Donate to Kirby Yates’ flood relief fundraiser, and in exchange I will make myself ill for your entertainment

Padres reliever Kirby Yates’ hometown of Koloa, Hawai’i was recently bombarded by historic rain storms which entirely destroyed dozens of homes and caused extensive damage to innumerable others, as well as wiping out countless personal possessions and basic living staples. Here, I’ll let you hear it from Yates himself, from the youcaring.com page he created:

I am from Koloa, Hawai’i, a small town on the South Shore of Kauai. I attended Koloa Elementary School. I learned to play baseball in Koloa. When nearly 50 inches of rain fell on Kauai in just 24 hours, I was devastated to learn that dozens of homes in Koloa were wiped out by the floods. This hit home for me, literally, and I knew I had to do something to help.

The Hawaii Community Foundation and Poipu Beach Foundation are coordinating relief efforts in the Koloa area. Most people in the community had no warning, which means no time to prepare or escape before the floods hit, resulting in the loss of homes, cars, and belongings. Families were left without basic resources needed for everyday life such as food and clothing.

Just $10,000 will give the Foundation enough funding to provide supplies, clothing, food, and cleaning to those in the Koloa area. I will personally match all donations up to $5,000. Together, we can can cover 100% of the costs needed to help the families in my hometown recover from the destructive floods.

As an added enticement, if us Gaslamp Ballers collectively put up $2,000 toward his goal, I will eat an entire watermelon in one sitting, and record it all for your entertainment. Why a watermelon? Because they’re huge and messy for one, and that in itself seems like a recipe for comedy, but mostly because I haaaaaaaaaaaate watermelon and I know a lot of people who would be greatly amused to watch me cringe and retch through the process. Besides, I couldn’t offer to eat a jar of the most disgusting “food” ever, olives, because I did that a couple years ago to raise $1,919.19 for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation.

So, here’s how this will work: Once you donate, send a screenshot proving you did so, then either tweet or DM ([at]TheThinGwynn), or email it (josephalanek [at] gmail [dot] com) to me, and once the total hits $2,000, I’ll head to the Kroger produce section.

Once again, here’s the link to donate.