Brian Dozier was born in Mississippi and recently bought a house in Hattiesburg, where he works out with the Southern Miss baseball team and catches the occasional glimpse of local hero Brett Favre.
Dozier loves baseball, hunting, fishing and Southern living. So why did he spend chunks of his winter digging trenches in Nicaragua and riding in an odoriferous bus through the godforsaken snowlands of Minnesota?
The only explanations would be a poor sense of direction, or a good heart.
In November, he and his bride-to-be, Renee, volunteered to serve a mission in Nicaragua. For eight days, they slept on bunks, ate rice and beans or peanut butter and jelly and dug clean-water trenches, because so many Nicaraguans die from ingesting tainted water.
Rice and beans? Peanut butter and jelly? For a big-league athlete?
"Well," Dozier said, "once in a while they'd find a chicken."
In early January, he married Renee and they honeymooned in Maui.
This week, Dozier flew to Minnesota — there is as yet no evidence of threats or coercion — to voluntarily ride in a bus with other Twins representatives on the Twins Caravan through our customized version of the Polar Vortex.
