Reason 1,000,001 Why We Love Braves 2B Ozzie Albies: He Rescues Dogs!

Ozzie Albies leads the Braves in hitting. He also has eight rescue dogs in his house, a foundation that has re-homed more than 100 dogs in the last year, and a plan to build a permanent facility in Atlanta. The reasons to like him just keep accumulating.

The Atlanta second baseman explained the foundation's origin to Rich, with a directness that made the math easy. He and his wife Andrea are dog people. They adopted eight dogs themselves. They are currently fostering a ninth named Buck. None of that, at some point, felt like enough.

"We decided to do something for the city of Atlanta," Albies said. "We wanted to give back in the way of re-homing dogs."

The numbers landed harder than the framing.

"We have re-homed over 100 dogs just last year," Albies said.

The bigger play is structural. Albies described the gap the foundation is trying to fix in the existing shelter pipeline. A dog that sits in a shelter past 100 days without an adoption is, in the system as currently constructed, on the clock.

"We want to give them a chance again before they get euthanized," Albies said.

The Ozzie Albies Foundation is also building toward a permanent facility, a place where dogs can be homed rather than warehoused. That is the part Albies seemed most invested in talking about.

"That's the goal that we are trying to get to right now," he said.

Rich, who runs a dog-rescue household himself with his wife Susie Schuster, joked that eight rescues made his own count look weak. He also flagged something important about the reach of the work.

"Even if there is dogs outside of Atlanta," Albies said, "we still, if we have a opportunity to help them, whatever the case might be, we actually pull for it and go for it."

The foundation's website is ozziealbiesfoundation.org. The pitch from Rich was simple. Adopt, don't shop.

The pitch from Albies, more or less, was that the dogs are out there and they are waiting.