Yakima, WA

Park # 158

What I Remember

I remember the Big Bear Dog and the Family Burger. Yakima is on the eastern side of the Cascades and has a high desert western feel…maybe that explains hearty appetites. Whatever the inspiration, the food at the concession stand was seriously big. Sue brought back a Big Bear Dog between innings and I thought it was a joke, it was the biggest hotdog I had ever seen. The Family Burger was even bigger and quite literally that. It took up an entire paper plate.

The Bears had moved to a new stadium by the time I came back to the area in 2003 and the team left for good, moving to Hillsboro, Oregon in 2012. We liked Parker Field, though. The Bears had cool black and gold hats despite the fact that they were affiliated with the Dodgers and they gave us a pair. We were also featured on the front page of the Sunday Yakima Herald Republic the next day.

The Game

Yakima Bears 8 Spokane Indians 5

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.