Butte, MT

Park # 152

What I Remember

I had a vague understanding that the Butte Copper Kings name must have had something to do with copper mining but that was about as much as I knew until I went back to Butte 25 years later. My family and I took a rest break in Butte en route from Yellowstone to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in the summer of 2016. The Copper Kings were long gone (they left after the 2000 season,) but the copper history was still there and we visited a copper mining museum not far from the field at Montana Tech University where the Copper Kings had played.

Even in 1991, Alumni Coliseum paled in comparison to the college football field next door. There were tapestries instead of doors in front of the restrooms and the grandstand seemed temporary, which it turned out to be. It had been removed by the time we saw the area again.

I had forgotten what a slugfest this game turned out to be and the night was bittersweet for us. This was the last home game of the season for the Copper Kings and the first, but not last, time we witnessed the end of a season at a ballpark. Our tour of the minor leagues was down to its last handful of stops.

The Games

Idaho Falls Braves 17 Butte Copper Kings 11

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.