Minneapolis, MN

1991 World Series Game 7

What I Remember

It is difficult to describe the tension of this final game. In any baseball game there is a collective breath that is held until the first run scores. Once that happens we can begin to predict the outcome, but until it does the game is a mystery. Well, on this night, Sue and I and the other 55,000 folks in attendance held our breath for a long time.

Inning after inning the Braves kept coming to the plate and Jack Morris kept sending them back to the dugout and John Smoltz was doing the same thing to the Twins in the bottom of those innings. The situation was made even more tense by the fact that both teams managed a handful of base runners. The Braves got to second base in two of the first three innings and had a runner on third in the 8th, but the game stayed scoreless until the bottom of the 10th when Gene Larkin drove a ball over a drawn in outfield and scored Dan Gladden with the only run of the game and the last of the 1991 season. To say that pandemonium ensued would be quite a bit short of the mark.

At the end, all I could say on the videotape was wow. We had pulled for the Braves but had to admire the performance of Morris and the Twins. We were also tired, baseball had nothing left to give us in 1991 and we could offer no more in return. The clock had struck twelve, quite literally in the Eastern time zone and it was time to go home and move on.

In League with America tells the story of this most Excellent Adventure. I have finished the first draft of all 12 chapters and hope to have it completed and ready to be published in time for the 2022 baseball season. As the note at the bottom of the page has been reminding you all season, the book is really our story more than the story of the players and games. That is why I created this site.

The book begins with the genesis of the trip which started as the germ of an idea far back in my childhood. It tells the story of how Sue and I met and decided to undertake this quest together and what happened at each stage along the way. Chapter Three starts that in California when we first got comfortable on the road and then each successive chapter tells a different story…from how we became famous for a time to how and why we ultimately parted ways. When it is done, you will be the first to know on this blog.

For now, though, I am signing off from daily updates to this page. To the core group of a few regular readers I offer my heartfelt thanks for following along for these, almost seven months. I hope it has been fun to read and help me relive some very happy memories. I will follow through on my promise to produce another video about the World Series stops sometime in the near future if I can.

Enjoy the rest of the baseball season, I hope to see you at a ballpark somewhere in 2022 or beyond!

Bill Craib

Hartland, VT

October 27, 2021

The Game

Minnesota Twins 1 Atlanta Braves 0 (10 Inns)

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.