Louisville, KY

Park # 129

What I Remember

The world of minor league baseball in Louisville changed a lot in the years between my 1991 and 2003 trips to all the stadiums. By 2003 Louisville had a new name (the Louisville Bats,) a new affiliation with the Cincinnati Reds and a brand new ballpark. In 1991, though, the team still played its games at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds and it was affiliated with the Cardinals.

That was fitting because the Louisville Cardinals football team also played at the stadium. In fact, the stadium looked much more like a football facility, it had a towering grandstand on one side and beyond the outfield wall there was another huge seating section making up what would have been the other side of the football grid. The field itself was artificial turf, which made a hot day seem hotter when we went on the field to throw out the first pitch for the second game of a doubleheader.

The Game

G1: Iowa Cubs 8 Louisville Redbirds 1

G2: Iowa Cubs 6 Louisville Redbirds 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.