THE FRONT ROW WITH BRUCE BOURQUIN: Friday, April 8, 2016

After being a baseball hero as a left-handed relief pitcher for 14 seasons for four different major league baseball teams, Spokane native and Northwest Christian graduate Jeremy Affeldt moved on to become a hero where it really counts.

Fighting the worldwide injustices of human trafficking.

Through a nonprofit called Generation Alive, founded by Affeldt, who retired after last season, and his wife, Larisa, he has helped provide a path to more normal lives to slaves in places like South Korea and Thailand.

On Saturday night at the Best Western Plus Coeur d’Alene Inn, Affeldt will be the guest speaker at the 54th annual North Idaho Sports Banquet. Five people will be inducted into the Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame — former Coeur d’Alene High softball coach Larry Bieber, former Moscow coach Sally Greene, former NFL defensive end Marvin Washington, college and high school coach Bob McCray and Bob Squires, a former high school coach and teacher in Idaho for 42 years, most of them in Kamiah.

The Affeldts also have three sons — Walker, 8, Logan, 5 and Kolt, 3. So since quite a few victims of human trafficking are younger than 20, the issue hits them fairly personally.

“There are more slaves today than there were when it was legal,” Affeldt said. “It’s a $32 billion business. Koreans are the number one most trafficked women in the world. Your average slave makes $250,000 per year and you tell them who they are. For me it’s one of the biggest injustices in the world, where you tell them they have no right to be a human. Essentially, everyone’s a product in a way, you get hired and work for someone who uses you for a certain thing. But you have the ability to say yes or no or walk away. As a slave, you don’t have that ability. So they can sell you off, you don’t have the right to name your price.

“I don’t think that’s right. We have a catering business in Amsterdam in the red light district. We get girls out of there, they get jobs right away. We develop different businesses like cafes in the United States and abroad. You get frustrated, whether it’s in the labor trade or anything else, you treat people as a usable product. You wish you could help more. But we’ve built orphanages in places like Thailand for more than 250 kids and built them a basketball court. In Uganda, in a place like Gulu, which is near the northern border of the country, (Giants starting pitcher) Matt Cain and I built an orphanage, we’ve rescued slaves who were going to be used to be child soldiers.”

AFFELDT DID quite a bit of traveling after the 2012 MLB season to see these places. At the bottom of the organization’s website, Generation Alive (generationalive.org) exists to develop a generation of young leaders, committed to serving others and responding to the needs in their community. So it was only fitting a young student at a school where Affeldt was speaking was the one who helped Affeldt kickstart the idea for the nonprofit in the first place.

“I was approached by one of the students,” Affeldt said. “She said some of us have a hard time surrounding ourselves with friends. We have to surround ourselves with the people who help us survive. I didn’t know what that meant at first and she said, ‘I am from a community where we’re so poor, we have to steal in order to live.’ I tried to understand what really goes on in communities and what are the different levels of community and so I started to see a lot of poverty in certain areas. Not just nationally but globally, I saw poverty and saw things people dealt with. I saw it with the hunger and the water crisis. Everywhere I was looking, anywhere there was poverty outside America, there was also a trafficking issue. I thought it was pretty weird.

“So I called up my buddy in Kansas City, Mike King. They do Generation Alive around town, and I asked him what about this trafficking issue. He told me I should check out Dave Batstone, who is a USF (University of San Francisco) professor in economics, he’s also an investor and financial advisor. I just signed with the San Francisco Giants (in 2009) and I emailed him, we started talking and I found out he ran a nonprofit called Not For Sale. So I was able to get to know him a little bit and I was kind of adopted into the Batstone family. For me, we were talking about talking with some people about how these people can come back to the organizations that we were trying to help.”

Affeldt also wrote a book in 2013 titled, “To Stir a Movement: Life, Justice and Major League Baseball,” that was about some of the injustices Affeldt has seen in recent years.

AFFELDT WAS contacted through his nonprofit organization to see if he wanted to be the guest speaker at the North Idaho Sports Banquet. And of course, the local product with a 3.97 career ERA and a 43-46 won-loss record said yes.

“I’m going to be around more,” Affeldt said. “It’s fun to do and it’s something that I want to give back to the community. I want to kind of share my thoughts about the area. I want to be more active locally. I thought just to be able to hang around here with some local athletes would be fun. I’ve been speaking to some athletes at Gonzaga and give them some of my impressions and sharing some of my stories.”

Affeldt decided to retire in part due to his family and that fact he’d accomplished just about everything he could as a reliever, especially the three World Series rings with the Giants (in 2010, ’12 and ’14).

“I thought, why am I playing?” Affeldt said. “I’m a dad, I can set my schedule, do my own thing. I’m fully vested retirement-wise. I wanted to see my boys grow up, so you know what? I’m good. I’m still working for the Giants.”

Affeldt remains involved with baseball, as he’s a community ambassador with the Giants, the team he played for the past seven seasons. He was also on the 2007 Colorado Rockies team that lost in the World Series to the Boston Red Sox. He will also spend roughly 20 to 25 games as a Giants guest broadcaster during pregame and postgame broadcasts for Comcast Sportsnet.

And Affeldt made it a point that should the Giants win — we’re talking every-even-year magic — he’d still get a World Series ring, since he’s a part of the front office.

“I’ll go down there about once a month and do some work for the Giants,” Affeldt said. “I’ll help them out with a few things, promoting the team around the community, cable sponsors, hang out and doing different functions. I’ll be speaking a lot down there, doing some leadership development stuff.”

WHILE HE did not play against teams in this area during his high school days, Affeldt has a few ties to North Idaho.

“After we got married, before we went off to our honeymoon, my wife and I stayed at The Coeur d’Alene Resort,” Affeldt said. “Every so often, my wife and I will stay at Coeur d’Alene for dinner. We’ll stay at The Resort if we go out to dinner and there are times now where we’ll go to Schweitzer. We’ve spent a decent time there, we’ll eat at the Wolf Lodge. We’ll watch bald eagles every now and then at Lake Coeur d’Alene, which is pretty cool.”

Affeldt’s family moved to Spokane in 1993 when he was 14, after he spent time in Merced, Calif., and Guam. He graduated from Northwest Christian in 1997.

Jeremy’s father, David, was an Air Force bombardier who flew B-52s.

“My wife’s family owned Walker’s Furniture, so she’s always lived here (in Spokane),” Affeldt said. “I met her in high school. I was a military brat bouncing around all over the place. But my dad retired (from the U.S. Air Force), so I could go to high school, without having to move around. We were stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base (in Spokane) in the early ’80s and we moved back here. She was my high school sweetheart; we were married when we were 20.”

Affeldt remains the only player from Northwest Christian to reach the majors. He was drafted by the Kansas City Royals in the third round of the 1997 MLB Draft (91st overall) out of high school.

“Northwest Christian is known for its basketball team,” Affeldt said. “We lost kids who transferred to other high schools in Spokane. Some of them thought they needed to play at bigger schools in order to get more exposure from colleges. My parents never thought that way. I was scouted in American Legion games during the summers and then the scouts came to my school where I was seen. I threw in the high 80s and low 90s, I even threw 93 but without command. I had a lot of rawness that teams figured they could fine-tune. I knew I was going to be a top pick. I am still good friends with the guy who signed me, Greg Smith (now the head scout of the Texas Rangers).”

But Affeldt said the Royals did not seem like they knew how to use him, or have his role strongly defined. He started 18 out of 36 games in his second season, finishing 7-6 with a 3.93 ERA. Instead of having him in the starting rotation the next season, Affeldt had 13 saves in his third season, yet also started eight games. So it was no wonder Affeldt feels his career took off after his role was more clearly defined as a setup man, after he was dealt at the trade deadline to the Colorado Rockies in 2006. From that point on, he primarily pitched in either the seventh or eighth innings, as he was just as good against right-handed hitters as against lefties. He was also referred to as a ‘bridge’ reliever, getting the team from the starting pitcher’s usual six or seven innings to the closer in the ninth.

“I learned how to fail,” Affeldt said. “KC was up and down. My career turned around when I went to Colorado. In 2007 with Colorado, to lose that World Series was tough. (In Cincinnati), I played with (former Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds star outfielder Ken) Griffey (Jr.) and he didn’t ever make it to the World Series. Winning World Series with the Giants, it was awesome. I didn’t win a championship with a team until 2010; we didn’t win state at Northwest Christian. That’s an amazing feat, my dreams came true.”

“I was blessed playing with the Poseys and the Bumgarners,” Affeldt added, referring to Giants catcher Buster Posey and ace starting pitcher Madison Bumgarner. “You know you’re part of guys’ careers that may put them in the Hall of Fame.”

And with this lefty, he’s certainly on his way to a Hall of Fame-type of career with his nonprofit, helping one person at a time avoid the perils of human trafficking.

Bruce Bourquin is a sports writer at The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2013, via e-mail at bbourquin@cdapress.com or via Twitter @bourq25