Seattle, WA

Park # 161

What I Remember

It may say as much as needs to be said about our visit to the Kingdome that I seemed to take almost as much video looking out off the Kingdome ramps into the city of Seattle as I did inside the stadium. The old dome opened in 1976 just in time for the Expansion Mariners and it survived just 24 years before being torn down to make way for new stadiums for both the Mariners and the Seattle Seahawks. I have been back since and to say that they are a improvement is a vast understatement.

The Kingdome was certainly an engineering accomplishment, it was truly huge and walking around that stadium that night was somewhat awe inspiring if for no other reason than its immense size. But the picture on the front of the Mariners scorecard (in the gallery below) tells a pretty accurate story about what was wrong with the Dome. Seattle is a gorgeous city but the area around the stadium was covered over by a freeway…so much for pre-game ambience, you couldn’t see what was going on inside nor could people on the inside see out. It was the 1970s bell bottoms of baseball stadiums.

All that said, it was a good game. We visited with a woman from Montana who said her family had been a host of Cecil Fielder’s during his Pioneer League days and the Mariners won 1-0. Alas, the IchiRoll had not yet been invented.

The Game

Seattle Mariners 1 Detroit Tigers 0

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.