ORLANDO, Fla. — When Bob Boone died earlier this week at age 78, baseball lost a legendary catcher, a World Series champion and one of the greatest defensive players ever to squat behind home plate.

But Orlando lost something else. We lost another little piece of a big league baseball dream that has been dangling tantalizingly in front of us for nearly four decades.

Hop up on my knee and let ol’ grandpappy here tell you a story about the Orlando SunRays — the Major League Baseball franchise that never was. The team that had an owner, a manager, a front office, a name and even a plan for a beautiful downtown ballpark. Everything, it seemed, except Major League Baseball’s permission to exist.

And Bob Boone was supposed to be our manager.

Back in 1990, the irrepressible Pat Williams — the same visionary who helped bring the NBA’s Magic to Orlando — convinced Boone to become the first manager of the would-be expansion SunRays. This wasn’t some washed-up baseball lifer looking for a paycheck. Boone was a seven-time Gold Glove winner, a four-time All-Star and the catcher who helped lead the Philadelphia Phillies to their first World Series championship in 1980. He would finish his 19-year playing career having caught 2,225 major league games.

He was baseball royalty, the patriarch of a three-generation major-league family that includes his father Ray and sons Bret and Aaron, the current Yankees manager. And he believed in Orlando.

“I’m thrilled at the chance to start a franchise from scratch,” Boone said back then.

Imagine that. Bob Boone standing in an Orlando dugout. Pat Williams sitting in the owner’s box. A packed downtown stadium on a warm summer night. The crack of the bat. The roar of the crowd. It was all so close you could almost smell the peanuts and Cracker Jack.

Williams had recruited billionaire Amway founder Rich DeVos to bankroll the franchise. Orlando had collected 7,500 season-ticket deposits and lined up corporate commitments for thousands more. A proposed 35,000-seat ballpark was in the works.

But in 1991, baseball’s expansion committee delivered the crushing verdict. Miami and Denver were in. Orlando was out. Too small a television market, they said. Too many stadium questions. Too much uncertainty.

The irony? DeVos would eventually buy the Orlando Magic later that same year, becoming the most influential owner in the city’s sports history.

And Williams? He never stopped dreaming. Even after the SunRays disappeared, even after the years turned into decades, even after Orlando grew from an ambitious little tourist town into a booming American metropolis, Pat kept believing baseball belonged here.

He and co-founder Jim Schnorf launched the Orlando Dreamers in 2019, renewing the same seemingly impossible quest. Just a few days ago, Orlando climbed past Detroit into the nation’s 14th-largest television market. We’re still the largest American market without an MLB or NFL franchise.

And, yet, we’re still considered a longshot.

Sound familiar?

Williams died in 2024. Boone is gone now, too.

But the Dreamers keep swinging.

Maybe that’s the real legacy of these two remarkable sportsmen. Not the championships Boone won or the franchises Williams helped build, but their stubborn, beautiful refusal to accept that a dream is dead simply because somebody says no.

Somewhere up in baseball heaven, I’d like to imagine Pat Williams is working the phones, selling another impossible idea. And Bob Boone is standing beside him, catcher’s mitt in hand, ready to manage.

Keep a spot in the lineup for us, gentlemen.

Orlando isn’t done dreaming yet.

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