MLB WINTER MEETINGS

December 4, 2023

April Brown

Catalina Villegas

Torey Lovullo

Justin Balko

MLB Charity Auction Press Conference

APRIL BROWN: Good morning. Welcome to Nashville. Welcome to Major League Baseball's Winter Meetings 2023. It's such a joy to be here and to start off on Monday morning with you all.

My name is April Brown. I am the Senior Vice President of Social Responsibility at Major League Baseball, and it is my distinct, distinct honor to be here with you and to announce our 2023 Winter Meetings Charity Auction.

This auction is held during baseball industry's greatest stage, during our Winter Meetings, and it was started by our public relations colleagues in baseball looping with the Commissioner's Office to support causes that are close to our game and to honor those who have been touched by causes very close to our game.

Over the last ten years, close to $2 million has been raised through this auction, so it is just an incredible opportunity for us to really make a difference.

In the past we've honored organizations such as the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, the Jackie Robinson Foundation. The legendary Katy Feeney, we established a scholarship in her honor. And last year we were able to contribute to a brand-new Boys and Girls Club in Eovalde, Texas, after the tragedy, which has been up and running and thriving.

Of course, Stand Up to Cancer -- we are the founding donor of Stand Up To Cancer. It was, in fact, in Nashville ten years ago that they were the beneficiary of our proceeds, so it is very befitting that this year, once again, Stand Up to Cancer, is our auction recipient. Many members across the years and the last decade and this year have been touched by cancer.

In the past we've honored individuals such as Melody Yount, the late and beloved Shannon Ford, the late and beloved Monica Barlow from our MLB PR group, and the late baseball journalists Juan C. Rodriguez and Richard Durant.

Today I am proud to formally announce that once again we hope to make an impactful impact in this dreaded disease with Stand Up to Cancer, who does life-saving research, life-saving work, and life-saving clinical trials, which you're going to hear about.

Each year we see how it affects us. We're hit hard, and sadly this year two of our very, very beloved and honored colleagues were diagnosed with cancer, our Senior Vice President and Special Assistant to the Commissioner, Mr. Billy Bean, and his direct report, our Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Catalina Villegas.

Both do incredible work off the field ensuring that inclusivity is met on the field and off in all of our programs with our employees. They do it tirelessly, and they work across the league and with many, many partners. We miss seeing them every day, but they are steadily getting back to us, and we're so excited and just honored that Catalina is here with us to give us a few words in Nashville face-to-face. It is just a pleasure to see her.

I would like to welcome to the stage Catalina Villegas, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Major League Baseball.

CATALINA VILLEGAS: Thank you, April. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here and for supporting people affected by cancer. I want to thank April Brown and Steve Arocho for organizing this initiative.

2023 has been a challenging year for our diversity, equity, and inclusion team, but we are a team of resilient people and never give up. It's been amazing to see the whole support of the MLB community and the baseball family.

Actually in March I got diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, something that, of course, I didn't see coming since I was only 36 years old. I've always been a very healthy person. By being a former athlete, I took for granted my health and the strength of my body.

It seemed unbelievable and overwhelming to see everybody from the Office of the Commissioner, starting from our DI department to many different departments, reaching out as well as many MLB and MiLB clubs and giving us their support. It's an important message that baseball never turned their back on me, but instead gave me all the support to help me overcome this horrible disease.

From day one there's been a special person that always been helping me through this journey -- not my wife. I have to make sure that I mention her. She's been great. Her name is Jenny French. She's been my rock and has been amazing to walk me through all this journey.

But the other person has been our SVP, our leader, our friend, Billy Bean. He has been there since day one. Now seeing him hurt and going through what I actually went through, it's been hard. But I know he's a strong man, and he's going to come back stronger, and we'll be able to tell this story together.

The other person that has been incredible from the baseball family has been my former boss and baseball Hall-of-Famer Ivan Rodriguez. I wake up every morning with a text from me with a positive quote telling me that I'm not alone and that life is going to get better.

I'll be forever thankful to Pat Courtney and April Brown. Again, sorry, April. You've been there forever. Also, Ginger Dillon for having the kind and caring idea to connect me to Stand Up to Cancer.

I've been able to develop a very good relationship with two of the founders, Rusty Robertson and Sue Schwartz, and they've been able to give me incredible support from giving me great access to doctors to also resources and then just best tips to overcome this disease.

Stand Up to Cancer does so much amazing work, but I think the most important work that they do is their commitment to health equity and make sure that underserved communities get the opportunity to get health cancer treatment and screenings.

This is not about Billy or I. This is about creating awareness that preventive care is so important. You have to make sure you have some time to go see your doctor, get your screenings, get your checkups.

It took me around three months to go get my mammogram just because I was too busy with life and my career and didn't think it was important until my wife encouraged me to go get it done. That, of course, saved my life.

Just to wrap it up, for anybody out there that is struggling going through a difficult time right now, just know that life gets better. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel. You just have to have a positive attitude, a good perspective, and never give up.

I actually would like to repeat that really quick in Spanish because our Latino players and we have a big Spanish audience.

(Speaking Spanish.)

I appreciate you all and gracias.

APRIL BROWN: Thank you, Cat. We're so happy that you're with us. We're so happy that you're feeling stronger, and thank you. We can't thank you enough. You know how much I love you personally.

Billy Bean, he is a colleague. He is a friend and a mentor to me. He is also MLB's first ambassador of inclusion, and now in his role as Senior Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Special Assistant to the Commissioner, he has established strong bonds across the league, across all of our clubs and within the community.

He so wanted to be here today. He was not able to. He's amid his treatment still. He's doing strong. We speak to him and we see him on Zoom, so he sends his best. But most of all he has a special video message that I believe we're going to be able to see.

BILLY BEAN: I am disappointed that I cannot be in Nashville with my MLB colleagues this morning. However, I am so grateful to join this wonderful group and be able to share my profound experience with Stand Up to Cancer.

My name is Billy Bean. I am SVP of DE&I and Special Assistant to the Commissioner. Baseball players are always asked to do things that are demanding upon their time and attention. When a young player sees a high-profile partnership between MLB and Stand Up to Cancer at the All-Star game or during the World Series, it would be easy to assume that this happens to other people.

However, the first time you see the face of an MLB player, MLB manager, front office executive, or MLB veteran who has been affected directly by cancer or to a loved one, it's then you begin to grasp the impact of this program and why I am proud to work alongside the incredible group of dedicated medical professionals who are committed to saving lives.

My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer in November of 2022, and as you just learned, Catalina Villegas from my DE&I team was diagnosed with breast cancer in March of 2023.

And believe it or not I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia this past summer on September 1st. It's because of my ongoing treatment that I am unable to join you today.

During my mother's initial diagnosis in 2022, Stand Up to Cancer was right there, and I began a generous dialogue and friendship with Rusty Robertson and Dr. John A. Gillespie.

Upon learning the news of Catalina's condition, we didn't hesitate to reach out again, ensuring she was confident in the treatment decisions that she was going to receive from her physician. During the 2023 postseason I watched, like many of you, my friend and former big league teammate Torey Lovullo and his D-backs make their magical run to the World Series.

Where baseball is concerned, like most players, I am very superstitious, so I didn't want to bother Torey with my diagnosis because they were winning. There would be time to tell him later.

My work at MLB is dedicated to serving others, but the past three months have been the most difficult experience of my entire MLB career. However, I am determined to use this learning moment to become a more effective communicator and teacher to the MLB family, our fans, and our communities.

I am thrilled that Torey is here in Nashville today using his platform to bring more awareness to important cancer prevention information to honor those who fought so valiantly and are no longer here with us and sharing in this united effort and commitment to do whatever we can to find a cure.

APRIL BROWN: Thank you. As Billy mentioned, his very, very dear friend is here with us today, and we're so happy that he's joining us. I would like to bring up to the podium the manager of the National League champions, the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The first All-Star game was in 2011 at Chase Field where we did our first Stand Up placard moment, so it's really awesome that you are here with us today as we make Stand Up, again, our beneficiary. Let's welcome to the stage Torey Lovullo.

TOREY LOVULLO: Thank you, April and all the others involved in the Stand Up to Cancer platform. Cancer is a vicious disease. Although we're making progress in slowing it down, it's basically running rough-shod to everybody's lives.

Right now it has a hold on my good friend Billy Bean, and I've known Billy since 1984 when we played on the same summer baseball team in Santa Maria, California. We've had so many incredible moments and conversations over that time, but one of my most recent conversations took on a different twist. That was very difficult for me to hear, but I know, Billy, that you're going to fight with all your might because that's the style you only know. It's gritty, it's tough, and it's all-in with everything you have.

I know that it's very hard for you right now, Billy, and it's our turn to take care of you. You have been the ultimate giver since the day that I've known you. So even though I know it's going to be very tough for you, it's time for you to sit down and let us love you up and take care of you.

I love you, my brother. Thank you.

APRIL BROWN: Torey, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. And you said it best. Billy is the one who takes care of everyone else. Even as we're all here, I'm pretty positive we all have about ten texts of Billy giving us support and thinking about us as we're here this morning.

So it just means so much, and I know it means so much to him that you are here. Thank you for those very loving words.

As the founding donor of Stand Up to Cancer, Major League Baseball has contributed more than $50 million towards the life-saving and critically-needed research and clinical trials that Stand Up is able to garner through a host of scientists across the globe.

What makes them the breakout organization is that they truly break down silos, and research and clinical trials information is shared so that we can get closer and have more and more progress, which you are going to hear about.

Over the last 15 years we've sought to unite our fans and our baseball community through the iconic placard moment at MLB All-Star games, at our World Series, and our signature events. To date, more than one million people have stood up against cancer during these very memorable moments. So together we're working towards a goal where every cancer patient becomes a long-term survivor.

On behalf of Stand Up to Cancer, we are really honored to have to the podium cancer researcher at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center right here in Nashville, Dr. Justin Balko.

DR. JUSTIN BALKO: It's amazing to be here. It's amazing to see everybody coming together for this cause. I want to thank Stand Up to Cancer both for having me come today and for all of their past support. Not just of my own lab, but really of all of cancer research.

I want to thank Major League Baseball for having me here. I think it's amazing things like this auction that -- I'm going to tell you a little bit about how that affects me.

I don't have to make the argument to anyone here that cancer is something that it's -- it touches every single one of us, whether that's personally to ourselves or to one of our loved ones. Probably multiple times in our life. We've already seen that. I don't need to make that argument.

I feel blessed in being a cancer researcher and specifically breast cancer. So I co-lead the breast cancer research program here at Vanderbilt in Nashville. Being somebody that gets to do something about it in a little bit different way, which is to try to devote my life to having a broader impact on patients with cancer and specifically with breast cancer.

That's a really difficult thing to do, so I'm going to explain really briefly in about a minute how this all works for things like doing new clinical trials to try to treat, for instance, breast cancer patients.

We have the government. Many of us think the NIH should be funding research, and they do. They fund great research, but they fund very advanced research. Huge clinical trials that cost many, many millions of dollars to really prove that something is effective.

Your have pharmaceutical companies, they do good research, also, with a little bit of their own conflict in how they want to use their drugs. But academic researchers, like myself, we want to do things that we're researching in the lab and try to bring those into that early proof of concept. These are high-risk, high-reward type of studies.

The only organizations that fund these sort of things are organizations like Stand Up to Cancer. These give us the opportunity of really building on something. Taking that chance and trying to find the right combination and the right patient, try to reduce the amount of chemotherapy we need to use, try to diagnose patients earlier.

I almost want to call it grassroots funding, but things like this auction, you can't imagine how meaningful those are to our cancer research field.

So I have a ton of statistics here. A few of them were quoted. I know baseball; right? We should be thinking about the statistics.

Two million people in the U.S. this year will be diagnosed with cancer. There's no way that that can't touch each and every one of you. Doing even these things like these auctions, all of that money ends up filtering down to exactly where it needs to be to try to help those people in one way or another.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the clinical trials. Stand Up to Cancer, we've been involved with for many, many years, and I know the relationship between Major League Baseball and Stand Up to Cancer is 15 years old now. That's a long time. That's $50 million that the Major League Baseball has donated to Stand Up to Cancer, and Stand Up to Cancer has donated $50 million on its own just to breast cancer research to fund studies like the ones we took part in with that organization.

So we ran a clinical trial. I believe it's closed now about four years ago in metastatic ER+ breast cancer. So estrogen receptor positive or hormone receptor positive. This is the most common type of breast cancer. It's actually responsible for nearly two-thirds of the breast cancer deaths that we have here in the U.S.

While many patients do very well with hormone receptor positive breast cancer, those that become metastatic are likely going to succumb to that disease. So we ran a clinical trial using novel combinations, new combinations, trying to match the right patients to the right therapy using new drugs called immunotherapies to help target our body's own immune system towards the cancer.

We had responses in that trial. It was a small trial. We learned so much from that trial, and I want to say that actually today in my lab nearly five years later there's graduate students right now that are preparing shipments to different companies that will run assays for us to try to further use the tissues from those patients' biopsies to try to figure out why those patients respond and why other patients didn't.

Many years later the impact of that research is still holding place and holding a big part of our lab's responsibility. So, again, I just really want to close and say you guys have no idea how much impact events like this auction have and what it means to us as researchers and how we can do a better job to try to sort of -- for lack of a better word and be a little bit more uplifting -- flip cancer the bird, right, and say we're going to do the best thing that we possibly can do and change the way the patients are treated.

We're going to improve those treatments, and we're going to do something with this money that's good for everybody. Thank you, guys.

APRIL BROWN: Thank you. Thank you. We've heard why we're here. We've heard the stories behind why we've chosen Stand Up to Cancer this year. Here's the what we're going to do. What we're going to do is we're going to go to MLB.com/wintermeetingsauction, and we're going to bid, and we're going to raise significant funds to continue to support the amazing work of Stand Up to Cancer.

We all can raise our hand in this room. We all know someone who has been touched by cancer, unfortunately. But here's where we have our power, and our power in our sport is that we do things big. So let's go big. Let's go to MLB.com/wintermeetingsauction and have some fun and bid on some amazing, amazing experiences. Thank you to all of our Major League Baseball clubs, our Minor League Baseball clubs, and the Office of the Commissioner. There are some amazing experiences. So let's turn our tone to positivity, to our fight, and let's raise a lot of money.

You want to meet Mike Trout? Guess what. It's on there. You can bid on that. You want to have a luncheon for eight with the Astros at Minute Maid Park? It's on there.

We promise, if you are a foodie, if you want to be a broadcaster, you think you can call the game better than the person calling it? Test yourself out. Go on there and bid on that experience.

There's something for everyone, and 100% of the net proceeds will go directly to the work of Stand Up to Cancer.

So we thank you. We thank you for your time this morning. We thank you for what you're about to do because you're about to spread this word wide and far and have everyone go on. The auction is open right now, and it will go through Thursday evening. So please let's all go on there, MLB.com/wintermeetingsauction, and bid often.

Thank you to our panelists. Thank you, Catalina. You know how much we love you. Dr. Balko, thank you for the work that you continue to do each and every day. Torey, we love you, and Bill loves you, so thank you for being here.

At this time we will conclude this portion, and we will take a group picture, and all of our panelists will be available for interviews or any questions that you might have.

Again, on behalf of MLB Together, thank you.