The fires that have ravaged Los Angeles this week have left thousands of people without homes, and hundreds of thousands more on edge, wondering whether they will be the next to lose theirs. The tragedy has touched so many lives that few of us are more than one degree removed from it.
As many of you know, I spent about 15 years in and around L.A., and still visit once a year or so. Some of my best friends in the world have been affected by the fires, and others have been sweating their status all week as they navigated evacuations and worried over their safety, their families, their homes. I know that a number of Newsletter readers have been caught up in the fires as well, and I continue to hope for the best for them.
There’s a helplessness you feel from 3,000 miles away, though truth be told, I’d be useless from 3,000 inches away. I can’t fight fires, I can’t care for the injured, I can’t rebuild homes. What these hands are good for, well, I am doing right now.
So that’s how I’ll try to help. If you’d like information on how to provide aid to those affected, please visit this New York Times page, which has a list of the organizations aiding the victims of the fires.
From that list, I have made a donation to Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen, which is working to provide meals to people displaced by the disaster. To the extent I might be helpful on the ground, it would be by cooking and serving, so I am doing that by extension.
I hope you’ll take a moment to give what you can. To that end, I will donate any subscription revenue generated this weekend to World Central Kitchen’s efforts, on behalf of Newsletter readers, so you can both donate to a good cause and get more good baseball reading for years to come.
Thank you, and for those of you living through this, I’ll keep you in my thoughts.
--Joe Sheehan
