Two current and one former member of the Jackson Bulls amateur baseball team are in Florida this week living a once in a lifetime opportunity for most people.
The thing is though, they’ve all been there and done that before.
But that doesn’t make it any less special.
Current Bulls Blaise Jacobsen and Andy Wolf are playing with the Tennessee White Lightnin’ at the Roy Hobbs World Series Adult Baseball Tournament.
Former Bulls great Tom Hady, who has played with Class B Shakopee the past couple of summers, is at the same event, playing with the Minnesota Blenders.
Games in the tournament are played on 23 fields at four sites in the Fort Meyers area.
One of the sites in the Minnesota Twins’ Lee County Sports Complex, including Hammond Stadium. Another is jetBlue Park Fenway South, where the Boston Red Sox play.
Another location operated by the Red Sox is the Player Development Complex.
The final site is Terry Park Sports Complex, which was used from 1925-87 at various times by the then-Philadelphia Athletics, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Kansas City Royals. Terry Park appears on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Jacobsen and Wolf have a good friend who is also playing for the Lightnin’ in Igor Gribanovsky, who is from Moscow, Russia.
Gribanovsky was instrumental in recruiting Jacobsen, Wolf, Hady and another former Jackson player, Pat Boggess to join his RusStar team from Moscow in the RHWS. RusStar won its division in both 2018 and 2020.
It was at the Roy Hobbs World Series that Jacobsen and Wolf became acquainted with Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitched for 13 seasons with the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos.
He started the second and seventh games of the 1975 World Series for the Red Sox vs. the Cincinnati Reds. Lee left both of those games with the lead although Boston would lose both games and the series.
That association led Lee to visiting the Iowa Great Lakes to appear at a clinic conducted by Total Baseball Development and Wolf, who completed his first season as head baseball coach at Okoboji High School this summer.
In 2022, Lee, who makes several appearances each season with the barnstorming Savannah Bananas, was in Ruthven for a camp and Banans-style intrasquad scrimmage with the Graettinger-Terril/Ruthven-Ayrshire High School baseball team.
Lee needed a catcher, and he invited Jacobsen.
Play in the Roy Hobbs World Series continues through Saturday.