Sherwin Williams isn’t donating $1 million to the Angels’ charity because of a technicality

On Tuesday night, Justin Upton hit a home run out of Angel Stadium that ended up in a large Sherwin Williams paint can situated beyond the fence in left-center field.

The oversized, branded can wasn’t just hanging out there because that would be weird. It’s part of a promotion that the Angels set up way back in 2014 with Frazee Paint, which is now owned by Sherwin Williams, dictating that the company would donate $1 million to the Angels Baseball Foundation if a home run every landed in there.

So now that Upton’s dinger went in the bucket, it should be donating that money to the Angels’ charity focused on kids right?

Wrong.

Thanks to a small clause that was included in the original contract, the company can get out of paying up thanks to a technicality. Which is tied to how exactly Upton’s home run landed in the container.

Apparently, someone on the paint company’s legal team saw a situation like this coming and included a line about the promotion only occurring if the ball lands in the paint can on the fly.

Upton’s bounced before landing in, which means that unlike in beer pong, the outcome is actually bad and the Angels’ charity won’t get its money.

Now, Sherwin Williams could have easily just said it would do it anyway despite the wording of the release from three years ago since it mostly happened.

The charity aims to improve local children’s lives after all, and with all the capital Sherwin Williams has as a global company, what would the harm be to just follow through on the spirit of the promotion?

Apparently the bit of backlash so farhasn’t caused the company enough strife to just do so at this point, but they will be nudged further in that direction. If not, it’s fair enough to say that they aren’t cheating anyone out of the money — but it’s a shame that’s the rules are what they are in this situation.