A decent crowd attended the recent Frontier League All-Star game at the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium at Hudson Valley Community College campus in Troy.

TROY — Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin has been known to say, and post on social media, outrageous things — but that didn’t make his recent suggestion that Joe Bruno Stadium needs a dome any less surprising.

A roof on the region’s beloved baseball temple, home to the ValleyCats?

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That’d be like painting a moustache on Nipper or floating a Burger King out onto Lake George. Even a retractable roof would be a desecration, if not a prosecutable crime against upstate summer.

Welcome to an air-conditioned nightmare and soulless comfort. Welcome to the Mall at Hudson Valley Community College, which perhaps we’ll call the, ugh, BrunoDome. Welcome to stale air, the end of ballpark sunsets and… McLaughlin talked me off the ledge.

“Some people are misconstruing what I’m saying,” he said Monday, perhaps aware that he was on the phone with one such person. “The dome would only be on the field in the off-season.”

What McLaughlin is weighing, he said, is the prospect of an inflatable-style roof that would be placed over the field at the end of the baseball........

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