He looked at me like I’d asked about the antennae slowly growing out of his neck, then smiled. Years earlier Bump (Maury’s son) had been a Sports Illustrated cover subject as a hot young phenom, and I remember asking him one day in the dugout how many copies of the magazine he kept at home. Writing baseball was more than I ever imagined: the everydayness of it, the rosters busting with stories, the managers willing to talk until you ran out of tape and notebook pages.īump Wills managed the Renegades. It sure seemed a lot of people were having a lot of fun every night.Īnd, man, I was at the front of the line. They came for the kitschy stuff, sure: the scoreboard sound effects (a crashing windshield was always a big hit) and the weird races every night in which two fans would spin around a bat until they were dizzy and try to beat each other to first base without collapsing first. Baseball fans were disgusted with those warring parties but not with baseball: night after night that summer, 4,000 or so folks packed both ballparks. MLB’s owners and players were on a collision course of self-immolation, which would culminate in a strike on Aug. Louis as their parent, were moving to Skylands Park, in Augusta, N.J.Īnd it couldn’t have happened at a better time. The Hudson Valley Renegades, a Texas Rangers affiliate, were setting up shop in Fishkill, N.Y., just across the river.

I was working for the Middletown Times Herald-Record newspaper in the mid-Hudson Valley, and into our midst dropped dueling gifts: two affiliated baseball teams and two brand-new stadiums. Then, in the spring of 1994 arrived a gift I never saw coming. That wasn’t a choice I’d made necessarily, it was just how things had shaken out. My first five years in the business of sportswriting, I mostly covered college sports - heavy college hoops, and then college football, both the University of Arkansas and West Point.

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