By GREGG BELL
AP Sports Writer
SEATTLE(AP) -- Rich Stearns works and lives just outside Seattle.
He grew up in New York state. He lived in Philadelphia for 10
years.
So he was torn as a fan watching the Yankees and Phillies in the
just-completed World Series.
He couldn't wait for someone - anyone - to lose.
"I just want to make sure someone loses, so others can win," the
president of World Vision said.
The leader of the humanitarian group based in the Seattle suburb
of Federal Way, was talking over the phone while on a train
outside Philadelphia, hours before the Phillies lost Game 6 and
the World Series to the New York Yankees late Wednesday night.
Stearns and his organization view the Series and the Super Bowl,
for which it also holds a licensed-merchandise agreement with
the NFL, in a different way: bring on the losers!
Each fall and winter for the last three years, World Vision has
sent to the impoverished around the world thousands of team
championship caps, jerseys and T-shirts produced before the
World Series and Super Bowl and then rendered unusable for
marketing in the United States when teams don't win the title.
In the last few weeks, Stearns has had shipments sent to
disaster-stricken Indonesia with 1,300 pieces of preprinted gear
featuring the words "Los Angeles Angels, World Series
champions," or bearing the logo of the Dodgers, the other loser
in the league championship series last month. Now that the World
Series has ended, seemingly unusable Phillies championship gear
is being processed out of World Vision's distribution center in
Pittsburgh - items bound for Zambia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and
Romania.
World Vision tracks the delivery and dissemination to ensure the
countries that need them most get the gear, along with food,
health and sanitation supplies, tool kits for building shelters
and other basic needs.
"As hard as it is for us to believe, this might be the only
piece of brand-new clothing these people have ever had in their
lives," said Stearns, the organization's president since 1998.
"In Indonesia, with the earthquakes they've been having,
families have lost everything they own. They've lost their
homes."
Some children across the globe are wearing XXL Arizona Cardinals
shirts right now. They were made before last season's Super
Bowl, meant to be worn by mammoth linemen inside a victorious
locker room - until the Pittsburgh Steelers won the NFL title.
"They wear them as dresses," Karen Kartes, media relations
director for World Vision United States, said with a laugh.
The group wanted to get Phillies gear out to the many who are
still needy in Indonesia, but the latest shipment had to leave
Wednesday - hours before the Yankees won their 27th World
Series.
"Baseball is a social institution with important social
responsibilities and this is a tremendous opportunity for Major
League Baseball to make an impact on the lives of those in need
around the world," Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig
said. "We are pleased to work with World Vision, which brings 60
years of experience successfully assisting millions of people
around the world."
World Vision got into this game a few years ago. Kartes said the
NFL grew tired of either watching all this unused apparel get
destroyed, or of having to work with U.S. Border Patrol agents
to stop counterfeit, non-licensed or unusable merchandise from
losing teams in the Super Bowl from being sold in far-flung
black markets or on eBay. The league and World Vision found a
far more useful, and environmentally friendly, alternative.
"You talk about a 'green' solution," Kartes said.
Baseball joined by donating its gear soon after. Kartes said
World Vision is in talks with the National Hockey League to
establish the same program for merchandise produced before the
Stanley Cup finals each spring.
She said the NBA hasn't been approached, but that the
organization would welcome a partnership with basketball, too.
Since that league's championship series ends in the early
summer, that would give World Vision a year-round supply of
apparel.
Back on that train outside Philadelphia, with World Vision
shipments flying across the world, Stearns still sounded
relieved the World Series was ending days after he had hoped.
"Most people who receive these jerseys and T-shirts would not
know who the Yankees and the Phillies are," he said. "They are
just looking at these as new clothes."
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