2021
Suzanne Dion: She Loved the Game prudence brighton
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eLacheur Park was Suzanne Dion’s summer haven—a place to celebrate the Lowell Spinners’ victories, to grieve their losses, and to simply enjoy nearly twenty summers of minor league baseball just ten minutes from her home. Suzanne was a highly intelligent woman who likely found all the intricacies of baseball and its history a worthy challenge. But she was also thrilled just to sit in the stands watching the antics of Canaligator and his fellow mascots, the offbeat video and cartoon clips played season-after-season on the jumbotron, and especially toddlers racing the Canaligator around the bases between innings. Hall of Fame shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., once said, “You could be a kid for as long as you want when you play baseball.” Suzanne would amend that to say, “as long as you’re watching baseball.” Like the accomplished editor she was, she’d also have tweaked Ripken’s grammar while she was at it. She and her father, the late Norman Dion, were among the very first to hold season tickets to Spinners’ games in 1996, when the team played at Alumni Field off Rogers Street. They followed the team to LeLacheur in 1998 and had seats in Section 107, four rows above the dugout. When her father felt he could no longer manage the bleachers, she kept both season tickets and shared them with family and friends, most often sharing them with me, a friend and former colleague at The Sun. Her father was a die-hard baseball fan, and he conveyed his passion for the game to his daughter. She learned how to keep a baseball scorecard—which baseball writer Chaz Scoggins calls a lost art—under her father’s tutelage. Sitting in her seat above the first-base dugout with a scorebook on her knee, she drew attention from adults and children alike as she filled in the boxes with Ks. She knew the careers of many legendary and some not so legendary players. She also knew the rules of the game probably better than many umpires. When I got home after a game, I often opened my computer and googled a rule she’d just cited, and found that I still didn’t get it. By the first game of a Spinners’ season, she had done her own “scouting” of new players and would tell me which ones to watch for potential careers with the Red Sox and other major league teams. Among those she pointed to were Kevin Youkilis, Jonathan Papelbon, Jacoby Ellsbury, Clay Buchholz, Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley, Jr., and Andrew Benintendi. These players and many others became part of her bobblehead collection. On “bobblehead night” at the park, she would be among the first at the gate to make sure she scored one. 154
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