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Adam Wainwright gave a generous gift to a car-less teammate
Spring training is the ultimate team-building exercise for baseball clubs. Everyone gets together for six weeks to work out and play games that don’t count. But they also make new friends, and get reacquainted with the old ones, after a long winter of no baseball. For St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright, when he got to know one of the minor leaguers in camp, he was inspired to perform an act of generosity.
This story comes from Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and if you’re looking for a feel-good story, this one definitely fits the bill. Wainwright caught Ryan Sherriff, a career minor league pitcher (and non-roster invitee), walking to and from the ballpark several days in a row. Wainwright stopped Sherriff and asked him if he walked every day, and Sherriff said yes. Wainwright also asked him if he wanted a bike or a car, and Sherriff said thank you, but no.
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So imagine Sherriff’s surprise when he got a call telling him that a Nissan Altima rental car had arrived at the stadium. It was for him, all expenses paid, courtesy of Adam Wainwright.
“Waino got me a rental car,” Sherriff explained. “I freaked out a little bit. I started crying. I called my mom, and she started crying. Really, I’ve never had that experience. No one has ever done something so nice for me before.”
The appearance of the rental car explained a weird incident from earlier in the day, when a Cardinals employee had asked Sherriff for his license without an explanation. Sherriff had assumed it was for a prank involving his unflattering license picture, which would normally be a safe bet. But there was no prank; just an act of generosity.
As Goold’s story notes, Wainwright knows that these gestures of kindness can go a long way and stay embedded in your memory. In his younger days, Mark Mulder gave Wainwright a box of collared shirts when he noticed the young pitcher had worn the same one to the ballpark several days in a row. Wainwright wanted to pay it forward.
“That’s the kind of thing that happened to me when I was younger,” Wainwright said. “Many many many things like that happened to me. You just kind of pass that stuff on.”
Veterans helping young rookies is a long tradition in baseball, and Wainwright is helping to keep it alive. Of course, Sherriff wanted to show his gratitude to Wainwright, so he got his own gift together. Sherriff bought a Chick-fil-A gift card, some sweet tea, and what he thought was barbecue sauce for Wainwright (facts gleaned from his Twitter bio), and gave it to him along with a thank-you note. The barbecue sauce was actually A-1 sauce, but Waino was thrilled all the same. Even better? All of those gifts were things he wouldn’t be able to get without the rental car.
Sherriff may get a chance to spend even more time with Wainwright during the season. The Cardinals are in need of a lefty reliever to fill out their bullpen, and Sherriff is in the running for the job. (His 2.84 ERA from Triple-A Memphis last season doesn’t hurt his chances.) If he gets it, it would be his very first time in the majors. So good luck to Ryan Sherriff. I’d tell him to enjoy the car, but now that he doesn’t have to walk to and from the grocery store while carrying all his food bags, I’m pretty sure he’s doing that already.
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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher
