There's not an easy way to consider the fact that maybe your favorite team (or at least the wives of your favorite team's players) is awful. And I don't mean "awful" in the sense of a win-loss record.
The Houston Area Women's Center provides shelter, counseling, and advocacy to support individuals affected by domestic and sexual violence pick up and try to move on with their lives. Through community awareness and education they work to end domestic and sexual violence.
And tonight, the Astros Wives Organization (which now officially apparently does not exist) took $250,000 away from them by canceling the annual Black Ties and Baseball Caps gala which would have been in its 24th year of benefiting HAWC.
According to an Astros official:
The team's charitable foundation is changing directions and will focus on at-risk youth and youth baseball programs.
Now, there are things we do not yet know: What kind of programs for at-risk youth will the Astros' charitable foundation be supporting instead? But that's not even the right question. The right question is: If the Astros' charitable foundation is changing directions, and as lucrative as a baseball franchise is (especially one with a $25m-ish payroll) why can't they support both?
If ever a team needed some good PR, it's the Astros. Pulling support for a Women's Center is not just bad PR, it's bad humanity. We can wait for more answers, I guess. But what's the point? An Astros official gave a statement and that's that, for now.
The HAWC has been around since 1977. The Astros "charitable organization" has supported them since 1989. But not, apparently, anymore. HAWC CEO Rebecca White:
I don't know if we will cut anything because we can't. We have to serve the people who come to our doors. The alternatives are too horrible to imagine.
So be better than the now-defunct Astros Wives Organization. Donate to HAWC. Losing 110 games doesn't make me ashamed to be an Astros fan. But this does.
We didn't come out here to play tiddlywinks, son.
-Hal Smith
