Last week I wrote about the experience of attending a Texas Rangers game at Globe Life Park, and sitting in the sun in 90-plus-degree temperatures. However, there’s more to the story.

The Rangers were playing the Kansas City Royals that day, and one of the television broadcasters for the Royals is a former player whom I hadn’t seen in over 30 years, Rex Hudler. So, I went to the television booth in the press box to renew acquaintances with the man we used to call “Rex Dog.”

I reminded Hudler that I had met in and spoke with him a few times when he played with the Montreal Expos (1988-89). As we chatted, it was a game long before his time with the Expos in which we had a connection, and shared our memories of a very scary incident.

In 1978, I was a batboy for the Jamestown Expos, and the team took me and another batboy on one road trip that season; a two-game series with a one-night hotel stay in Oneonta, New York. To a 13-year-old batboy, it was a thrill to ride the bus and feel as if I was a member of the team, and to get to stay in a hotel without my parents. Hudler was a member of the Oneonta Yankees that season, and was playing in that series against Jamestown.

I don’t remember much about the first game of that series; however, the incidents surrounding the second game are etched in my memory forever. The team was supposed to play the game that night, jump on the bus, and take the five-hour ride back to Jamestown, arriving around 3 a.m. My dad was to planning to pick me up at the stadium parking lot, and we would head home and prepare to travel to Buffalo to catch a morning flight to Arizona, to begin a vacation visiting family. It was about a two-hour drive from Jamestown to the Buffalo airport.

Well, those plans were almost thwarted by circumstances beyond our control.

First off, every time Oklahoma-native Tommy Joe Shimp pitched for the Jamestown Expos, it rained, and he was the starter on the mound that night. Sure enough, during the game it began to rain and there was a rain delay. Everyone on the team knew that my travel schedule was tight, my parents had made that clear to the team’s manager, Pat Daugherty, before we left home and Daugherty promised my father, I would be home in time to not miss our flight to Phoenix.

During the rain delay, I had a worried look on my face, wondering how long this was going to delay the game and would I get home in time. Shimp came to me in the dugout and simply said, “I’m sorry,” acknowledging that it might in some way be his fault that it was raining; after all, he was pitching that night.

Once play restarted, something else happened that when I reminded Hudler of the incident, he asked, “Were you at that game? Wow, I sure remember that.” I told Hudler that indeed I was there, in the dugout with the Expos.

What happened was, one of the batters fouled back a pitch that hit the umpire right in the Adam’s Apple, causing him to pass out on the field. This was before the neck protector was added to the face mask. In those days, emergency crews weren’t on hand at every game, as they are now, so we had to wait while someone called 911 (no cell phones either), and then it seemed like 20-minutes went by before the ambulance arrived. Then, there was a long delay while they worked to resuscitate the umpire on the field, put him on the stretcher and drive off the field to take him to the hospital. On top of all that, since the New York-Penn League only employed two umpires per game, we had to wait for the Oneonta general manager to find a local umpire who could rush over to the stadium and finish the game on the bases, while the base umpire suited up to work behind the plate. All of this took more than an hour, and now I was really worried we wouldn’t get back in time to catch our flight in Buffalo.

Hudler began telling this story to his broadcast partners in the booth as we remembered this incident so clearly. It was certainly something that was ingrained in his memory, as well as mine, as we weren’t sure at the time if the umpire would live; however, he did recover.

When we got on the bus to head home, I was crying because I was sure we wouldn’t make it in time. Daugherty reassured me we would and he called my dad from the pay phone before we left the stadium to give him our new estimated time of arrival back to the stadium in Jamestown; 5:30 a.m. Shimp, still feeling somewhat responsible, stayed up front with the bus driver all the way home, encouraging him to keep going and to push the speed limit, because we had to get home as soon as possible.

As I got off the bus, someone told me what Shimp had done, while I and everyone else was sleeping. I thanked him, and my parents thanked him, as we jumped in my uncle’s car to drive to Buffalo.

If that wasn’t enough to stress us out, there’s even more to the story. On the way to Buffalo, my uncle ran over a trailer hitch in highway that tore something under his car causing the vehicle to stall out on the side of the road. Some nice young man in a pick up truck stopped to give us a hand. My uncle insisted that the guy give us a ride to the airport, and that he would be okay in getting back to Jamestown. This upset my father, but he knew he didn’t have much of choice except to lose all the money we had spent on the airline tickets for the three of us.

The young man proved to be an angel sent by God, as he knew Buffalo better than any of us, and was able to get us right to the terminal where we made our flight in time, and had a great vacation in Arizona.