No Middle Ground in Reliever’s Commitment to Helping

from Bats, the New York Times Baseball Blog
by TYLER KEPNER, June 11, 2011
click here for the original article

When the San Francisco Giants needed a player to speak to the crowd before their game with the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 11, the choice was obvious. It would not be a star, but a journeyman left-handed middle reliever. It had to be Jeremy Affeldt.

The first time the teams met, on opening day at Dodger Stadium, a Giants fan named Bryan Stow was severely beaten in the parking lot. This was the teams’ next series, in San Francisco, and Affeldt was asked to deliver a message of peace and unity.

“Jeremy has a unique sensibility among any players you’ll run into,” said Larry Baer, the Giants’ president. “He’s very thoughtful, he thinks about things, he cares a lot about people, causes, movements, initiatives. It just seemed natural that he would be the perfect person to thoughtfully address it.”

Lots of players are deeply committed to charities. But few think as deeply, range as globally and share their humanity as openly as Affeldt, who since 2002 has played for Kansas City, Colorado, Cincinnati and the Giants.

“Love has become ‘feminized,’ ” he wrote recently on his blog, jeremyaffeldt.wordpress.com. “When you talk about love, a lot of people will say you’re soft. But love is what saves people. Loving them. If you ask me, that’s pretty strong stuff.”

Affeldt, 32, works with several organizations, focusing on producing clean water, feeding the hungry, housing orphans and ending human trafficking and slavery. He is ambitious in his goals, and tries to address them with urgency. He is a Christian, he said, but his motivation goes beyond faith.

“I don’t want to be an American that just sits there and says, ‘I only care about my country; it’s all about me in America,’ ” Affeldt said before a recent game in St. Louis. “Sometimes, because of what we have — and we’re blessed to have it, I’m not against it, every day I feel very fortunate — we’re selfish. We think of all the problems we have in America, but they’re not problems compared to the rest of the world. So I try to remove myself from that and say, ‘What can we do to help out humanity?’ ”

Affeldt is building an orphanage in Gulu, Uganda, with the help of his teammate Matt Cain. He financed a soccer field in Brazil and a basketball court in Thailand, and built a well in Uganda, where he hopes to visit someday.

When the well was ready, Affeldt said, one of his staff members took a picture of a boy drinking the water, which Affeldt uses as the background photograph of his Twitter page (@JeremyAffeldt). Staffers called him from a satellite phone when the clean water started to flow.

“They just put it up so I could hear, when the water popped, the screams of praise, the roar of life,” Affeldt said. “It almost made me want to cry.”

After signing with the Giants before the 2009 season, Affeldt joined with the San Francisco-based Not for Sale organization to fight modern slavery. He pledges $250 per save and $250 per hold to the campaign’s Free 2 Play initiative, which the Giants will highlight during a game this month. The Cardinals’ Matt Holliday, Affeldt’s former Colorado teammate, donates $500 for every home run.

“When I was growing up,” Affeldt said, “I had water, I had food, I had shelter, I had those things, so I want to help other people have them. I also had the ability to dream, and dream really, really big — like a major-league-baseball-player type of dream. I played all these sports, and my dad let me do whatever I wanted to do to figure out what I liked and disliked. I had that ability, but human trafficking eliminates that ability.”

When the Giants played in Los Angeles last month, for the first time since the parking lot attack, Affeldt, who is married with two young sons, was eager to go into the community. He asked the team if he could meet Stow, who is in a medically induced coma.

Baer accompanied Affeldt on the hospital visit. Affeldt met with family members, then held Stow’s hand and prayed.

“He was hoping that Bryan would, on some level, at some point, know it,” Baer said. “And when Jeremy started speaking to him, his eyes opened — halfway, or three-quarters — and that was just amazing. It was almost like a power beyond us.”