Chicago, IL

Park # 170

What I Remember

There are volumes written about Wrigley Field and its American League cousin, Fenway Park in Boston. There isn’t a lot that I will add here except that it was all true. The ivy vines on the short outfield wall, the manual scoreboard, the homers thrown back – we saw it all and we loved it.

There is one that that those two parks had in common, however, that does not seem to get enough appreciation. Wrigley Field isn’t in Chicago, it is part of Chicago – squeezed into an otherwise normally functioning neighborhood. I was looking again at some video that Sue shot looking down from the upper deck. There are seats, set well back in the lower deck, that are just a few feet away from a cab passing by on the street. They are separated only by a normal chain link fence. Friendly Confines indeed. Wrigley Field’s constraints are to my mind its biggest gifts.

We arrived late after driving down from Minneapolis for a Wednesday matinee but since we had been to the park just three days earlier we were not particularly bothered by that. As I recall, we went for a beer at the famous Cubby Bear after the game.

The Game

Philadelphia Phillies 5 Chicago Cubs 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.