(organ music)
(crowd cheering)
- A lot of times, since it's the first game of the season,
the umpires, the players, they've seen bat-dogs before.
But a lot of times, they're not that familiar
with all the things that Finn can do.
And in retrospect, I don't really know the umpire,
and maybe he thought that Finn wasn't gonna get there in time
or, I dunno what he thought
but right as Finn was picking up the bat,
he picked up the bat and he threw the bat away
from the dog, and the fans saw him,
we got it on video and everybody just booed him.
And on my drive home, I was looking at the video
and I said, "Oh, this will be pretty funny
I edited the video real quick,
and just put that part up there.
And by the time that I got home,
which was just 20 minutes later,
the video had over 300,000 views on it,
and then by the following morning, it had over a million.
In 2019, the Las Vegas Aviators became the AAA team
of the Oakland athletics, and so Finn was the official bat-dog
of the Aviators.
We got the name "Finn" because he loved to swim.
And we have a pool in our backyard
and he was always in the water.
And then he loved to retrieve,
so we could see that we could play ball with him,
and he really liked that, and that seemed to be the thing
that he was kinda geared towards.
So we started doing that, and then that naturally
got into layer that, we turned him into a bat-dog.
(crowd cheering)
He only works the first three innings
when our team is up.
So after he works for the first inning
and the other team comes up, we go behind the scenes,
and we go into the locker room that he has.
And in that locker room he has his own shower,
which really comes in handy
because I wet him down in between innings,
and he gets to stay nice and cool.
There's a TV in there, it's air-conditioned,
so we get to watch the game on TV
so we know when to come back out again.
(crowd cheering)
He's seven now, and he still has a few years left in him.
But he's just been able to do so much,
and his personality is just so good that the biggest problem
I'm gonna have is, you know, one of these days,
and I don't even wanna think about it,
is trying to replace him.
(announcer)
He's a tough act to follow because everything
that he's done, you can't, you know,
it's just hard to duplicate a dog like that.
No, you can't go 100 miles an hour.
That's perfect.
And don't be hitting anything on your way in the garage.
Gotta turn it a little bit, there you go.