Good Sports: Fresno Grizzlies spread holiday cheer

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Baseball season ended almost three months ago for the Fresno Grizzlies, but the lines outside Chukchansi Park had a special purpose earlier this week.

"You know I think a lot of people look at the Fresno Grizzlies as a seasonal business," Grizzlies Manager of Communications Ryan Young said. "And I think our goal here, especially downtown, it to take our partnerships with certain businesses that we have and extend them to the off season."

So the Grizzlies reached out to a handful of local companies and community members to hand out 100 full meals to families in need of a delicious Thanksgiving dinner.

"What we did was contact some of our pastors in the Fresno area and asked them to help us find families on the ground," Fresno City Councilmember Clint Olivier said.

"They said, 'How would you like to help maybe 50 families?' I said that'd be great," downtown Fresno Grocery Outlet owner Chris Caillier said. "Maybe we can grow it a little bit more. Let's get some more partners involved. That's when the Matoian family and OK! Produce stepped up and Shepherd's Inn Restaurant."

The families were given a top quality turkey to go along with fresh produce and ingredients, and even a few recipes for side dishes to make with the extra ingredients.

"So you can go home and you have the sheet perfectly there," Young said. "It's in Spanish, it's in English, and it kinda takes all the stress out of it. It's one thing to get all this stuff, but it's another to be there and cook it and have your whole family say, 'Wow this is delicious.'"

And the best part about the food giveaway: How easy it was to get downtown Fresno companies together to help downtown Fresno residents, leaving all parties involved anxious to do it even bigger next year.

"We hope that Downtown grows," Caillier said. "We hope the economy grows down here, we hope the housing grows down here, but if we can just do one small thing like this for a hundred families, who knows what it could grow to."

"You could open this event up to the public and hey let's help out 500 families, let's help out a thousand families," Young added. "And that's probably where we eventually want to get to."