A Puppy Has Faced Harsher Sanctions than the 2017 Houston Astros
Good ‘Ole Art
The puppy is sitting several feet back from the bars, looking directly at the camera. As his picture is taken by the peace officer, he seems to be fairly relaxed, considering his circumstances. Just the faint expression of an English gentleman confronted with a profound administrative error. Miffed but dignified.
A sort of: “Well, I never.”
Though after a few minutes, you can almost see the questions start to form.
"What exactly had they finally gotten me for?"
Digging without a permit?
Driving after pup cup?
Had that damn squirrel actually gone through with the restraining order?
Whatever the charge, Chippy seemed prepared to face it with dignity. A lifetime of getting the shit kicked out of him by other dogs at the dog park for having a name like Chippy will thicken the skin. No jail cell was gonna ruffle this one-year-old English Springer Spaniel puppy.
An actual jail cell. Concrete floor. Steel bars. The whole production.
There are brightly colored paw prints painted along the walls and floor, presumably part of some well-intentioned effort to make the facility feel less like a jail. The effect is exactly what you’d expect if someone attempted to cheer up Alcatraz with throw pillows.
I know this photograph exists because years ago, I saw it on the wall of Todd’s office when I was picking him up for a lunch break.
"Dude, what's with the inmate puppy?"
So now I get the story. You see, Todd worked for a gentleman named Art. Art was apparently one of those men whose life generated stories the way thunderstorms generate lightning.
One morning Art walked into the office carrying booking paperwork from the previous evening. His wife had been arrested for DUI. That part wasn’t especially noteworthy. It was generally agreed that this was an inevitability, what with her rampant alcoholism and surly demeanor.
The noteworthy part was that she had been driving around with their English Springer Spaniel puppy, Chippy, in the back seat. Which led Todd, and I guess Art, to discover something that had never previously crossed their minds.
Apparently when the police arrest a drunk driver who is accompanied by a dog, they don’t simply take possession of the dog.
They book the dog. The first page was Chippy’s booking photo. The second page was Chippy’s intake paperwork.
Aggressive behavior: No.
Biting: No.
Foaming at the mouth: No.
Hissing: No.
A model inmate. At which point Todd reportedly looked at Art and asked the only reasonable question available:
“Can I see your wife’s checklist?”
Because based on everything he knew about the situation, there was absolutely no chance the dog had been the problem prisoner. As Oscar Wilde might opine, some people make the world better only by leaving it.
The best part, though, came afterward. The photo got pinned to the wall. Not for a week. Not for a month. For years. Hell, it might still be there, if Satan-willing Art is still alive and working. Visitors would come through the office and eventually somebody would notice it. A Springer Spaniel puppy sitting in a jail cell. And then somebody would have to explain. No, that’s a real dog. Yes, that’s a real jail. Yes, we know what the charges were. No, he didn’t complete a diversion program.
That photograph remained on the wall for many reasons, not the least of which was its uniqueness in history. How many other times could this have happened? It’s one of those perfect collisions between human bureaucracy and animal innocence.
Which brings us to today’s story. Because a minor league baseball team has now suspended a dog. And that… well that just ain’t right.
Free The Dog
A Manifesto Against Canine Scapegoating
There are many injustices in this world. Wars. Corruption. Ticketmaster. The existence of raisins. But every now and then, a story comes along that is so profoundly, magnificently stupid that it transcends ordinary injustice and enters the realm of performance art. This is one of those stories, and this is where we come in.
Recently, the Tulsa Drillers, Double-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Dodgers, made headlines after one of their top prospects, Kendall George, suffered an injury in a bizarre near collision near home plate. George had just scored a run. And, on his way back to the dugout, he nearly tripped over the team’s bat dog. In attempting to avoid him, George landed awkwardly and appeared to tweak his knee - an unfortunate circumstance for a player whose entire game revolves around him being able to run really fast.
However, this wasn’t some sinister conspiracy of canine treachery. It was…an accident. A freak occurrence. The sort of random sporting mishap that happens thousands of times a year across every level of athletics.
The response? Suspend the dog. Not redesign the route the dog takes. Not alter procedures around home plate. Not shrug and acknowledge that occasionally the universe rolls snake eyes.
No. The dog. The actual dog. A creature whose daily responsibilities consist primarily of retrieving bats, accepting ear scratches, and maintaining a tail-wagging percentage that would make Aaron Judge jealous.
At first I assumed this was satire. Surely I had wandered onto a parody website. Maybe The Onion had expanded into minor league baseball coverage. Maybe someone had gotten into the newsroom whiskey cabinet and mistaken a late April Fools prank for a publishable article.
But no. The dog got benched. Which raises an important question. Have we completely lost our minds?
Imagine for a moment you're driving home from work. A squirrel darts across the road. The driver in front of you swerves to avoid it, clips a mailbox, and crashes into a hedge. Police arrive. Insurance investigators conduct interviews. Weeks later a formal announcement is made. The squirrel has been suspended indefinitely.
Or imagine a flight attendant trips over a toddler running through an airport terminal, shredding her ACL, and severing her ear as her face crashes against that little pseudo razor edge thingy that’s supposed to perforate your luggage tag from the spool. Following a thorough review, authorities place the toddler on administrative leave pending further investigation, never mind that the flight attendant could have just watched where she was damned going. The child releases a statement through his legal team consisting primarily of applesauce stains and unintelligible screaming.
That's how absurd this feels. The bat dog wasn't freelancing. He wasn't running an illegal gambling operation. He wasn't corking bats. He wasn't stealing signs from the opposition using a sophisticated network of cameras and trash cans like the Houston Astros. He was doing the exact thing everyone wanted him to do. Retrieving bats. That's the entire job description.
If an accountant makes a mistake, we don't suspend the calculator. If a golfer slices a drive into a pond, we don't ban the pond. If a fan spills twelve dollars worth of stadium beer all over himself, we don't put Anheuser-Busch on double-secret probation. Yet somehow we've reached a point where an accident involving a dog results in consequences for the dog. Which lets face it, is consequences for us, the fans.
The deeper I thought about it, the more this felt like humanity's most natural instinct. Not problem solving. Not accountability. Scapegoating. Finding someone, anyone, something, anything to blame. And if that someone happens to be incapable of understanding the accusation, all the better. The dog can't hire representation. The dog can't hold a press conference. The dog can't appear on ESPN and explain that he was simply attempting to retrieve sporting equipment in accordance with established organizational protocols.
The dog can only sit there wondering why fewer people are calling him a good boy this week. Which brings us to another uncomfortable truth.
Dogs are, by and large, significantly better employees than human beings. Let's review the evidence:
Dogs never demand trades. Only treats.
Dogs never hold out for a contract extension.
Dogs never leak anonymous complaints to reporters.
Dogs never post cryptic social media messages consisting entirely of hourglass emojis.
Dogs never get arrested for fighting outside a nightclub at three in the morning.
Dogs never show up out of shape and claim they're actually in the best shape of their lives.
Dogs don't create burner accounts.
Dogs don't manufacture drama.
Dogs don't request load management.
Dogs don't spend six months negotiating guaranteed money before immediately pulling a hamstring.
Dogs show up.
Dogs work.
Dogs retrieve the bat.
Dogs receive snacks.
The arrangement has functioned flawlessly for centuries. Meanwhile humans invented cryptocurrency, reality television, and meetings that could have been emails.
Yet somehow the dog is the one under investigation. Sports history is filled with examples of humans searching desperately for non-human culprits.
The Curse of the Bambino.
The Billy Goat Curse.
Black cats.
Rally monkeys.
Bartman.
Entire generations of fans have blamed animals, supernatural forces, and random spectators for outcomes that were overwhelmingly caused by their teams playing like hot garbage. Apparently we've now advanced to blaming golden retrievers for orthopedic injuries.
Progress.
What's especially frustrating is that nobody appears willing to acknowledge the true culprit here. Physics. Momentum. Bad luck. The unholy triumverate of human misfortune. The same forces responsible for roughly eighty percent of sports injuries since the beginning of organized competition.
Athletes have torn ACLs celebrating touchdowns, or even more embarrassingly, made field goals. Basketball players have gotten hurt stepping on teammates. Baseball players have injured themselves sneezing. One pitcher famously hurt his back ironing a shirt. Another got hurt playing Guitar Hero.
The sports injury gods are deeply strange creatures. Sometimes they demand sacrifice. This appears to have been one of those times. Unfortunately, instead of accepting randomness as part of life, we've put a Labrador on trial. And I, for one, refuse to stand for it.
Because if we're going to start assigning blame every time something unfortunate happens, eventually we're going to run out of humans. And when that happens, we'll be conducting disciplinary hearings for mascots, pigeons, and particularly judgmental squirrels.
It's a slippery slope. Today the bat dog. Tomorrow the San Diego Chicken. The day after that, who knows. Maybe we'll suspend the moon for affecting ocean tides. At some point, somebody has to stand up and say enough. The dog is innocent. The dog was working. The dog remains, by every available metric, a very good boy.
Until justice is restored, I will continue to consider this one of the greatest miscarriages of sports justice in modern history.
SPORTSWRITING WITH RECKLESS INTEGRITY
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