Stockton, CA

Park # Bonus-2

What I Remember

In Chapter 3 of In League with America I write about a seminal moment that occurred on our trip. It came on our third day into the season. Oakland had been amazing. The Coliseum is hardly a classic of ballpark architecture and it wasn’t then either. However, there was a lot of baseball history in the building and I had seen it and its green and gold tenants on television many times. To be there in person starting a great adventure with a film crew from ESPN capturing it all was an unforgettable experience.

But the second day in Reno, particularly as compared with the first, was also unforgettable – but not in a good way. It was freezing cold, spitting snow and the frozen bases had to be replaced. The error-filled Class-A game took hours and there were fewer than 100 people there with us at the end of it. There was very little interesting to say about Moana Stadium and I think both Sue and I felt as if we had perhaps made a mistake. Maybe this adventure would not be so excellent after all.

But as we pulled into the warm and sunny Central Valley of California on Day Three that feeling went away and really never returned. Stockton was where we came to know that we were doing exactly what we wanted to be doing. I don’t think we said it in quite those words at the time but that is why, with a handful of days before we needed to get to another major league park we decided to return to Stockton and see the Ports in the California League playoffs.

The team staff was happy to have us back and seemed honored that we had chosen to come. We threw out the first pitch again cheered the Ports to a 6-4 win and a 2-1 lead in the series.

The Game

Stockton Ports 6 High Desert Mavericks 4

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.