Milt Wilcox

Ball in his right hand, Milt Wilcox comes to a set and looks to Sparky Anderson. But this isn't Tiger Stadium, and it's not Detroit's championship season of 1984. Crouching on the end of a dock at the Nautical Mile Festival in Freeport, N.Y., Wilcox has a tennis ball in his grip. And Sparky Anderson? Well, that's not his former manager but his 78-pound black Lab, ready to jump more than 20 feet into a pool to retrieve the ball once it's tossed. Stationed next to the pig races and a few spots down from the inflatable moon bounce, the dog dock-jumping event is the work of Wilcox's company, Ultimate Air Dogs. "I've turned into a real carnival guy," Wilcox, 57, says with a laugh.

While relaxing on his lakefront property in Michigan five years ago, Wilcox, a 16-year major leaguer who peaked with a 17-8 record for the Tigers in 1984 (he won Game 3 of the World Series against the Padres that year), tuned into the Great Outdoor Games on ESPN, saw the burgeoning sport of dog jumping and said to himself, My dog can do that. Sparky won the second competition he entered, and a year later Wilcox founded Ultimate Air Dogs. In 2004 Sparky became the first dog to qualify for the finals of the Great Outdoor Games, the Super Retriever Series and the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge in the same year. His longest jump: 22' 7". "He's sort of like I was in my career," says Wilcox, who had a lifetime record of 119-113. "I didn't throw the hardest. I didn't have the best curveball. But I was a competitor."

Wilcox and his 31-year-old son, Brian, manage Ultimate Air Dogs, which has three traveling docks and will stage 35 events this year. "It's the owners who get hooked on it," he says, "but the dogs love doing it." Wilcox also coaches at Tigers fantasy camps and at the Detroit Batting Academy, but when he works with Sparky it's clear he's found his new passion. "I've been in front of 50,000 people with 50 million watching on television," Wilcox says. "The thrill I get from dog jumping is the same as when I was playing ball."