Eugene, OR

Park # 144

What I Remember

I remember we met the Commish, well former Commish anyway. Bowie Kuhn who made a name for himself while presiding over major league baseball’s labor squabbles in the 1970s and 80s happened to be attending the Eugene Emeralds game on this Saturday night too. The reporter who wrote the feature story below spent time interviewing both Mr. Kuhn and us and patched together a nice story of the visitors to Civic Stadium that night.

I recall Civic Stadium as a classic old park. It was closed in 2009 and burned to the ground by an arsonist six years later but the Emeralds continue to play in the lovely city. The team’s owners, the Bebans, were particularly friendly toward us and put us up in a very nice hotel next to the Willamette River after the game.

The Games

Eugene Emeralds 2 Southern Oregon A’s 1

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.