This story was excerpted from Ian Browne’s Red Sox Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
BOSTON – The cancer-fighting Jimmy Fund will receive much-deserved attention and raise life-changing funds on Monday and Tuesday, when the Red Sox host their annual television-radio telethon at Fenway Park.
While there will be stories of hope and perseverance and medical knowledge that will be absorbed by NESN and WEEI viewers and listeners, the players will gain added perspective of the magnitude of it all.
Meanwhile, Red Sox ace setup man Garrett Whitlock will feel right at home.
Whitlock has been the designated Jimmy Fund captain of the Red Sox since 2023, and it’s no coincidence that was the season after Nathan Eovaldi left Boston for free agency.
An unwritten part of being the Jimmy Fund captain for Boston’s baseball team is to find the best possible successor.
In Whitlock, a naturally kind and giving person, Eovaldi knew that’s what he had.
“In 2022, [Eovaldi] was kind of just like, ‘Hey man, I could be gone next year, why don't you start coming to some of the stuff I do with the Jimmy Fund,’” remembers Whitlock. “And Miss Lisa [Scherber of the Jimmy Fund] was kind of just like, ‘Hey you know like we'd love to have you around’, and then [former Red Sox community relations VP] Pam Kenn, was also just like, ‘This would be good for you to learn what it's about’, so I just kind of shadowed Nate around."
To say Whitlock has become a big part of the Jimmy Fund and the Jimmy Fund has become a big part of him would be a big understatement.
He has thrown himself into his work with pediatric cancer patients with the same passion and determination as he shows in the seventh or eighth inning when his team has the lead.
“Yeah, it becomes part of your family,” said Whitlock. “Like it was Becca [Eovaldi] with Nate, it's [my wife] Jordan with me and everything like that. Your family gets involved in it, and so when you do that, you build personal relationships not only with the patients but with the faculty and the staff and everything, and it just becomes part of your family, and part of your life.”
Or, put another way?
“It's almost just like another part of the baseball season,” said Whitlock.
“Like, hey, when it's baseball season, it's Jimmy Fund season as well.”
The relationship between the Jimmy Fund and the Red Sox is one of the most unique in sports history, given that it started in 1953, when Ted Williams was the champion of spreading the word.
Several Boston players through the decades have been legendary for their efforts with the Jimmy Fund, including Carl Yastrzemski, Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn, the late Tim Wakefield, Brock Holt (current co-chair of the Jimmy Fund), Eovaldi, Mitch Moreland and, more recently, Whitlock.
One of the most poignant stories of all took place in the mid-80s when Clemens went to the pediatric ward of the Dana Farber Institute and one of the patients didn’t believe he was really who he said he was. Clemens marched back to Fenway and came back in full uniform, giving that child a memory of a lifetime.
While it brings the players joy to provide a happy diversion for kids in need, there is also the flip side of the coin.
“The first time that you find out that one of the patients you become close to passes away, it rocks you,” said Whitlock.
Whitlock went to Holt to come to grips with it.
“The advice he gave me was like ‘Listen, it’s going to be hard. And it is. Anytime you lose anyone, you have to remember them for the time you had with them, not the time that you don't,’" said Whitlock. “I think that's the biggest thing is you always have the memories you had with those patients, but you would rather have those memories and build those memories than not even ever take the chance to get close to someone than to not have made those memories.”
While the Red Sox hold club options for Whitlock for ‘27 and ‘28, he knows that there are no guarantees in baseball. So if this somehow ends up being the last season with the only team he’s ever played for, he’s already lined up a Jimmy Fund captain successor in rookie lefty Payton Tolle.
Tolle acts like a big kid himself, which would make him a natural fit to goof around with kids for whom laughter is therapy. Also, his mom Gina died of breast cancer in 2024, just months before the Red Sox took him in the Draft.
“When it gets to the point where it's just like, this could be my last year, you want to make sure that it's set up in good hands for the years to come, and so like that's what Nate did with me, and now I'm like, 'OK, if this is it for me, I want to make sure that the Jimmy Fund’s in good hands for next year,'” said Whitlock.
“And you look at a guy like Tolle and his love of people, and then obviously the history of his family and everything, and you know this is who I would feel comfortable knowing that the relationships I've built would be in great hands with him moving forward.”
Tolle is already embracing it.
“We talked about it last year,” said Tolle. “I told Whit, ‘I would like to follow you around. Whatever Jimmy Fund thing or event that happens, I would like to watch, tag along, like be part of it. Because as somebody that’s been affected by cancer, being able to give back in ways that you can [when you have this platform], whenever you're in a situation like this, like it's an incredible opportunity.”
The Jimmy Fund and the Red Sox are the definition of a symbiotic relationship.
“It’s a really neat tradition,” Tolle said of the Red Sox/Jimmy Fund partnership. “And I think it's something that, no matter what, should never be touched. That should be continued forever, obviously it has and it's just special. There's not a whole lot of things like it, and whenever you get to be a part of something like that, it's really special.”