Bill Craib had always intended to write a book about his trip that captured the nation’s attention 32 years ago.

In 2020, when the global pandemic hit and his business consulting gigs dried up, the former Bend resident got to work digging through all the notes, tapes and memorabilia that had been sitting in his basement.

“In League with America: The Story of an Excellent Adventure” chronicles Craib’s successful mission to attend a baseball game at all 26 major league parks and all 152 minor league parks in the 1991 season with then-girlfriend Sue Easler. Their video footage, dubbed “Bill & Sue’s Excellent Adventure,” aired weekly on ESPN and they were featured in Sports Illustrated and the New York Times and appeared on ABC News, CNN and “Good Morning America.”

Small-town newspapers were interested as well, and when Craib and Easler came to Bend to watch the Bend Bucks — members of the Class A Short Season Northwest League from 1987 through 1991 — former longtime Bulletin sports editor Bill Bigelow set out to interview Craib and Easler while the team played at Vince Genna Stadium.

“Personally, I thought it was a really cool thing that they were trying to do,” Bigelow said this week. “I thought that would be pretty amazing to do. When it became evident they were going to find their way to Bend … I started tuning in to the ESPN broadcasts.”

A Central Oregon summer hailstorm postponed the game and left Craib and Easler with a drenched tent at their campsite at Tumalo State Park. Bigelow and his wife Sandy took them out to dinner at Chan’s Chinese Restaurant and invited them to stay the night at their home in Bend.

“I thought, heck, maybe I could be a good guy here and get a little bit better interview from them,” Bigelow said. “They were really nice kids. Their story was pretty well known by that time. They were just real normal down-to-earth kids that were doing this thing that was amazing and that was admirable.”

Craib and Easler stayed with the Bigelows that night and left the next morning.

“Even though we got rained out in Bend, it remained a special place for me,” Craib recalled recently of Bend. “We kept in touch (with the Bigelows) and that’s how I came back to Bend in 1992 and 1993.”

Bigelow’s Aug. 19, 1991, article in The Bulletin was headlined, “Travelers have hail of a time.”

Craib, now 59 and living in Hartland, Vermont, worked as a stringer for The Bulletin, covering the Bend Rockies — a Class A Short Season Northwest League team from 1992 to 1994 affiliated with the Colorado Rockies. There was peak interest at Vince Genna in 1992 because the Colorado Rockies were about to begin play in 1993 as an MLB expansion team.

“It was the first Rockies affiliate, so there was a fair amount of interest from Denver,” Craib recalled. “They hadn’t started playing in Denver yet, but all their players were in Bend. So I wrote a weekly column for the (Denver-based) Rocky Mountain News also. I did that in 1992 and did the Bulletin gig again in 1993. Sue and I went our separate ways at the end of that fall and I moved back East and she moved to Portland.”

Craib always had fond memories of Bend, which he refers to in his book: “We made some lifelong friends and some happy memories. If I close my eyes I can still see the view of the Cascades from the press box at Vince Genna Stadium.”

A return to Bend

Craib returned to Bend to live in Central Oregon from 2000 to 2003, before leaving on another trip across the country to every major and minor league ballpark, which sparked another Bulletin article by Bigelow on March 30, 2003.

“He’s crazy, you say, a derelict,” Bigelow wrote. “But consider this: He’s done it before.”

Craib is on yet another summer-long trip, this time with his 15-year-old son Alistair, focused on towns that used to have MLB-affiliated baseball but now host teams in leagues such as the summer college wood-bat West Coast League.

Count Bend among those, as the Bend Elks are set to conclude their WCL regular season at Cowlitz, Washington, on Sunday.

Craib was back in Bend last month to attend an Elks game at Vince Genna Stadium with Alistair. They again stayed with the Bigelows and ate at Chan’s.

“It was a great crowd, a really great crowd,” Craib said. “I can’t remember very many crowds for the Bend Rockies as good as that one. It was amazing. I really mean that. That sight that you get over the left-field wall is magical. You look out at the Cascades as the sun is gradually setting behind center field, and it’s amazing. It’s not a fancy ballpark by an stretch, but for me it holds a lot of memories. It was great to be back. I loved living in Bend.”

Bigelow said they did a lot of reminiscing. “I think it’s really cool that he finally finished his book,” Bigelow said. “He’s been wanting to do that forever.”

An idea forms

Craib was raised in New Jersey and attended Syracuse University with dreams of becoming a sportscaster and the play-by-play man for his beloved Baltimore Orioles.

“I found out that I had a fair amount of competition,” he said.

He ended up taking a job out of college as the director of sales and promotion for the Macon Pirates in Macon, Georgia, in 1986. Craib handled the public-address announcing and tried to sell fence advertising. When he came down with mononucleosis and could no longer work he returned home to New Jersey. He opened his Baseball Bluebook, which had the schedule for every major and minor league team.

“I had no clue there were so many teams,” Craib said. “I figured out there were 151 other minor league towns. I started to play around and wondered if it was possible to see all these teams in one season. I got a big pad of paper and a calendar and a map, and started to see if it was possible. I found out that it was. It would be possible over the course of a baseball season to go to all 26 major league parks and 152 minor league towns. We would have to double up with two parks in the same day 17 times.”

Craib, then 27, eventually pitched his idea to a friend who had been director of programming at ESPN. The friend got him in touch with the producers of ESPN’s weekly program “Major League Baseball Magazine.”

“They said we’ll give you a video camera and you send us back the tapes once a week,” Craib recalled.

Across the country and back again

Craib and Easler set out in a brand new minivan, attending their first game in Oakland on April 9, 1991. ESPN sent out a film crew to get footage of the couple starting their adventure.

“Three weeks later we were at a concession stand in Palm Springs or somewhere and our show comes on and there’s our first segment,” Craib said. “Pretty soon we were on every week.”

Craib and Easler found themselves in Arlington, Texas, on May 1, to see pitching legend Nolan Ryan’s seventh and last no-hitter.

“It really was amazing,” Craib recalled. “We went to all seven games of the World Series that year. Twins-Braves, Jack Morris with the 10-inning shutout. It was a great World Series, but it was hard to top Nolan Ryan’s seventh no-hitter. I went to 160 more parks in 2003, and I’ve never seen another no-hitter. It was amazing to have that be the one.”

Minor league teams would prepare for Craib and Easler and set up crazy things for them to do: coaching first base, working with the grounds crew, running in dizzy-bat races.

Craib caught a practice fly ball in Buffalo, New York, in front of about 10,000 fans, a memory that stuck with him.

“We did stuff that I don’t know would be allowed anymore,” Craib said.

A $5,000 sponsorship from Foot Locker helped them continue their trip when they were nearly out of money.

“We started with $3,000, just sort of hoping we’d find a sponsor along the way,” Craib said.

Craib and Easler put 53,970 miles on the new minivan, going west to east and back west again. They finished in Yankee Stadium for their 178th stop. Their parents came to the game with them and they were featured on the Jumbotron.

MLB Productions paid for airfare to send the couple to the World Series, in which the Twins beat the Braves in seven games.

Another baseball trip

Craib now lives in Vermont with his wife and son and continues to work as a business consultant, and Easler still lives in Portland with her husband and stepson and works as an underwriting consultant. The two reconnected for the book and there is a section near the end of the book called “Sue’s Take.” (“In League with America” is available on Amazon for $19.49.)

Craib is about two months into his latest baseball trip, set to finish Aug. 16 in Syracuse. He blogs about his trip at inleaguewithamerica.blog. The minor league contraction from 160 teams to 120 in 2021 got him interested in visiting towns that used to have minor league teams.

“A lot of the towns we saw in 1991 don’t have teams anymore,” Craib said. “A whole bunch in the Northwest. I’ve been going back to those towns with the idea of writing another book some day with the idea of how baseball has survived.”

Criab said that fans in these towns may enjoy watching baseball, but they are not connected in any way to MLB.

“And I think that’s too bad for Major League Baseball,” he said.

Minor league contraction and the pandemic helped spur Craib to write the book he had planned to write in 1992, but so did the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I had worked in Washington when I was in high school and in college, and it had a big impact on me,” Craib said. “I thought I knew this country. Now everybody is basically red or blue.”

He said his 1991 trip and his book are about “one America.”

“A place where multiple people took us into their homes,” he said, “and gave us lots of kindness.”