Atlanta, GA

NLCS Game # 5

What I Remember

It was the 189th day of our journey 30 years ago today but there was still something that made it unique. We went to a game but we did not drive to it – Game # 193 was a flight not a drive.

We already knew on this Monday morning of 1991 that the Minnesota Twins would be representing the American League in the World Series and we had already been to Pittsburgh so this would be our last stop in the playoffs and we flew down from Newark to Atlanta on Monday morning.

An old friend from my college days, Toby O’Brien, picked us up at the airport and escorted us to the game – a late afternoon start complete with a tour of a local watering hole. The town had been transformed since our June visit to Atlanta. Then, the Braves and the Mets were playing a routine mid-season game. But now, Atlanta was making just its third trip to the League Championship Series and hoping for a first trip to the World Series since the Braves had moved to the city decades earlier. The whole city seemed to be cheering for the Braves and while were stealthily rooting for the Pirates, it was hard not to get swept up in the excitement.

There wasn’t much excitement for the Braves faithful that night, however. The Pirates shut out the Braves 1-0, a score that would haunt them again in the next series, and what had appeared to be the tying run in the form of a Mark Lemke RBI single turned out to be an out when David Justice was ruled to have missed third base on his way to the plate.

The Braves and Pirates took the next day off on a travel day back to Pittsburgh while Sue and I headed back to New Jersey to see who would be playing the Twins.

The Game

Pittsburgh Pirates 1 Atlanta Braves 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 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.