Greensboro Grasshoppers Welcome A Fetching New Dog To The Team

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.