When I think of Boston Red Sox players I think of smelly, long-haired idiots who win the World Series about every eighty years or so. Its not often I also think of one of them as being a hero.

BOSTON (AP) - Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and wife Shonda paid to fly a New Orleans family of nine to Boston and pledged to provide them with housing for a year.
The Fields family, with seven children between the ages of 5 and 12, fled New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina struck. They spent the past week at an Atlanta hotel with the help of a charitable organization.

"When we realized how many people had nowhere to go, we didn't just want to make a donation," Shonda Schilling told The Boston Globe. "We decided we wanted to bring an entire family here and put them up."

The families connected through a Web site, openyourhome.com, which matches displaced families with people willing to house them. The Schillings registered Friday and on Saturday anonymously arranged for the family to fly to Boston.

"He said, 'I would like to help you,'" Efrem Fields, 31, told The Globe in a phone interview from his hotel. "He didn't say who he was."

What a class act.

And Open Your Home (which I had not heard of previously) seems like a first-rate organization. You can learn more about them here.