You’ll understand if Peter “Pedro” Bragan Jr. is a little more tense than usual.
It’s three days before his final game as owner of the Jacksonville Suns and his emotions are all over the place.
He’s nervous. He’s emotional. He’s excited.
The night before, after a long 10-inning win, Bragan drank a little chocolate milk and ate a couple of cookies before going to bed.
An hour later, he was wide awake, thinking about details of the last days of the Bragan era.
Nerves usually reserved for opening night are prominent during his final holiday weekend stand.
“I think I might get a beer tonight,” he said, half-jokingly.
Six months after announcing the sale of the Southern League franchise, Bragan is at his desk in a room busting at the seams with memories.
Jerseys, baseballs, newspaper clippings and pennants are among the items that ring the walls in his office, as well as those throughout the team’s administrative suite.
He hopes much of what he’s collected ends up in a museum, which will be supported by his Peter Bragan for Better Baseball Foundation.
But first, he needs to get through the final weekend with the team Peter Bragan Sr. bought 31 years ago after a successful career of selling cars in Alabama.
The team that made Jacksonville the Bragans’ home for the rest of their lives, made Bragan a very rich man and brought him something priceless — a happy marriage with his third wife, Nancy.
From big league dreams to running a shrimp boat
Bragan grew up wanting to play first base for the St. Louis Cardinals.
He was a left-handed power hitter who could hit right-handed pitchers but struggled with lefties. As a defensive player with soft hands, he said, “I could scoop them up with the best of them.”
He played college ball at South Georgia Junior College and the University of South Alabama.
Bragan said he could have been a big leaguer like his “Uncle Robert.” Bobby Bragan played with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“But I was too wild and crazy,” he said of his younger days. “All of a sudden, I woke up and I was 26.”
Bragan lasted two weeks at spring training with the Dodgers. “They sent me home,” he said.
His other uncles dabbled in professional ball: Jimmy played AA ball, coached in the big leagues and was president of the Southern League; Frank played AA; and Lionel played A ball.
One of Bragan’s coaches got him a job as a deckhand on a shrimp boat for two summers during college.
The owner later gave Bragan the chance to partner in a second boat. In a short time, Bragan had made enough to buy that boat, which he ran for years.
But as diesel gas prices went up and the price for a pound of shrimp went down, Bragan shifted to running a truck filled with seafood from Mobile to Birmingham. It required less than four days of work to make about $1,000, he said.
When that ran its course, he tried selling commercial real estate. In a year and a half, he sold one building. The buyer? His father.
“I hated it,” he said of the real estate job.
Then, in 1984, came the chance for the elder Bragan to buy the Suns.
Moving to Jacksonville
Bragan’s Uncle Jimmy, who was president of the Southern League at the time, admitted the teams weren’t profitable then. But, the trend was shifting, he said.
Run it for three to five years, Jimmy Bragan advised his brother, then sell it for a profit.
Bragan came with his father to Jacksonville to run the team.
“I never dreamed I was coming to Jacksonville to spend the rest of my life,” said Bragan, who was 32 at the time.
Early on, his father ran the business side of the team, meaning Bragan could do things like ride the bus with the team. “That was awesome,” he said.
When he took over his father’s duties, he discovered it was a year-round job.
In the months just before the season started, he’d make promotional speeches. In the months after the season, he’d put on a coat and tie and knock on the doors of sponsors.
Along the way, Bragan said, he learned the three key things needed to be a successful minor league team owner: keep the beer cold, the hot dogs hot and the ladies’ restroom clean.
Decades of memories
Thirty-one years with the team have brought a lot of great memories.
The first game in the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville in 2003 was electric, Bragan said. It still holds the record for the biggest crowd at more than 12,000.
The night in 2010 when Chris Hatcher, who had been hitless in the post-season, hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth for the game’s only run.
While Bragan was on the field accepting the championship trophy, his father was sitting on his regular bench, ringing the bell like he’d done for years after each win or home run.
“Daddy rang the bell until his arm got tired,” he said.
Bragan took over for him for a few minutes, then rolled the bell over by the staircase so fans could ring it on their way out.
About a month ago, as Bragan said on the bench his father had occupied for years, a man with his two sons approached him. We all rang that bell that night, the father told Bragan.
“That memory will stay with them for years,” Bragan said.
Last year’s run when the team won 10 in a row to make the playoffs, then won six out of seven to win the championship also stands out for Bragan.
The Suns won six Southern League championships in the Bragan era.
But the biggest win for Bragan over the years in Jacksonville came off the field.
A school program that changed lives, including Bragan’s
Bragan was looking for a way to build attendance and thought getting Suns schedules in the hands of school children would help. He offered to put schedules on bookmarks that could be used in school libraries.
In exchange, school officials wanted him to dress up in a baseball uniform and read to kids.
That blossomed into a program he did for 25 years, where he stressed the importance of reading.
He’d read a story to them, then challenge them to memorize “Casey at the Bat” in exchange for earning a glove, bat or jersey.
The first time he made the speech didn’t go well. “It went right over the kids’ heads,” he said. “I just felt like a dork.”
Soon, he perfected it, leaving decades of school children with the memory of his message on the importance of reading.
He’s run across many of those students. A few years back, as Bragan was trying to snake his way through a traffic jam, a state trooper in his early 30s spotted him while he was in “a questionable position,” Bragan said.
When the trooper motioned him to pull forward, Bragan thought he was going to get a ticket.
Instead he got a handshake from the trooper who told Bragan he never forgot about his visit to school and the message he shared.
“That made me feel very proud,” Bragan said.
Former City Council member Richard Clark also was one of those kids, Bragan said. When he and Bragan were talking about putting a statue of Bragan Sr. in front of the new ballpark, Clark suggested a statue for both Bragans.
Bragan said when he resisted one of himself, Clark told him of his memory of Bragan’s visit to his school when he was young and what it meant to him.
But the best memory out of the program came in the late 1990s, when Bragan was at Hyde Park Elementary School. The principal thanked him for what he had done that day and he asked her out on a date.
She turned him down because she was dating someone else.
“I said, ‘I don’t see a ring,’” Bragan recalled, but she still said no.
They ultimately went out when she and the other man broke up.
In 2003, Bragan and his bride, Nancy, got married in a church near the ballpark. The groundskeeper picked them up in a golf cart with beer cans trailing from behind and drove them to their reception on the main concourse at the park.
Bragan said he did spring for fancy French champagne, but he insisted hot dogs be served, as well.
He points to a framed newspaper on his wall, showing President George W. Bush hugging his wife while visiting her school in September 2003. The president told her his visit would be the best day she’d have that month. Bragan said his soon-to-be-wife corrected the president: The best day that month would be her wedding day 10 days later.
Deciding to sell
Over the years, Bragan has had many offers to buy the team.
They came when the team was doing well, when it was announced the Better Jacksonville Plan would fund a new ballpark and after his father’s death in 2012.
He didn’t appreciate the latter offers, saying they were “vulture-ish.”
Then Ken Babby came into the picture.
Bragan wasn’t ready to sell, but Babby was persistent. He already owned the Akron RubberDucks, a Double-A Eastern League team, but wanted the Suns, too.
Bragan said “no” two or three times as he and Babby “waltzed around most of October and November.”
Finally, Bragan relented. Reports say Babby paid $24 million for the Suns.
At Monday's game, if the weather holds up, Bragan will drive his 1967 Corvette around the track, then walk up to home plate and say a few words to the fans.
He’ll then retire the number 10 jersey, which was never worn by a Suns player.
Bragan’s father viewed the owners as the 10th man, helping the nine on the field. It’s also the number Bobby Bragan wore with the Dodgers.
He’s thought a lot about his Daddy recently. He thinks he would enjoy the final run and would understand why Bragan sold the team.
“He had me, so he could go until he died,” said Bragan, who doesn’t have children to pass the team on to.
The job was getting to be too much for Bragan.
Plus, Bragan laughed, “I’ll never get this gut off with six months of free ballpark food every year.”
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