Cape Cod League: The Lumbs of Harwich Have Created a Unique Family Affair with the Mariners
This article was written by Mike Richard
This article was published in Cape Cod Baseball League: From College Stars to Big League Futures (2026)
Alex and Jeanette Lumb with the 2024 Cape Cod Baseball Championship trophy. (Courtesy of Cape Cod Baseball League)
Alex Lumb, the assistant general manager and director of interns with the Harwich Mariners, saw himself in a bit of a quandary early in the summer of 2011. Apparently one of his interns was called back home suddenly and had to leave her position for the summer.
So like any good baseball man would do, Alex went to the bullpen for some immediate relief help.
He phoned his sister Jeanette, who was spending the summer at the family home in Staatsburg, New York.
“Originally, it was going to be a temporary job. So I asked her if she just wanted to come (to Cape Cod) for a couple of weeks, take the summer off, hang out,” he recalled. “She accepted and took a liking to being here and before long, she became more and more involved.”
As Jeanette recalled, “I knew they were down some interns, so (Alex) asked if I wanted to come up. I just figured I was helping out that summer, so I mainly was in the concession stand,” she said, adding, “and then I just pretty much never left.”
The Cape Cod Baseball League has long been known as a summer commitment that helps bring families together in a very special way. There are those families who host baseball players in their homes, while over the years there have been many husband-wife combos who have worked together for the betterment of the league.
The Lumb siblings may not be the first to work together for a Cape League franchise, but they certainly must be the longest-tenured.
From the time they were very young, Alex and Jeanette would spend several weeks each summer at the summer home of their paternal grandparents in Chatham on Cape Cod with their parents, Daniel and Marie.
For a baseball-obsessed kid like Alex, summers on the Cape meant attending the youth camps at Veterans Field at Chatham.
“I know the first game I can remember going to was in 1994 because Mike Lowell was on the Chatham team that season,” he said.
Prior to the summer of 2007, just before his senior year in college at Old Dominion, he considered getting an internship on the Cape to help further his employment opportunities in the sports management field, which was his major.
“I applied to all of the teams on the Cape and the first one who responded was Harwich and their president, Mary Henderson,” he remembered. “Her first question was whether I needed housing and when I said I already had housing she hired me on the spot.”
Since the biggest issue for most interns is securing housing for the summer, having a built-in place to stay – only seven minutes from Harwich’s Whitehouse Field – was the perfect scenario for everyone involved.
“From a sports management standpoint, (the Cape League) was a good place to get your feet wet in a lot of different areas,” he said. “It was also a comfort to be in the Cape League which I knew so well, and just being around the best baseball, so it was a win-win for me.”
He recalled that first summer internship where he had to become a bit of a jack of all trades.
“Mary had us doing everything. We were the greeters at the front gate, collected donations, ran the 50/50, the concession stand, the merchandise sales,” he said. “One of my big things, I was in charge of doing sign-ups at the youth clinic. In all, it was a lot of the behind-scenes, not a ton involving the team on the field, but more of the game-day operations side of things.”
With such a great experience his first year, the next summer, after his graduation from Old Dominion in 2008, Alex returned for another year of volunteering with Harwich.
“And I’ve been here ever since,” he said with a smile.
The Harwich Mariners would go on to win the championship during that 2008 season over Cotuit, their first on the Cape since 1987.
Jeanette Lumb. (Courtesy of Cape Cod Baseball League)
In the case of Jeanette, she also caught the Cape Cod Baseball bug after spending her first summer interning.
“When I decided to come back the following year, I took over the administrative side of the baseball clinic, so then I was there pretty much every morning,” she said. “We’d check the kids in, have our clinic, and it was there that I got to see the excitement our youngest fans would have, knowing that in a couple minutes they would be interacting with potential future major leaguers. We have even had some of our clinic participants later become interns for us.”
Realizing she had a serious intern who might have some staying power with the franchise, President Henderson latched on and doled out more and more responsibility.
“Mary put me in charge of a lot of the day-to-day and behind-the-scenes responsibilities,” Jeanette said. “Also, Alex was transitioning more toward the baseball side of it, and I sort of stepped into what he was doing, because he was Mary’s right-hand man.”
After a few years on the scene, Alex was appointed assistant general manager at Harwich, where general manager Ben Layton took him under his wing.
In addition to his GM responsibilities, he also continued to work with the interns as it was felt that since he was close to their ages, he would have a better chance to relate and vice versa.
“Mary would ask me to run the interns through appropriate game day setup and I really enjoyed that,” he said.
Jeanette would soon take on a bigger role within the league when in 2016 she was named the curator of the Cape Cod Baseball League Hall of Fame Museum. At the time, the museum was located in the basement of the John F. Kennedy Museum in Hyannis.
“That summer, we had interns who also assisted at the museum,” she said. “Several of the teams also took tours of the hall of fame during the summer.”
In addition, she oversaw a traveling exhibit that summer which was set up at the site of the Cape Cod League All-Star Game.
Unfortunately, her experience at the museum was short-lived: In 2017 the Cape League was asked to move out of the JFK museum, which was expanding its own collection and needed space.
Since that time, most of the memorabilia, hall of fame plaques and other artifacts have been placed in storage until a suitable new physical hall of fame building can be obtained.
That same year, 2016, Jeanette was asked to fill the vice president position of the franchise after longtime VP Jim McGonigle stepped down.
Both of the Lumbs recalled the challenges that came about in 2020 when league play was shut down because of the COVID pandemic.
One of the summer traditions that Jeanette had overseen in the past was to bring players to libraries in the Harwich community for story hours for the young children of the town, in addition to the baseball clinics.
“That summer, Alex and I reached out to a lot of our previous players and using the baseball alphabet book H is for Home Run, we had each player read a letter and we would videotape them,” Jeanette recalled, noting that Alex put the videos together. “We combined it together and that was really nice, because I know the kids were upset that there were no clinics that year, so this brought us a little bit of normalcy. That’s probably the thing I’m most proud of that I’ve done with my brother.”
After 11 years as assistant general manager, Alex took over as general manager in 2022 when Layton stepped down. That became a banner year for him as he was named the Richard “Dick” Sullivan Executive of the Year for the Cape League.
“That was definitely fun to get that phone call from (former league President) Chuck Sturtevant and to be recognized like that,” Alex said. “You obviously don’t do this job because you’re looking for recognition, but it was very nice to be honored that way.”
Meanwhile, Jeanette was awarded the Fred Ebbett Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at the Cape Cod Baseball League Hall of Fame induction in 2023.
Aside from her work with the hall of fame and the Harwich franchise, she has also coordinated volunteers from all 10 Cape League teams at the All-Star Games held at Whitehouse Field. Since it returned to the Cape in 2012, after being held for several seasons at Fenway Park, Harwich has hosted three All-Star Games and will host the annual summer classic in 2026.
In addition to their work with the Harwich team, the Lumbs have also taken on the role of hosting players in their Cape home since 2008.
“I think we’ve had over 70 players and coaches stay with us full-time or temporarily,” Alex said. The first player who stayed with the Lumbs was Brandon Belt, who would become a first baseman with the San Francisco Giants and Toronto Blue Jays.
During the 2011 season, while he was assistant general manager, the Mariners captured another championship, beating Falmouth in the finals in two straight games. Finally, in 2024, two years after becoming general manager, Alex saw Harwich capture another title, beating defending champion Bourne.
“That was definitely a highlight for me because I was directly involved with moves and the makeup of that team,” Alex said. “It’s all the work behind the scenes, making sure we’re in the right position, making sure your team and the players are in the right position to thrive.”
Creating a great team along with President Henderson and longtime manager Steve Englert, Alex feels that stability of the franchise has been largely responsible for the team’s success on the field.
“Mary’s (Henderson) been great to me; she’s someone that you can talk to about anything and Steve (Englert) is awesome; he’s always on the grind and keeps it fun,” Alex said. “I’ll fight for him till the end, because I love what he does for the organization.”
Alex explained the full-time role of a team’s general manager and how sometimes he’s not able to appreciate things until the seasons is over.
“After we won it in 2024, you realize all of the work that you’ve put in,” he said. “The nine months leading up to it, behind the scenes it’s quiet, and then it just goes crazy for 10 weeks where it’s like, fire, fire, fire. Then you stop, and breathe, and say, ‘We did it!’ That was really cool.”
And then before you know it, sights are set on the next season and it’s time to build another squad.
“Steve will tell me he’s already getting verbal commits for the next summer, starting in July, August. We’ll do our own thing for two or three weeks after the season and then by September 1 he’ll give me a list,” Alex said. “One good thing about Steve, he’s been doing it so long and has a tremendous amount of contacts.”
It has not been an easy job, as during offseason months Jeanette works as a tax preparer from her hometown in the Hudson Valley of New York. Meanwhile, Alex is an assistant athletic director for sports information at the United States Naval Academy, a position he’s held since 2013, and lives in Annapolis with his wife Brooke and son Colin.
However, frequent communication with team President Henderson has kept things flowing nicely for the franchise.
“I would say that Alex and I work very well together, so it’s been fun,” said Jeanette.
What started as a potential one-year summer internship for the Lumb siblings over a dozen years ago has now turned into a full commitment to the Harwich franchise with no plans of slowing down in the immediate future.
MIKE RICHARD has been the historian of the Cape Cod Baseball League since 2018. He spent 35 years in public education, both as an English teacher and later a guidance counselor before retiring from Gardner (Massachusetts) High School in 2013. A longtime columnist for the Gardner News, he also wrote sports columns for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the Barnstable Patriot, and the Cape Cod Times. He has authored two sports history books: Glory to Gardner: 100 Years of Football in the Chair City, and Super Saturdays: The Complete History of the Massachusetts High School Super Bowl, as well as contributions to many SABR publications. Also known for his exhaustive research of Massachusetts high-school sports history, he is historian of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association and is responsible for all records and statistics for the annual state tournament programs. He and his wife, Peggy, live in Sandwich on Cape Cod and are the parents of two grown children, Casey and Lindsey, and two grandchildren, Theo and Grace.
SOURCES
Information for this article is based on author interviews with Alex Lumb on January 7, 2026, and Jeanette Lumb on January 16, 2026.