ST. PETERSBURG, Florida. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the team with the worst record in baseball, today announced that they will dedicate their 2008 season to Mimi, the late French poodle owned by Valerie Cardinale, long-time interior decorator for Alison Price, the second wife of minority owner Thomas Gibson of Ft. Myers, Florida. Players will wear black arm bands in memory of the dog.
"Mimi was sort of a friend of mine---"
"We look for inspiration wherever we can find it," said Rays' Assistant Vice President for Promotions Andy Bannister. "Nobody really important in the Devil Rays family has died recently, which may account for the team's lackluster play."
Fred Tenney of the New York Giants, mourning the death of NL President Harry Pulliam.
Baseball players first used black armbands to express mourning in 1909, when National Leaguers donned the symbolic accessory following the suicide of League President Harry Pulliam. Since then, clubs have used the symbolic armband to motivate players, send signals to baserunners, cover holes in jerseys caused by head-first slides and express disappointment with teammates' on-base percentage.
"I want you to go out there and win one for the Gipper--our Academy Award is riding on it!"
"Death can be a bummer, but it can also inspire a team to do the little things like hitting the cut-off man or signing that extra autograph," says baseball historian Bernard Small. "The Devil Rays use of a non-human, non-employee, non-playing relative of a non-front-office investor is unique in the annals of sport, and mortuary science."
Mimi
Devil Rays' players seemed both enthused and depressed by the announcement, and said they would do their best to honor the memory of an animal who was loved by all who knew her, unless they tried to take away her "rawhide" chew.
Rawhide chew: Don't even think about yanking this out of Mimi's mouth.
B.J. Upton
"It's probably the most exciting thing to hit the clubhouse in a really long time," said center fielder B.J. Upton. "The black armband will make our uniforms look totally sick next year."
Con Chapman is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and "CannaCorn", a novel about minor league baseball to be published by Joshua Tree Publishing in 2009. He has written a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His articles and humor have appeared in newspapers and magazines including The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and The Atlantic Monthly, among others.
