It’s been more than three decades since Bill Craib and his then-girlfriend, Sue Easler, spent six months traveling all over the United States and Canada to see every major and minor league baseball stadium during the 1991 season.

But Craib’s recollection of the trip is still as sharp as ever, and in February, he finally published the book he intended to write shortly after the journey. “In League With America” details the couple’s trek of nearly 54,000 miles to 178 ballparks, as well as the media coverage the trip received from the likes of ESPN, ABC News, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times.

“I’ve got the original videotape from all of the ballparks, and that certainly helped jog my memory,” Craib said. “I have notes that I took early on with the intention of writing this book 30 years ago, so I pulled all that stuff together.”

Now a business consultant living in Hartland, Craib had just come home from a business trip in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States. With his work schedule significantly lighter, he began to think about his past travels and realized he had never truly told the story of the baseball trip to a wide audience.

Craib’s writing, by his own admission, was “not all that great” when he started on the book, but he enlisted Bruce Wood, a former Valley News sports reporter who now covers Dartmouth College football for his own independent website, to help with the editing.

“It just appealed to me that 30 years after he made the trip, he was willing and ready to get down and get it all on paper,” Wood said. “I really respect that he had the drive and I was impressed with the amount of work he put into it.”

Craib grew up in New Jersey and studied broadcast journalism at Syracuse University, and soon after graduation moved to the Upper Valley to become a news reporter with WTSL radio. While there, he met Easler, a Quechee native and University of Vermont graduate who was waiting tables at Jesse’s Steakhouse in Hanover, where Craib also worked as a bartender. The two started dating in the fall of 1990 and embarked on the baseball trip the following spring.

Growing up, Craib’s dream was to become a play-by-play broadcaster for his beloved Baltimore Orioles — as much to visit the different major league cities as to be around the game every day. He discovered the minor leagues during his first summer out of college, when he worked as the director of sales and promotions for a Class A team in Macon, Ga., and that piqued his interest in visiting the smaller communities that most minor league teams called home.

Without an algorithm to create the most efficient route for them, Craib and Easler broke the trip down into sections, starting on the West Coast to take advantage of milder weather in April. They opened the season at the Oakland Coliseum with a game between the Athletics and Minnesota Twins and spent the first month in the western part of the country before traversing the South in May and most of June.

“We always stayed for the end of the game, unless we were going to two parks in the same day, which on 17 occasions, we had to do because there were more teams than there were days in the minor league season,” Craib said. “We had spent anywhere from four to eight hours driving to get to this place, (so) by the time we got there, the last thing we wanted to do was leave. The baseball games were by far the most fun part of the trip and we never got tired of them.”

By June, word had spread about the trip, thanks mostly to a weekly segment on ESPN’s “Major League Baseball Magazine” that became known as “Bill & Sue’s Excellent Adventure.” Tom Odjakjian, at the time ESPN’s director of college sports, knew Craib from his days in athletic communications at Princeton University — Craib worked one day a week at Princeton’s sports information office in high school.

Odjakjian facilitated Craib and Easler’s recurring ESPN segment, with ESPN paying MLB Productions to produce the weekly show.

“A lot of people tried to put themselves in their shoes,” Odjakjian said. “How many people can take that kind of time and expense to do that? A lot of us lived vicariously through them, and that made it appealing. Not to mention the logistics of actually pulling it off, schedule-wise.”

Craib and Easler’s popularity grew through the show, and many people invited them into their homes in various cities and towns they passed through. Otherwise, the pair stayed at campsites during the journey due to a tight budget for motels. They threw ceremonial first pitches at several stops, and Craib even coached first base for the Madison (Wis.) Muskies.

A film crew from ABC followed Craib and Easler for three days in upstate New York, and a New York Times reporter ran a lengthy feature for the Sunday paper about the adventure. Craib and Easler also appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” the day after they finished the regular season at Yankee Stadium, and Craib wrote a weekly column for the Valley News throughout the season detailing their travels.

“It attracted people’s imagination in a way that I hadn’t really anticipated, and I don’t think ESPN or the folks at MLB Productions had either,” Craib said. “It took off and sort of took on a life of its own.”

They attended Nolan Ryan’s record seventh no-hitter in Arlington, Texas on May 1, the MLB All-Star Game in Toronto in July and minor league playoff games in Stockton, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz., in September. Craib and Easler also went to both the National and American League Championship series, as well as all seven games of what is widely considered to be among the greatest World Series of all time, between the Twins and Atlanta Braves.

Craib and Easler stayed together for two years after the trip. They moved to Bend, Ore., in the spring of 1992, where Craib took a job covering the brand-new Bend Rockies for the newspaper and Easler worked in the front office. After parting ways at the end of 1993, Craib returned to New England, while Easler has remained in Oregon. Craib reconnected with Easler as he began working on the book to make sure all his information was accurate.

“I’ve been very pleased and gratified that a bunch of people I know who are not baseball fans at all have said they really enjoyed (the book), mostly because it was about a guy who chased his dream,” Craib said. “That’s the central theme I was hoping to get across.”

Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.

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