Detroit, MI

Park # 166

What I Remember

I remember the photo deck. We were certainly a bigger deal at the minor league stadiums we visited in 1991 than we were at their major league brethren. In those days national media didn’t make it to minor league parks often and thus, even though our segments on ESPN were short, the minor league teams rolled out the red carpet for us.

That wasn’t true to the same extent in the major leagues, visiting media was no big deal. Still, most of the teams went out of their way to be accommodating of our request for tickets and roaming camera credentials. But then there was Detroit. When we called the Tigers PR guy a couple of weeks before our stop in the Motor City he initially declined our request for a media pass and without it, we wouldn’t have been able to bring the camera in Tiger Stadium. His exact words when we told him this was to be Stop #166 was… “everybody’s got a gimmick.”

Finally, with some help from MLB productions he reluctantly gave us a photo pass that allowed access to just one place in the park, a photo camera deck far above the third base line. It was freezing cold that night, the Tigers were in third or fourth place and there were thousands of empty seats below us but we stayed until the end and got some good shots of a cool old stadium.

The Game

Milwaukee Brewers 8 Detroit Tigers 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.