Cedar Rapids, IA

Waterloo, IA

Parks # 131 & 132

What I Remember

I remember that Cedar Rapids smelled like cereal, specifically Corn Chex. The aroma of cereal seemed to permeate everything as we arrived on a Sunday afternoon and we soon learned why, there was a Cargill grain manufacturing plant just beyond the outfield wall. Veterans Memorial Stadium in Cedar Rapids has been torn down since we visited and replaced by another park of the same name in roughly the same spot. I saw the new one in 2003 and it was certainly an improvement. The old park, though, had classic a large grandstand and towering facade that made it look much larger than it was.

I don’t remember all that much from Waterloo, probably because we were very late for the game. Our game in Cedar Rapids started a half hour earlier than the nightcap in Waterloo but that was more than eaten up by the 70 mile drive between the cities. We didn’t arrive until the 9th inning but we did catch an optimist ballgame going on at the stadium afterward.

The Game

Cedar Rapids Reds 5 Peoria Chiefs 2

Springfield Cardinals 5 Waterloo Diamonds 0

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.