 1991, although more recent news reports suggest that it has not aged well. Sue noticed one relatively unique feature of the park, which was that there were mini buildings that resembled covered school bus stops where the bullpen pitchers could get out of the rain if necessary. All of the major league teams had such quarters but many minor league bullpens just sat on an open bench down the foul line.

The park sits right next to the Rock River and thus, around dusk, a bunch of midges of some kind emerged. They didn’t bite but they were thick.

Rockford’s franchise in the Midwest League would last just nine years after our visit. The team moved after the 2000 season to Dayton, Ohio where it became one of the most successful Class-A franchises in history.

The Game

Beloit Brewers 7 Rockford Expos 5

The Box

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.