A scholarship, a memory and family brought Lynn back to the Cardinals and southern Illinois
Lance Lynn is good natured and self aware about the reputation he’s built up over his near decade and a half of playing Major League Baseball.
So he understands why people would see a tattoo on his left forearm which reads “Big Nasty” and assume he was celebrating that reputation.
“You get people who like to say all that,” he said Thursday morning with a smile from the patio outside the St. Louis Cardinals spring clubhouse, “but no one knows the story sometimes. It was in honor of him. That was my first one.”
“Him,” in this case, is Trace Bittle, Lynn’s brother-in-law, who was just 18 years old when he passed away following a one-car accident in Carbondale on November 20, 2022. Lynn’s wife, Dymin, is from Marion, and Trace was a 2022 graduate of Marion High School who played baseball and golf for the school.
“This was his nickname,” Lynn explained, gesturing to the artwork. “That’s the first thing they called him when we were doing a baseball camp when I first met him, so I kind of figured that was the way to go.”
Above all his sporting interests, Lynn said, Bittle loved to hunt. The ducks and antlers surrounding the tattoo are proof of that, and the start of the legacy that the Bittle family is trying to build for a loved one taken away from them far too soon.
“We’d do duck and deer together,” he said. “We’d go rabbit hunting and stuff like that too, but deer and duck hunting...and geese.”
Now, when Lynn hunts without him, he often does so wearing the apparel line that is the fruit of Bittle’s family attempting to carry on his dreams. In The Face Outfitters was Bittle’s brainchild, and Lynn said he had dreams of expanding from apparel into outdoor gear and supplies.
The website for the brand doubles as a fundraising website for the Trace Bittle Scholarship Fund, established last year to help students graduating from Marion High School handle the costs of attending college while still pursuing their athletic dreams. The first class of recipients, graduating in 2023, is pictured on the foundation’s website, arm in arm, clad in their In The Face gear.
In a promotional video, scholarship recipient Kenley Ashmore said, “I think it’s so great that their family’s doing this for other people, including myself. It’s going to help me out a lot in college.”
Ashmore is now a student at Southeastern Illinois College and a catcher on the softball team.
The foundation’s presence is growing.
This April, it will host its second bass fishing tournament. T-shirts are being sold for rivalry baseball and softball matchups against Herrin High School in March and April, and a retail location is open most Fridays on North Radcliffe Street in Marion.
Lynn joked that when he’s recognized in Marion, where he now lives full time, people often ask what he’s been up to. By his reckoning, Cardinal fans in southern Illinois are under the impression that his career simply ended when he left St. Louis after the 2017 season, and now he gets to resume it.
“It’s like, yeah, you know, just finishing top three in the Cy Young (in 2021), but other than that, nothing much,” he said “The funny part about it is I was playing in the same state (for the Chicago White Sox). When you’re in southern Illinois, it’s Cardinal country, nothing else. It’s like Chicago doesn’t even exist.”
Still, he wasn’t a native. Bittle was, and from the time Lance met him – he was just 12 then – he was already a presence in Lynn’s adopted community.
“Most of the people in town, they knew him before they knew me,” he said. “You get a lot of people talking and telling stories about him. It’s always fun to hear stories just because you want him to live on. He was such a special person.”
After being traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the midst of on-field struggles last summer, Lynn hit free agency this winter with a strong desire to get closer to home. His family was still reeling from loss, and he’d seen how much his mother-in-law had been buoyed by the presence of his and Dymin’s young children.
“We’ve got a lot of routes, and we’re where we want to be,” he said. “It kind of got to, hey, where can you win, but also be able to be home as much as you can on off days and things of that nature, and where family can get to you as easily as possible. There’s no other place that hit all those criteria, so it was an easy call.”
Lynn’s tattoo was part of the family’s healing.
“The whole family got a variety,” he said, all centered around the iconography that represents the person they lost and the cause they’re growing in his absence. The whole family, though, doesn’t have to watch video replays of themselves as part of the normal course of their workday.
Lynn does, and every time he sits down for film study, he embraces the reminder.
“Man, what a kick he would get out of it if he were able to see it,” he said. “But I know that he’s getting a kick out of it. When you see it, it’s like, ‘oh yeah,’ and then everything clicks in at the same time. I know that there’s nothing that he would enjoy more than seeing a tattoo in honor of him on TV while I’m pitching, for sure.”
Big Nasty, after all, runs in the family.