RA Dickey travelled to India to help fight the sex trade there. The Toronto Blue Jays pitcher and Cy Young winner visited to work with a child trafficking rescue organization.
Dickey is known as one of the more well-read and knowledgeable baseball players in the majors, but he is proving it with his latest endeavor by travelling to India to Mumbai to work with Bombay Teen Challenge, a Christian organization that has rescued women and children from sex trafficking for the past 23 years.
The Associated Press reported the news, detailing Dickey's travels to Mumbai's red-light district, where he witnessed an unsupervised young boy with sores all over his body and playing in dirt and grime.
"He was playing amongst the open sewage and filth with rats as big as dogs. Unsupervised," the Toronto Blue Jays' new knuckleballer told The Canadian Press on a conference call Tuesday from India's most populous city. "You see these images and pictures that just don't seem like they should exist. And you hope that it's the only one ... but that's what's representative, these lives that just don't have a voice."
One of the main reasons Dickey decided to travel to India was due to his own experience with abuse. The pitcher detailed his experiences in his autobiography released last year, "Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball."
"It's authentic to me because of my past experience, also I have a sentimentality to it because the girls that I've seen firsthand in the streets, these 19-, 20-, 21-year-old girls. You have to look beyond that and see at one point they were daughters themselves, and having two daughters ... that just for me was so compelling."
The AP report said that Dickey made the trip with his two daughters, how are 11 and nine-years-old.
"I want to give my children a heart for humanity," Dickey said. "The only way to really do that is to get them outside of the bubble that they live in, and expose them in very measured ways to what real life is to a lot of people. They've responded beautifully."
Dickey said that it has been a roller-coaster" visit, and he has seen many things that troubled him, including red-light images of women in doorways and the cages where they keep them when they're first trafficked. He also said that he has seen many hopeful things while working with the organization.
"Those are the miracles, the 300 lives in Ashagram, those are 300 living miracles," Dickey said. "Sure, (my daughters) heard about the wickedness and the darkness, but they got to actually see the redemption, so their response has been really positive. This is a seminal trip for them."
Dickey also helped celebrate the opening of a clinic in the midst of Mumbai's red-light district, which he helped pay for, raising over $100,000 by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro last winter.
The facility is like a beacon of light in the middle of a swamp," he said.
BTC's Thomason Varghese said the organization was blessed by Dickey's presence.
"But we think we've been even more blessed by his daughters," Varghese said. "Just to see innocent girls loving our girls and playing with them with no inhibitions, it's just been a real joy for us to see and experience. There are friendships that have come through this despite how different their backgrounds are."
The organization Dickey was working with has been working in Mumbai's red-light district since 1990. Dickey has dealt with many hardships in his past, which was detailed in his book. He had a traumatic childhood that saw him suffer multiple instances of child abuse, but he was able to recover and became the first pitcher to win the Cy Young throwing primarily a knuckleball.
The pitcher went 20-6 and threw a franchise-record 32 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings during the first half and made his first All-Star team. He also led the National League in quality starts (27), strikeouts (230) and innings pitched (233 2/3) while finishing second in ERA at 2.73 to Clayton Kershaw's 2.53.
The Mets opted to trade Dickey in the offseason to the Toronto Blue Jays, who then signed him to a two-year extension. The Mets acquired prized-prospect Travis d'Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard in the deal.
