Sabathia helped distribute baseball equipment, fresh produce and food and PPE outside Yankee StadiumMLB
The Players Alliance tour, in partnership with a Black-founded charity called Pull Up Neighbor, "will provide communities in need with baseball equipment, with fresh produce and food that has a longer shelf life, and with personal protective equipment," according to Barry Svrluga of the WASHINGTON POST. The Players Alliance, a nonprofit organization of more than 150 current and former Black MLBers, aims to "change the way baseball looks, the way it thinks, the way it hires, the way it's developed." The tour began Tuesday outside Yankee Stadium, where former MLBer CC Sabathia "helped distribute the goods." The tour has "some three dozen stops between this week and the end of January." The entire endeavor "has roots in the summer, when protests over police brutality and systemic racism swept the country." Three veteran Black players -- free agent 2B Dee Strange-Gordon, Tigers LF Cameron Maybin and free agent P Edwin Jackson -- "began talking." The question they asked was one MLB "hadn't really dealt with perhaps since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier 73 years earlier: What role should the sport play in furthering the conversation about race in America?" The idea is to "have as many major leaguers participate in the three dozen stops -- spreading from Florida to the Midwest to California -- as is feasible in the midst of a pandemic" (WASHINGTON POST, 12/4).
