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Greensboro Grasshoppers Welcome A Fetching New Dog To The Team

Little Jackie Robinson greets Grasshoppers fans in Greensboro. Courtesy: Greensboro Grasshoppers/Twitter

The Greensboro Grasshoppers baseball team has a fuzzy new addition to the front office.

This week, fans celebrated the debut of Little Jackie Robinson, a three-month-old Labrador retriever and relative of the team's other iconic bat dogs: Miss Babe Ruth, Master Yogi Berra, and Miss Lou Lou Gehrig.

Earlier this season, the Grasshoppers mourned the loss of Babe, the first of the team's canine employees to fetch bats and deliver baseballs to umpires. Yogi has also passed away.

Jackie belongs to team president Donald Moore, who picked her out of a litter of eight purebred Labs.

Moore says she's a little too young and rambunctious right now, so she won't be sent to training school for several months. But if she makes the grade, she could start working alongside her half-sister Lou Lou next season.

“That'll be exciting,” Moore says. “One thing I've noticed in all these years here: people love the dogs. And a lot of people flat tell you they come to the games just to see the dogs.”

Of course, there's no guarantee Jackie will take to the baseball lifestyle, but if she does, she'll be following in the paw prints of a Hall of Famer: Miss Babe Ruth's custom ball bucket is in the Baseball Hall of Fame's collection in Cooperstown, N.Y.

 

Sean Bueter joined WFDD in August 2015 as a reporter covering issues across the Piedmont Triad and beyond.Previously, Sean was a reporter, host and news director at WBOI in Fort Wayne, Ind., just a few hours from where he grew up. He also sorted Steve Inskeep's mail as an intern at NPR in Washington, D.C.Sean has experience on a variety of beats, including race, wealth and poverty, economic development, and more. His work has appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and APM's Marketplace.In his spare time, Sean plays tennis (reasonably well), golf (reasonably poorly), and scours local haunts for pinball machines to conquer.

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