Idaho Falls, ID

Park # 155

What I Remember

I remember Sammy the Salmon. McDermott Field, the home of the Idaho Falls Braves, was only ten blocks from the shores of the Snake River, which cuts through Idaho Falls. It seemed fitting that the team’s mascot was a salmon. Sammy, like many mascots that season, had a nightly running race against a fan but unlike many of the mascots I don’t think Sammy won too often. He ran like a fish out of water and fell over frequently which would cause his head to fall off.

We also got a kick out of a group of guys sitting on a pickup truck beyond the right field wall. Their house was just across the street and Bubba’s Brew Crew sat out on top of their truck for every game ala the higher profile (and more expensive) rooftop seats at Wrigley Field.

This was our last stop in the Pioneer League. The regular season ended the next day and then the Salt Lake Trappers won the best-of-three league championship series against the Great Falls Dodgers. None of the Trappers ever made it to the majors but eight of the players on the Great Falls Dodgers did, including one of the guys who “lent” us his room the night we stayed with the Heppners. Ken Huckaby played six seasons in the majors and was a platoon starter for the 2002 Toronto Blue Jays.

The Games

Butte Copper Kings 6 Idaho Falls Braves 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.