I’m back! It’s been a heavy week for my family as we laid my father to rest. However, due to the length of my dad’s illness, it felt more like a celebration of life rather than a mourning of death. All 3 of his children, my sister Ashley, brother Jeffery, and me, spoke at his funeral. Since my love for Braves baseball came from him, I wanted to share my memories of my dad:

When I was a little tyke, my dad got into baseball cards. He’d go scrapping at the railroad in his old green truck and sell whatever type metal he could find and turn that money into baseball cards. And when dad got home, I had to be ready. My routine was to rush to finish my homework, go play with my neighborhood friends, and when dad got home, the real fun would begin.

  • I would open the packs of cards while watching Sanford and Son.
  • Put the cards in numerical order watching Andy Griffith
  • Then watch Braves baseball with dad while Skip and Ernie rocked me to sleep

The Braves were putrid. Terrible. But it didn’t matter. We watched anyway. It became the one eternal thing that dad and I would do together over the course of his lifetime. I remember not knowing what it meant, but one time the Braves were getting hammered and Skip said, “The bases are loaded and I wish I was”. When I got to be a late teenager in college, I started writing at a blog called “BravesJournal”. Over the years, the owner changed hands several times, and in 2020, the blog was handed to me. There’s just something about writing about the Braves that will always connect my soul to my dad. 

Now we’ve already heard about the green truck (my sister shared about it, but he had a green truck that was a real beater), but the thing I just couldn’t understand was why my dad, who could surely afford to buy another truck, kept driving the ugliest truck in town. Like Ashley discussed, that truck was so beat up that dad could’ve put it up for sale for 50 cents and still not’ve been able to sell it. But boy oh boy did that truck have some stories.

One time, we were riding down Zuber Avenue and the truck was notorious for having bad brakes. Well, we rounded a curve and right in front of us were a flock of chickens. Now sometimes, dad would get this nervous type of energy, especially when things were about to go south, but even when those things happened, he couldn’t help but laugh. As we plowed through the chickens, he just started laughing and yelled, “Dead Chickens” and just kept going.

There was also a time when we packed 4 people in the truck: Dad, Carrie Yancey, Ashley, and me and headed to town. We were on Meighan, right where the Rally’s used to be, when dad attempted to do a U-turn and ran right into a telephone pole. The nervous laughter erupted. We turned to look back and a transfer truck was coming behind us. We yelled. He reversed, tried again, and nailed the pole a 2nd time. Luckily, we made it out alive and the story remains a constant that we tell yearly and like all good stories, more is added every time.

Another story that goes down in the “Legend of JoJo” was my first spend the night birthday party. I had a flock of friends over to wreak havoc inside and outside our home. By 11:00, my parents called it a night and we proceeded to go outside to make sure the neighborhood stayed away. Finally, dad had enough, came out on the front porch in his white fruit of the looms and yelled “2:40 is enough for anybody”. I think he was right.

In my earlier years, my dad and I spent a lot of time at the softball field. For some reason, I was the only one he could convince to work with him regularly at his softball tournaments. I started out as the gatekeeper, eventually went to keeping score, and then became an umpire. One tournament, I was scorekeeping from morning to night and when it came down to getting paid, I told my dad that I had scored 12 games. He looked at me with that, “You’ve got to be kidding me” look and said, “Son, there’s no way you scored 12 games. There’s only been 10 on this field”. I might’ve been a little stubborn at that time, so I argued back. He then proceeded to find the scorecards, count them, and sure enough, 10. I decided to finally keep my mouth shut.

Now there was another time when we were conducting a Men’s softball tournament. Men’s tournament hit different because in-between games, the men would go out to their trucks and get sauced up and then come back to play. My uncle M.N. was umpiring a game and it was obvious that the men had been doing a whole lot of 12 oz curls during the day. The teams got in an argument and it looked like it was about to come to blows. Tommy Stanley was there and dad turned to him and said “We’ve got to go down there”. Tommy looked at him and said “Joe, those men are going to kill us!” Well, they went anyway. When they got down there, dad got in the middle of the 2 teams and the drunkards started berating dad. Well, that set M.N. off and he was about to fight the whole lot of them, so dad sent M.N. away. Then, dad did something. He got in the middle of those 2 teams, closed his eyes and said nothing. One of the players yelled “What are you doing?”  He said one word: Praying.

Braves Lineup, Ozzie’s back

The Braves come into tonight with a 2 game deficit against the Mets for the 3rd Wild Card spot and will battle them Tuesday through Thursday next week. However, to get there with a chance, they need to dominate this series against the Marlins. Ozzie Albies is back in the lineup and will bat 2nd and play 2nd. For the first time in his MLB career, he will be solely be a right handed hitter.