Report: Hillcats announcer let go by team after reporting alleged assault

The Athletic broke an uncomfortable story this week involving the Lynchburg Hillcats, and the team’s odd break with its former play-by-play announcer, Maura Sheridan.

Sheridan, per the piece, reported an attempted assault against a now-former Hillcats player, Daritzon Feliz, in August 2021, finished out the season on the job, then found out in January that her job had been advertised as being open.

“I can’t help but think it was retaliation,” said Sheridan, who would in fact end up being replaced.

Feliz, meanwhile, was quietly released in the offseason by the Cleveland Guardians, the Hillcats’ parent club, after an investigation into the alleged assault.

So, there is obviously something to the story.

If an alleged assault can be made worse, though, the Hillcats made it worse by apparently punishing the victim.

Sheridan was the team’s first female lead broadcaster, and she brought what the club’s general manager, Chris Jones, referred to as a “wealth of broadcasting experience and familiarity with the Carolina League (that) made her the perfect fit for this position” in announcing her as the team’s play-by-place voice in February 2020.

From that, Jones told The Athletic that the team’s radio jobs are “seasonal positions,” and that he ahd changed radio people “almost every year.”

Except that he hadn’t; Sheridan had replaced Max Gun, who had served as the team’s lead voice for two years. Gun had stepped in for Kyle West, who had worked the radio for the team for four years.

That’s not close to a new radio voice “almost every year,” if that needs to be pointed out.

This is not a good look, to say the least, for Major League Baseball, which, yes, suspended Feliz for the 2022 season, but only after he’d been released by the Guardians.

That was his punishment. For Sheridan, hers is feeling like she’s been blacklisted from broadcasting in professional baseball.

“I never regretted saying anything … (But) I do think that (reporting the assault), in the end, it hurt me in multiple ways,” she told The Athletic.

Story by Chris Graham