Great Falls, MT

Park # 150

What I Remember

I remember the Heppners. Probably owing to the fact the we wanted another run or two on the water slide in Medicine Hat, we pulled into Great Falls shortly before game time with no time to find a campsite. The front office staff of the Great Falls Dodgers offered to try to help us find a hotel but it was a Friday night and the city was all booked up with people that had made the trek south from Canada to do some shopping.

Jean Heppner, though, had an idea. She and her family hosted two of the players on the team for the summer – it was one of the great traditions in the lower rungs of the minors. But the players would be leaving on a road trip right after the game that night and so we stayed in their room. It was another amazing kindness in a long season of kindnesses.

Looking through the Great Falls program again made me a little a sad and nostalgic. It was striking how much the community loved having the Dodgers in this Montana city every summer. More than one ad for a local store had the whole staff dressed in Dodgers uniforms more than 1,000 miles from Los Angeles. If the powers that be in major league baseball wonder if they lost anything when they ended the affiliate relationships of dozens of teams this year, they surely lost this.

The Games

Great Falls Dodgers 8 Helena Brewers 2

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.