Pocatello, ID

Park # 154

What I Remember

The Pocatello Pioneers lasted just one season and that was a metaphor for our visit too. The team had gone by the name the Gate City Pioneers in 1990 and was the Pocatello Giants for awhile before that. Minor League baseball in “The Gateway to the Northwest” had been around since 1900, but after the 1991 home season ended in a rainout the night of our visit, there would be only two more summers before afflliated baseball left the city for good.

We drove through Yellowstone National Park and stopped several times, getting some video of a herd of bison and it was a nice day for the drive. But as the afternoon went on the clouds thickened. The game against Idaho Falls began as scheduled, but in the second inning the wind began to pick up and a lightning storm rolled in. Halliwell Park was constructed almost entirely of aluminum bleachers and the fans were called down from their seats, initially, it seemed, just for a few minutes. It was hoped that the storm might blow through and the game could be resumed but the sky kept getting darker and hills and mountains that were visible when we pulled in were lost in a sandstorm. The season was over in Pocatello and an image we captured on our video camera summed it up, there was a pickup truck parked on the pitcher’s mound when we left that night.

The Games

Idaho Falls Braves @ Pocatello Pioneers – Canceled 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.