Kenosha, WI

Kane County, (Geneva) IL

Parks # 123 & 124

What I Remember

I remember both a lot and very little about the brand new home of the Kane County Cougars but before we get to the second stop that day, I will talk about the first.

The first thing I remember about Simmons Field in Kenosha that day was that the stadium had a marquee sign in the parking lot and the sign said, “Welcome Sue and Bill and ABC News!”

A separate film crew had come out to the park, not far from the Illinois border, to get a bit more footage of our trip. Simmons Field, named for the bedding company, had been around for 70 years but had minor league baseball had only recently come back and 1991 was the last year there was affiliated baseball in Kenosha. It is too bad, it was a very pleasant place to watch a Sunday afternoon game.

The second stop that night had just the opposite fate of Kenosha. 1991 was the first year for the Kane County Events Park and the Kane County Cougars and a team of that name still plays there, although the stadium is now called Northwestern Medicine Field. The most notable thing for us, though, was that we almost missed it. We got stuck in horrendous Sunday afternoon Chicago traffic returning from Wisconsin and didn’t pull into the parking lot until the 8th inning…you will see some of the ensuing coverage in the gallery below.

The Game

Clinton Giants 8 Kenosha Twins 2

Cedar Rapids Reds 5 Kane County Cougars 2

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.