On the Twelfth day of Christmas, Tiger sent to me,
Twelve waitresses serving,
Eleven cell phones ringing,
Ten reporters peeping,
Nine ladies dancing,
Eight maids a-blogging,
Seven texts awaiting,
Six police a-caving,
Five Golden Clubs!
Four call girls,
Three pre nups,
Two ER visits,
And an Escalade in the neighbors tree!

Thanks Jay Pinsonnault of Jay Pince Tours for crafting this one!! He’s without Twitter, can be found at http://www.jaypincetours.com.

For the 9th straight year, amateur baseball players throughout the Boston area took part in Winterball, a freeze-fest baseball game held to benefit Toys for Tots and the United States Marine Corp. The 9-inning game was scheduled to be played snow or shine.

Temperature was 42 degrees at game time with a steady mist. The field was muddy and the turf was a mess. But more than 50 athletes, two umpires, and about two dozen fans were in attendance to watch Team Santa battle Team Rudolph. The rosters were huge. Rudolph had 27 guys in their batting order at one point. As one of the event organizers, I of course hit dead last. I managed to work a full-count walk in my lone at-bat. I later scored on a double, almost passing the slow runner ahead of me, Earl Murphy, who is indeed a much better ballplayer than I am, yet slower than most large animals.

The mission of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots Program is to collect new, unwrapped toys during October, November and December each year, and distribute those toys as Christmas gifts to needy children in the community in which the campaign is conducted. Patrick Slattery of the Boston Fire Department was on hand to address the athletes, collect more than 50 toys, and delivery the Ceremonial First Pitch. Ryan Bere and Smokey Moore of the Boston Men’s Baseball League, who also hosted the event, managed the squads with excellence, even though Bere delegated nearly every task so he could focus on staying warm.

A ton of kids are going to be thrilled by the spirited outcome of the game, even though Santa got his butt handed to him by Rudolph, 8-6.

Do you want to know how Charity Hop got started? I’m Brett Rudy, one of the two co-founders of the company. Since the mid-1990’s, I helped run marketing and events for the Boston Men’s Baseball League - the largest amateur baseball league in New England. In 2002, while managing the Boston White Sox in that league, I drafted a young second baseman out of my alma mater, Northeastern University, named Mike Lembo. Mike and I both shared a passion for baseball and marketing and collectively did what we could to grow league events philanthropically. We created an annual fundraiser with legendary pitcher Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox in 2004 called 100 Innings of Baseball. It was the longest baseball game ever - 33 straight hours over 101 innings - and raised $112,000 for Curt’s Pitch for ALS, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease. The Red Sox won the World Series, and the event inspired us to launch Charity Hop Sports Marketing. The name integrates the word “charity,” and also doubles in baseball-terms meaning an “easy ground ball.” Thus, Charity Hop makes your fundraising easy.

At first, we merely built a website. Within a week, we were contacted by Charity Wines looking for us to help them put professional baseball players on wine bottles. We sold 800,000 bottles in the Boston area and raised $1 million for charity that first year.

Over the years, we’ve grown from a couple of amateur baseball players offering charitable consulting to adding sports & entertainment marketing, product development & deployment, event planning & implementation, and public relations & talent procurement to our service offering. We’ve worked with more than 30 professional athletes across Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League in a dozen markets, including many Hall of Famers. We’ve worked with Academy Award winning movie stars, household name national brands, and some of the most worthy charitable causes in country.

On this blog, we’ll share our stories. You may find interesting, and may even learn a thing or two. We hope you find them inspiring. Sports and marketing are our passion. And if you share the passion, follow along and join the conversation. We’re Charity Hop Sports Marketing. Thanks for reading our first blog posting.