Jack's Baseball Journey

2007 Muckdog, Jack Scribner

It was the summer of 2006 when I graduated from seminary and we moved from St. Louis to Flint, Michigan. Though Jack was just getting ready for first grade, he was already firmly entrenched as a Cardinals fan, a fact that soon would be very important. 

Just two months after we arrived in Michigan, the Cardinals were in the midst of an improbable postseason run. That run would end up leading them to the World Series, and as fate would have it, they ended up facing none other than the favorite team of all our new friends and neighbors: the Detroit Tigers. When the Cardinals prevailed four games to two, we may have been the only happy family in town! And the cherry on top came just four days after that Series ended. All the kids came to school on Halloween wearing their costumes, and much to his buddies' chagrin, Jack was thrilled to show up for school dressed as his favorite player: Cardinals first baseman, Albert Pujols!

The following spring we signed him up for Little League. I helped coach along with the dad of one of Jack's classmates. The first two years of our Little League experience, all the teams were named after minor league teams. For that 2007 season, we were assigned the Batavia Muckdogs of the New York-Penn League. We, of course, knew nothing about the Muckdogs (other than that they had a cool name!), but when I did a little research, I found out that starting with that season (after nearly two decades of being a minor league affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies), they would be an affiliate of (you guessed it!) the St. Louis Cardinals!

Jack meets Cardinals manager, Mike Shildt

We, of course, thought it was cool that our team was in the Cardinals farm system. It wouldn't be until many years later that we would find out our favorite fact about the Muckdogs. The hitting coach in Batavia that year was a relatively unknown coach named Mike Shildt. So both he and Jack were Muckdogs in 2007! More than a decade later in July of 2018, Shildt would become a Major League manager when he took over mid-season for the Cardinals.

Just a couple months after Shildt received that promotion, the Cardinals visited the Tigers in Detroit. We had a friend who gave us a couple tickets to the Saturday night game, and another friend who arranged for the opportunity to meet Shildt before the game. He was incredibly generous with his time and compassion, and showed deep and genuine concern about Jack's prognosis. I can hardly commend him enough for his kindness to Jack, as they continue to stay in contact with each other to this day, with him regularly checking on Jack to see how things are progressing. Even if he weren't the manager of our favorite team, he'd be our favorite manager!

Little League Champ

Getting back to Little League, just as Jack's first season had a special Cardinals connection, so too did his final year of Little League. In our first five seasons we were the Batavia Muckdogs, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, the New York Mets, the Florida Marlins, and the Milwaukee Brewers. When Jack was twelve years old though, we finally got to be the team we'd always wanted to be. And even better (from my perspective, anyway) the uniforms we wore were the cool powder blue road jerseys that the Cardinals wore in 1982 when I was eleven years old and they won the World Series!

Jack batted cleanup all season long, mostly playing first base and pitcher, as our team had an undefeated regular season. We won easily in the first two rounds of the playoffs, but fell behind 8-1 early in the championship game. We pulled within one after three at 12-11, and poured it on to take a 19-14 lead into the final inning.

Our opponents rallied though, and Jack came in to pitch when our top pitcher reached his pitch limit for the game. With the score 19-18, there were two men out, the tying run was on base, and the pressure was on. What an exciting (and nerve-wracking) experience it was as Jack struck out the other team's number three hitter to secure the Grand Blanc Little League championship!

After our twelve year old Little League season, five of our players and all three coaches made the transition to travel ball. We held tryouts to fill out our roster and formed a 13u team called the Michigan Mudcats.

Father and son, coach and player

Between playing in the Greater Flint Baseball League, playing an average of four tournaments each summer, playing fall ball, and being in a winter hitting league, the Mudcats pretty much became a year-round part of our life for the next five years, and many of Jack's teammates would become his very best friends. We were committed to fostering a family atmosphere with the team, and I think we succeeded. Even as many other teams disbanded as kids got older, our team stuck together all the way throughout high school for the boys. And we were able to have a competitive team through the years too, as we were always in the running for our league title, and actually won a pair of tournaments in Jack's last two years!

In addition to playing for the Mudcats, Jack also played for the school team throughout middle school and high school. Each year in school ball, Jack seemed to get off to a slow start, and each year he battled back to finish the season strong. In fact, in his final regular season game of high school, he went 3 for 3, even as he was visibly exhausted as a result of what we would soon find out was leukemia. He also likely already had leukemia less than three weeks earlier when he became just the second player on his team that year to go deep.

 

I was always proud of how hard Jack worked at baseball, and the fact that difficult challenges seemed to just push him to work harder, when many others might simply have given up. The same resilience and toughness that Jack demonstrated over the years in the sport that he loves, he has displayed over the last year in his battle with leukemia. As such, I'm thankful not just for the joyful memories, but also for the lessons learned from the greatest game there is.