Pittsburgh, PA

Park # 176

What I Remember

Our final run through the major league stadiums was in some ways an anticlimactic way to end our Excellent Adventure. As noted earlier in these pages, we were a much bigger deal to the minor league teams than we were to their major league brethren and while the clubs were almost all accommodating, most of the major league stops seemed like just another night at the ballpark. That was not true in Pittsburgh.

When we arrived at Three Rivers Stadium midway through a Friday afternoon the Pirates had several surprises in store. First, they had gotten us a room at the Hilton just across the river from the stadium in downtown Pittsburgh. They also told us that we would be throwing out the first pitch, the first and only time that happened at a major league game and, finally, they presented us with special Pirates game jerseys. Mine was number 17 and Sue’s was 6, together they spelled out 176, which was our stop number that night.

We met Barry Bonds and Jim Leyland along with several other Pirates on the field that night and Leyland was especially cordial – he had been a minor league manager for a number of years before getting promoted in Pittsburgh.

The Game

Montreal Expos 3 Pittsburgh Pirates 1

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 about 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.