What started with a dog has ended with a grave. So to speak.
In 1993, my betrothed and I were attending single-A minor-league baseball games in the city's aging and well-beloved stadium. My favorite player was the handsome first baseman, Nick Delvecchio, a contemporary in the farm system with a shortstop named Derek Jeter. That was when the local team was a Yankees franchise. We've been attending the city's minor-league games ever since.
In 2006, when the Miami Marlins owned the club, the local team's owner introduced a black Labrador retriever, Miss Babe Ruth, to bring bats back to the clubhouse and take a little bucket of fresh baseballs to the umpire. Since its inception, minor-league professional baseball has been about lively entertainment beyond the match itself. Miss Babe Ruth was the first minor-league bat dog, though far from the last; it now is common among single-A minor league teams.
The local ball club's owner and management, and the city, all thought that the team would continue to re-sign three-year contracts with the Miami Marlins for as long as they both would live. The divorce was unexpected, fast, and ugly.*
Miss Babe Ruth had received a diagnosis of cancer in early 2018 and died that May. Master Yogi Berra, Miss Ruth's relative, who had been serving alongside her, died not long afterward. Miss Babe Ruth's baseball bucket is now in Cooperstown, NY, in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
In the team's clubhouse, as a memorial, two small clean dog cages are tucked into a corner.
It seems that in the off season, when the local team and the Marlins (owner: Derek Jeter), were getting ready to re-sign a three-year contract, a Marlins vice president - Gary Denbo - made a snap visit. He saw the cages and criticized the clubhouse manager for having dog cages in a clubhouse. (And a couple of other issues - laundry room, soft-drink machine.)The local team is now a franchise of the Pittsburgh Pirates. It has Miss Lou Lou Gehrig, Miss Ruth's niece, and is hopeful that Little Jackie Robinson will develop. It's all about relationships. Jeter, taking the high road, is loyal to Denbo. The local team, also taking the high road, waited nearly a year to allow the story to come out, which it did when this season began.
Jeter has long and publicly claimed a soft spot for our fair city. Between 1992, when he could hit, and 1993, when he also could field, he worked extensively on fielding. Ours is the city where he became Derek Jeter, at least in utero. Miami is very nearly my childhood home, as I grew up in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Our fair city, Greensboro, NC, has been my rooted home for 28 years.
The hubs grew up in east-central North Carolina but was seven years old in 1962 (five years before my birth). He discovered Mickey Mantle and has been a fan of the Mick and the Yankees ever since. I grew up loving baseball because of my dad (who inherited it from his mother), who grew up in Baltimore, where his family was dynastic fans of the Orioles, who were in the AAA international league until Branch Rickey moved the "hapless" St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, where the Orioles are currently hapless. (Since 1986, beginning with sympathy and assisted by a claim of relatives in New England, I have allegiance to the Boston Red Sox.)
Branch Rickey invented the farm system. A Methodist and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan College, he also, with cool strategic deliberation, had the Montreal Royals (farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers) sign Jack Roosevelt Robinson from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League. It would take eight seasons from when Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers themselves to when the hapless Dodgers ("Dem Bums") would win the World Series.
Baseball fans in our fair city, the single-A team management, and all - are grieved at the severance of the relationship with Jeter and the Marlins. We now claim allegiance to Pittsburgh, a storied franchise with its share of player-clowns, some of my own baseball memories, and all. The team still has black Labs retrieving bats and bringing out buckets of baseballs. Baseball, and lif, continues after even a sudden, painful, and violent death.
The death of team dogs, and the death of a professional marriage, is a different kind of painful from the death of one's own dog (we have walked through that) or the death of one's own marriage (not today, thank you). But death, life, and resurrection are still death, life, and resurrection.
We've been to a few games this season. We delight in the bat dogs. And the hot dogs have improved, at least recently. The local team has some real talent, whom we are excited to watch.
"The thief comes only to kill and steal and destroy. I came that they might have life," Jesus said, "and have it abundantly." (John 10:10, NRSV). Where is the theft, the killing, the stealing, and the destruction in my life and in yours? And where is the life, and where is it abundant?
*Credit goes to Jeff Mills, columnist for the News & Record of Greensboro, NC, for his coverage of the divorce between the local team and the MLB franchise.
Credit also goes to the hubs for his recollections of Jeter and our fair city.
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