A Serialized Documentary
We Kept
Everything.
The 1996–97 Bangor Blue Ox archive, headed to Cooperstown.
30 years in the attic.
The Blue Ox was an independent professional baseball team that played the 1996 and '97 seasons on the campus of the University of Maine, 15 miles north of Bangor. When a failed downtown stadium vote forced us to leave, we boxed up all the papers, the swag, and all the media coverage we were able to capture along the way. It went straight to mother's attic. Babe the mascot stood on a basement mannequin for three decades. Now the whole thing is headed to Cooperstown, and we're telling the story on the way there.
— Milestones, characters, turning points.
— Ballpark flavor, anecdotes, things that pop up.
— Single frames, sounds, images. The mortar in the bricks.
Were you there?
If you were at Mahaney Diamond in '96 or '97, you might find yourself in the contact sheets.
Take a lookHanding off
history.
We built a pro baseball team from scratch in six months. It was pre-digital, so there was a piece of paper for everything. The Hall of Fame is preserving the whole story as a researcher's archive: how we did it and what it meant.
For the Record
Thirty years after the lights went out in Bangor, we carried the Blue Ox archive to the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and told its story at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. It was quite a day.