Keeping Hope Alive: Yankees Detail Plans For Charitable Week

By Eric Fisher, Staff Writer, SportsBusiness Journal

The Yankees yesterday announced HOPE Week, a large-scale charitable initiative that will include five consecutive days of community service efforts next week. The effort aims to take the long tradition of sports-related community endeavors to a broader, more ambitious level by involving the entire team, 18 different departments in the club’s front office, and several facets of the office of N.Y. Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Individual efforts during the week will include bringing a group of children suffering from xeroderma pigmentosum, a rare disorder that prevents sufferers from being exposed to sunlight, to a night game, with the Yankee Stadium field to be converted immediately afterward into a temporary carnival and camping ground for the kids; and a lunch and baseball clinic with Little League players with cerebral palsy and their friends, including a Connecticut father who invented a device to improve the communication skills of people with CP.

COMMUNITY SPIRIT: HOPE is an acronym for Helping Others Preserve and Excel, and Yankees P CC Sabathia, 1B Mark Teixeira and 3B Alex Rodriguez are scheduled to go on NBC's “Today” show Monday to promote the effort. Yankees COO Lonn Trost said the effort in part represents an outgrowth of charitable work the club has done for years, often in a more private fashion, or through the Steinbrenner Foundation. “We do it because it’s the right and moral thing to do, but traditionally, there hasn’t been a lot of (public) communication on these efforts,” Trost said. “As time goes by, we’ve found that awareness can have just as great an impact as money. So this is different, and we’re trying to bring awareness to some things out there in the community. The endgame here is to help spread the message that there’s a lot more to community than self, and there’s things we can all be doing.”