Bellingham, WA

Park # 160

What I Remember

I remember breaking the record. In 1991 the Bellingham Mariners had a contest on the field at each home game. They had a “Shatter the Record” toss to honor the fact that they had broken their all-time attendance record the previous season (which they did again that year.) The team would set up a board with a 33 RPM record secured into the middle of it near the first base coaching box and a fan, positioned about 20 yards away would get 30 seconds to try to throw a ball through it and break the record.

You guessed it, I got to try it and got a bucket full of balls for ammunition. I only needed one as it turned out. I threw the first pitch straight through and the crowd went wild. Well, not that wild, Joe Martin Field was one of the smallest in the league, there were probably about 1,500 people there and a good number probably weren’t paying attention but…you get the point.

Bellingham was a revelation to us. We had never heard of the town before the trip but we found it a charming small city, not far from Anacortes and the gateway to San Juan Islands.

It was Labor Day in 1991, the last day of the Minor League Season – but we still had one more minor league park to see.

The Game

Bellingham Mariners 3 Everett Giants 2

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.