Renegades Fever: Notes and nuggets from 30 years of Renegades baseball

With the Hudson Valley Renegades celebrating their 30th anniversary season in 2024, we are periodically going to look back at some of the fun stat nuggets from franchise history. These factoids, if you will, will cast a wide net, and serve as a quasi-dumping ground for some of the more interesting and off the wall baseball notes from the last 30 years.

INF Dan Grummitt hit 22 home runs for the 1999 Renegades in 287 at-bats. He fell one shy of setting the New York-Penn League home run record, and still holds a tie for the most homers by a Renegade in a single season. According to MLB stats, there were only two other 20-homer seasons in NY-Penn League history: John Hennell’s NYPL record 23 with Utica in 1982, and Marcell Ozuna hit 21 in 2010 with Batavia, and they record just five 20-homer seasons all-time in Class Short-Season A. His rate of hitting a home run every 13.05 at-bats is the approximate equivalent of hitting 45-50 home runs in a Major League season.

LHP Joe Kennedy struck out 101 batters in 95.0 innings in 1999. No Renegades pitcher would throw more than 87.1 innings or strike out more than 97 in a season until 2021 when the Renegades became a full-season team. His strikeout total was the ninth-most NYPL history, and no pitcher struck out more than 101 batters in a season after Kennedy did.

RHP Reid Ryan went 5-5 with a 2.90 ERA in 14 games (all starts) for the inaugural 1994 Hudson Valley Renegades. He pitched one more year in the Rangers organization before retiring and is now the CEO of Ryan-Sanders Baseball Inc., which owns the Round Rock Express and Corpus Christi Hooks.

LHP Ryan Reid went 1-9 with a 6.24 ERA in 15 games (12 starts) for the 2006 Hudson Valley Renegades. He made seven appearances with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2013, posting a 1.64 ERA and 1 save in 11.0 MLB innings.

In 1994, RHP Bucky Buckles led the Renegades with 18 saves in 27 games. In 1995, RHP Brian Martineau saved 18 games in 30 appearances. No other Renegades pitchers have recorded more than 15 saves in a Hudson Valley uniform.

Former Major Leaguers Josh Hamilton and Doug Waechter each hold the distinction of longest time in between playing stints with the Renegades, with seven years. Hamilton was with the club in 1999 and 2006, while Waechter played for the Renegades in both 2000 and 2007. Hamilton was returning from a three-year absence from playing professional baseball, while Waechter was rehabbing an offseason shoulder surgery.

Hopefully you enjoyed this trivial trip down memory lane, we’ll be back with some more in a few weeks!