Dad’s baseball binge of 30 games and stadiums in 30 days keeps kids alive

It’s 90 minutes or so before first pitch, and as he stands under the “Big A” sign in a steamy Angel Stadium parking lot, the guy wearing a “look at me” life vest on dry land is laughing and shaking hands and generally schmoozing with any tailgater who’ll schmooze back.

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And at this party, which includes about 100 friends and firefighters connected to the Jasper Ray Foundation, everybody wants to schmooze with Jonathan St. Clair.

So he wanders from one crowd to the next, listening and nodding. He thanks supporters, poses for selfies, gets his back slapped.

And he answers questions, lots of questions.

Some touch on how he and his wife, Julie Lopiccolo, have managed to turn tragedy – losing Jasper to drowning – into a surprisingly upbeat mission to tell the world about water safety.

But most are about his current trek, the event that explains the life vest – a fundraising stunt in which St. Clair is attending 30 Major League Baseball games at 30 different stadiums in 30 days.

And because he’s at Angel Stadium, on Day 26 of this marathon, the question on everyone’s mind seems to be what St. Clair will do on Sunday, Aug. 16, the first day in a month that he won’t have to wake up and sprint to another town.

“I’ll sleep in my own bed,” said St. Clair, 53. “And I probably won’t watch baseball.”

The punchline doesn’t quite land, but it gets laughs anyway. And St. Clair, as affable as he is, seems too tired to care.

Since July 17, St. Clair has driven, flown or ridden in a seemingly endless series of rental cars, planes and subways to most of the MLB cities in the United States and Canada, plus a few places in between, where he stopped only to sleep.

His plans, post-Anaheim, are typical of the pace he’s kept: On Wednesday, Aug. 12, he flew to San Francisco to watch a Giants game. After the game, he flew again, to Chicago, where he watched the White Sox lose to the Reds on Thursday and plans to see the Cubs on Friday afternoon. After that, he’ll fly home again. Finally, on Saturday, Aug. 15, he’ll end the tour at Dodger Stadium, home to his favorite MLB team.

A month of that has been brutal.

Most days, St. Clair says, have started before sunrise and ended around or after midnight. He’s had flights cancelled, delayed, re-routed. He’s been stared at, talked to, cried upon and embraced by baseball fans across the country. He’s missed his wife and kids. He’s lost the crazy vest once (in Atlanta, where a cop walked him back inside the stadium to retrieve it) and he’s had one flat tire. At times, he’s stared into the sky (or his laptop) to scare off rain.

He hasn’t yet missed a game.

At this stage of the journey, St. Clair says, he’s lucky to remember what town he’s in (in Anaheim’s case, it’s near his home, in Orange), what day it is or what game he’s supposed to see.

“It’s been fun,” St. Clair said of the marathon that he and Lopiccolo sketched out last summer. “I’m lucky to be doing this.”

It’s true. St. Clair is lucky in a lot of ways. His job, managing a commercial print operation, seems to be patient. He’s got plenty of support from family and friends. Lopiccolo, a family law attorney, is backing it, too. He’s healthy, he’s happy.

There’s just one glaring exception to St. Clair’s luck.

Hard story to tell

On the day he drowned, in 2014, Jasper was a few weeks short of his second birthday, a toddler who was walking steadily and starting to talk. He was happy enough to laugh at the moon, smart enough to sound out some letters and adventurous enough to explore everywhere.

Including, it happened, his babysitter’s parents’ house.

That’s where Jasper wandered out of a living room, through a master bedroom, into a backyard and, eventually, an unfenced pool. He was face down when he was pulled from the water an estimated 50 minutes later. He was given CPR by a neighbor who happened to be a retired firefighter and, after that, he was taken to Children’s Hospital of Orange County. He was on life support for a few days, until doctors could check for brain activity. When none was detected, he was taken off the machines and died naturally, in a fifth-floor room. His parents could see their house from the window.

In death, St. Clair and Lopiccolo allowed their son to be an organ donor – something that’s rare when toddlers pass – and there are people living today because of that. Jasper also was an inspiration, prompting the couple to co-found their Orange-based nonprofit, which focuses on spreading a message of water safety and giving lower-income kids a chance to learn to swim.

Jasper was a loving and loved kid. It’s clear from what St. Clair says about his boy that his life story was about more than drowning.

But parts of Jasper’s story are about drowning.

And on this afternoon, near the end of the baseball-palooza thing, St. Clair figures he’s told Jasper’s drowning story at least 100 times over the previous three-plus weeks.

He’s told it at every stadium, where his black, gray and yellow life vest serves as a conversation starter with little kids and their parents. He’s told it for reporters around the country eager to chronicle his fun-but-important tour.  And he’s told it to people connected to swim-safety nonprofits that are similar to the Jasper Ray Foundation. Turns out there are a lot of those, many started by survivor parents; people like St. Clair and Lopicollo.

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Cruelly, Jasper’s story always ends the same. And 12 years haven’t necessarily made it a lot easier to tell.

“I thought about that, about telling this story, over and over, before doing this,” St. Clair said. “I thought it would be the hardest part of this. And sometimes it is.

“But it’s also been something I didn’t expect,” he added. “It’s helped.”

Stubborn trend

Since the end of the pandemic, violent crime in America has fallen. Same for a lot of other lockdown trends, things like binge drinking, at-home baking and wearing sweatpants everywhere.

But data suggests a pandemic-era surge in drowning deaths, nationally and locally, hasn’t yet reversed.

In the decades prior to the pandemic, U.S. drowning deaths were in decline, falling to about 4,000 a year by 2019. But from 2021 through 2023, the last year for which national data is available, that number jumped to about 4,500 deaths per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Locally, the drowning numbers might be improving, if slightly.

Through June of this year – a period that doesn’t include the busiest drowning months of July through September – rescue agencies in Orange County reported 28 drowning incidents and eight deaths, according to the Orange County Fire Authority. Of all the drownings in the first half of this year, fatal and non-fatal, 13 involved children under the age of 5.

In all of 2025, there were 78 drowning incidents in Orange County, resulting in 36 deaths.

People of all ages and backgrounds drown, though men and people of color tend to drown most frequently. And, tragically, little kids tend to drown the most. It’s the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4.

All those numbers, and the stubborn trend they represent, frustrate St. Clair. He says every drowning is preventable. A little knowledge and common sense – and lots of swim lessons – could save lives.

“We started the foundation to help parents understand the dangers of drowning. So it’s a problem for us that we keep seeing the numbers rise,” St. Clair said.

“It’s why it’s so important to keep doing this. To get the message out.”

Awareness is hard to measure, but it’s likely that the swim-safety message has been heard by a few more people as a result of St. Clair and his vest.

St. Clair’s visits have been mentioned on big screens or by public address announcers at many of the MLB games he’s attended. The Angels have publicized the foundation, which is based in Orange, and the team has allowed the nonprofit to generate donations through game tickets. It’s why the event in Anaheim, after the tailgating under the Big A, eventually included more than 400 foundation supporters sitting under the Jumbotron.

But the other goal for the Wave Maker Tour was money, mostly to pay for swim lessons for kids who can’t afford it. And on that front, success hasn’t been so easy. St. Clair said the goal was to raise $1,000 for every day Jasper lived, or $662,000, but the current number is less than $50,000.

“Every single thing about this has been great, but it’s not taking off financially,” St. Clair said.

“But we’ve accomplished a lot of great things,” he added. ” We’re talking about drowning in a way that says prevention is possible, that’s positive, rather than in a negative light.”

St. Clair said the foundation started the day he and Lopiccolo came home, in 2014, to an empty house.

“When you get home, and there’s this stone-cold silence, after you were used to hearing something else … Well, you’ve got to do something.”

The St. Clair house is silent no more.

Since Jasper’s passing, the couple has had two children, a daughter, now 10, and a son who turned 8 a couple weeks ago. It’s why St. Clair said the real answer to what he’ll do, on Sunday, when he doesn’t have to go anywhere, is so easy.

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“We’ll hang out with the kids.”