Quad Cities (Davenport, IA)

Clinton, IA

Parks # 135 & 136

What I Remember

The events of Day 121 were among the most interesting of the whole tour. We were due to see two parks in the same day for the 17th and last time. We were glad about this, doing those twofers was a necessary part of the schedule because there were many more teams than days in the season. Still, we always felt like we were shortchanging those teams and shortchanging ourselves by not being able to stay for or see whole games.

It was also notable because one of our stops got rained out but the other, just a few miles away, did not. We saw John O’Donnell Stadium in Quad Cities (actually they play in just one of the four – Davenport, Iowa) and loved everything about it. There was a bridge over the Mississippi River visible from the ballpark making one of the most picturesque stops of the season.

We got rained out at Riverview Stadium in Clinton later that evening but the rains just made what happened next even more remarkable and touching. A group of women who worked with the team had read somewhere that we were getting tired of campground cookery and brought a crock pot full of pot roast, salads and cobbler for desert and served it all to us in a picnic area after the game had been officially called. It is one of the most special memories of a season of special memories and it happened in a place where the game wasn’t even played.

The Games

Quad Cities Angels 3 Burlington Astros 1 (G1)

Quad Cities Angels 8 Burlington Astros 1 (G2)

Rockford Expos @ Clinton Giants Ppd-Rain

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.