A Home Run for Charity

If baseball is as American as apple pie, then the owner of the Memphis Redbirds, a Triple-A, minor-league affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, is like grandma, dishing up warm, love-filled slices to anyone who's hungry.

According to an article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the team's owner is a nonprofit organization, the Memphis Redbirds Baseball Foundation, which donates all of its revenue to worthy causes, particularly a program that brings baseball to the inner city. Prior to the recession, the foundation dished out more than $100,000 every year, though today's economic reality is causing some belt-tightening.

The main program the team supports is the local version of a national program called Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities — RBI for short — an initiative that exposes urban youth to baseball and softball. The Memphis program is called Returning Baseball to the Inner-city and boasts more than 1,000 participants in 14 areas of the city.

The Chronicle's story quotes Elton Garmon, an RBI coach who previously coached in a suburban league where, he says "pretty much every kid had a $200 bat." He goes on: "Out here, most kids don't even have a pair of shoes to play in. But hot as it is in Memphis right now — close to 100 degrees — the kids don't want to go home and are begging to stay all day."

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