Bend, OR

Park # 145

What I Remember

I fell in love 30 years ago today. Don’t worry, I am not about to take this page in an uncomfortably personal direction. My new love was with a place. That place was Bend, Oregon. We drove over the McKenzie Pass between Eugene and Bend on a warm but sunny Sunday morning and were so blown away by the views we had to get out several times to walk around. Even when we got to Vince Genna Stadium later that afternoon, the view was spectacular. Mount Bachelor and The Three Sisters looked tantalizingly close over the outfield wall. I spent the next two seasons working in that stadium press box and never once regretted the fact that the park was sighted with a rare western exposure. It placed the sun directly in the eyes of the batter for a portion of every gorgeous Central Oregon summer sunset but I hope it never changes.

Alas, the sun set early on the Sunday of my first visit. A torrential thunderstorm, complete with hail, blew in over those mountains and the game was called after just two innings. The local reporter who interviewed us took pity on our camping situation. What Bill Bigelow didn’t reveal in his feature the next day was that he invited Sue and me to spend the night with his family after taking us out to dinner. I remain good, if distant friends with Bill to this day. This story gets told in full in Chapters 8 and 10 of In League with America.

The Games

Bend Bucks 6 Boise Hawks 1 Susp-Rain after 2 Innings

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.