This baseball game’s bat dog went out too early

Never get between a dog and a stick she is trying to fetch.

Meet Miss Lou Lou Gehrig, a bat dog for the Greensboro Grasshoppers, a minor league baseball team in the Miami Marlins system. As a bat dog, Miss Lou Lou’s job is pretty simple: When a player drops a bat after his plate appearance, she runs out and grabs it to return it to the dugout. Easy peasy. Here she is in action:

https://www.instagram.com/p/1t9Oq_I70y/?taken-by=gsohoppers

But last month, there was a tiny hiccup. Grasshoppers’ player Jhonny Santos was at bat when he thought he saw ball four and dropped his bat. But the umpire called a strike, which meant Santos’ at-bat continued. However, Miss Lou Lou had seen the bat hit the ground and dashed out to retrieve it.

The Grasshoppers’ director of production Josh Feldman tweeted out a video of what happened next.

Like the good, good girl that she is. Miss Lou Lou tried to grab the bat, even as Santos attempted to keep it out of her reach. Lou Lou turned away and then made one last attempt for the bat before making her way back to the dugout, empty-mouthed.

“Pro tip for @MiLB players: if you don’t want the bat dog to take your bat, don’t set it down. Learned that lesson the hard way… Miss Lou Lou Gehrig did the same thing to my lunch in the @GSOHoppers break room,” Feldman wrote.

But judging by all the comments on the tweet, which has been shared more than 600 times, everybody agrees that this was not Miss Lou Lou’s fault and that she is the best thing about the baseball game.

In case Santos is feeling sorry for himself, he should keep in mind that his animal adventure on the baseball diamond could have been even more awkward.

[h/t Miami Herald]