Boise, ID

Park # 156

What I Remember

The Boise Hawks had not yet become the enemy. Boise was a southern division rival of the Bend Rockies when I came back to Central Oregon to cover the fledgling Rox in the summer of 1992 and they were also the defending champions of the league, so there was no love lost between Bend and Boise that year.

However, when Sue and I arrived in Idaho’s capital city for a Thursday night game that late August of 1991 we did not know that any of that was to come. The Hawks were on the brink of wrapping up a division title and the playoff atmosphere was infectious for their game against the Eugene Emeralds that night. The Hawks led Eugene by three games with five to play and could thus wrap up the division title with a win, which they did.

It was a gorgeous night for baseball and the sell-out crowd enjoyed every minute of the clinching evening. It was one of the best minor league crowds we saw that year.

The Game

Boise Hawks 5 Eugene Emeralds 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.