In a game where much depends on fate – a ball that takes an unlucky bounce, a sudden gust that sends a sure home run just foul, a hard hit ball that careens off the corner of a base and miraculously ends up in the first baseman’s glove – is it any wonder that ball players put a lot of stock in good luck charms?
They follow rituals, wear lucky socks, eat the same pre-game meals, all in hopes of recapturing a bit of baseball magic. The San Francisco Giants’ lucky charm is a rabbit’s foot. Four of them, actually.
Alex the Great, a giant Flemish rabbit who weighs in at 32 pounds (34 during the offseason), has become the Giants’ unofficially official rally rabbit. He has a proven record, when it comes to bringing good luck to the boys by the Bay. The Giants have won 24 games when Alex was in attendance and lost just four.
Many of those victories, says Alex’s owner, Josh Row, were come-from-behind wins, including Alex’s first game, where the Giants were down two runs, before the rabbit magic kicked in, and they won by a single run.
In 2021, the Giants were at best a .500 team, Row says, predicted to win just 80 games in a post-COVID season. Then Alex showed up, rallied the team and kicked off a 14-game winning streak. Although the Giants’ World Series dreams were spoiled by the Los Angeles Dodgers in postseason play — which we don’t like to talk about — the Giants still won 107 games.
Coincidence, you say? Maybe, but it’s bad juju to question the luck.
Alex’s baseball record is impressive, but it is not considered his biggest turn of good fortune. The lagomorphic good luck charm was a whisker away from being someone’s Sunday dinner – a Dodger fan, probably – when he was rescued from a rabbit meat farm and put up for adoption.
Although Alex is not an official employee of the Giants, they’re happy to have him on their side.
“We know that he attends many of our games and is seen throughout the neighborhood and is popular with the fans,” says Casey Baska, the team’s senior director for business and internal communications. “With this Lunar New Year being the Year of the Rabbit, signifying hope, when Alex does attend a game, his presence will have extra special meaning this year.”
Alex didn’t intend to become a rally rabbit and social media darling. When Row, who has had rabbits for the last 16 years and does a lot of work with rescued rabbits, first met Alex, he and his fiancee, Kei Kato, thought Alex’s calmness and friendliness would make him a great therapy animal.
Rabbits, Row says, have all the good qualities of cats and dogs rolled into one fluffy, lovable creature. They also are easily trained, and Alex is incredibly adventurous and curious. For a rabbit, he’s also a bit of a ham and loves all the attention he gets, which is good, because Alex turns heads wherever he goes — and he goes a lot of places.
In addition to his baseball work, Alex is part of San Francisco International Airport’s “Wag Brigade,” an assortment of animals that stroll the airport, greeting fliers and working to keep tensions and anxiety as low as they can. The brigade includes dogs, as well as Alex and a pig. Alex also visits nursing homes and hospice care.
Alex the Great’s preferred mode of transportation is a remote controlled Jeep operated by Row, although don’t tell Alex that.
“He thinks he’s doing the driving,” Row says.
While he was training Alex to become a therapy animal, Row says he started taking the rabbit to public venues to help socialize him and get him more accustomed to larger groups of people. His first Giants game was the season opener, and Row noticed not only how calm Alex was with the crowd around him, but how interested he was. The rabbit really seemed to thrive on the energy in the crowd.
“He loves it when people get excited, and fans start chanting and cheering,” Row says. “He gets excited, and his ears go forward.”
Fans noticed him, too, and his fame spread quickly on social media, where he was immediately dubbed the Giants rally rabbit. Now fans seek him out at games.
“The first thing they do is touch his feet,” Row says. “They all want to touch his feet for luck.”
Alex has flirted with other Bay Area teams, too. The Warriors have invited him a few times, but Alex isn’t much interested in basketball. The noise in the enclosed arena might be a little too much, Row says.
The San Francisco 49ers also got in touch about having Alex attend a game at Levi’s Stadium, which Row considered, despite being a lifelong Seattle Seahawks fan.
However, Santa Clara County, which owns the stadium, wouldn’t permit Alex inside. The only animals allowed in are service dogs, not rabbits … leaving fans to wonder what might have been.