Helping a little amounts to a lot for Adam Wainwright, the 2020 Roberto Clemente Award recipient
In the small village, along a busy dirt road that led to other villages, a puddle had formed. For a while, it held its ground against the sun that tugged at its brown-gray constitution, the cars, motorcycles and bikes that tracked it a few yards further along the road, the dogs that lapped at its edges and the children who sloshed in its muddy wonder.
A visitor to Haiti and the village outside Cap-Haitien, Adam Wainwright stood with a handful of friends and colleagues some 50 yards away. They’d driven for hours along roads like this and through villages like this, searching for the perfect place to construct their tiny miracle. They’d already discovered too many.
Only hours before, Wainwright had said aloud, “I just don’t know how this can get better. It’s just too big of a project. I don’t understand how we could ever make a dent in it.”
Now they waited as a funeral procession passed, the coffin on the shoulders of locals who sang through tears, to a dirge done up in horns and drums. It, too, chugged across the puddle.
As the rattle of the voices faded, a woman approached along the road. She carried a bucket. She knelt when she reached the puddle, filled her bucket, hoisted the bucket to the top of her head, balanced it there and carried it away.
Wainwright turned to a friend.
“What’s she going to use that for?” he asked.
Everything, he was told. Cleaning, cooking, washing.
“Drinking?” he said.
And drinking.
“It’s mud,” Wainwright said. “It’s just mud.”
He watched her disappear and said, finally, “This is where we’re doing it.”
Today, alongside the road and about where that puddle was, a small structure stands, financed by Wainwright and his foundation — Big League Impact — and built by the organization Water Mission. Five thousand men, women and children in a place called Balan collect and carry away — and drink — clean water drawn from a well, run through filtration systems and delivered by taps thrown open as if by that tiny miracle, and have for more than five years.
He’d made a dent in it. In the cholera and typhoid that live in tainted water, in the water-borne illnesses that reportedly cause half of all deaths in Haiti, for the people who’d need a little less to worry about, for the hard lives that could use one less obstacle, he’d made a dent and filled their buckets.
“And when I left three or four days later, I left thinking, ‘OK, but what we were able to do in this little pocket, it has this compounding effect,’” Wainwright said. “We might not be able to help the entire city of Cap-Haitien or the entire country of Haiti, not right away. But what we can do is help this amount of people right here and hopefully that empowers them to help that amount of people here. And so it has this spider-webbing effect that I get really excited about. I think just understanding that we can’t help everybody, but we can help some people, keeps me excited and keeps me looking forward to the future.”
Wainwright, the 39-year-old St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, his foundation that sprung from an obsession with fantasy football, his wife Jenny, his brother Trey, his friend Scott Linebrink, his financial adviser Don Christensen, his five children, his agent Steve Hammond, his God, his ballclub, they put a water tap on the side of a road that didn’t have one. Then another on another side of a road. And another. Four in Haiti. Three in Honduras. Over seven years, the lady with a bucket in Balan has become 20,000 mothers and fathers and little boys and girls, some of whom won’t ever know of yesterday’s particular hardship, the two-mile trek for sustenance that would have sickened them anyway.
For that, and for those he has fed or clothed or healed or vaccinated or rescued from human trafficking, for the houses and latrines that have risen where there were none, for the dignity that’s come, for the hope that’s followed, in places such as Ethiopia and Poland and Haiti and Honduras and the Dominican Republic and St. Louis and in dozens of towns in his native Georgia, in the millions of dollars spent and the thousands of lives touched, Wainwright is Major League Baseball’s Roberto Clemente Award recipient in 2020. He had been nominated four previous times.
“He was our Roberto Clemente Award winner all the time,” Jenny Wainwright said.
It would seem Wainwright will pitch for another season or two, adding to the 393 games, 167 wins and 1,830 strikeouts, with any luck to the three All-Star appearances and to the World Series championships of 2006 and 2011. He’ll also turn 40 in August, and while he remained a free agent as of Monday, he did make 10 starts for the Cardinals in their frantic and disjointed 2020 season. He won five games, pitched to a 3.15 ERA and twice — for a team stretched and exhausted by 11 doubleheaders — threw complete games.
He almost certainly has not thrown his last pitch, but he could probably see it from here, feel it in the right arm with more than 2,200 big-league innings on it. And so, perhaps, what becomes significant are the footprints, and not just those from the dugout to the mound and back. Those that lead his own children. Those that follow his God along third-world roads, that fall lightly beneath the children of those towns who hold his hand and cling to his pant legs and give in to his hopeful smile. Even those that leave hardly any evidence at all, when the telephone rings with news of a disaster in the Midwest or an outbreak in Africa or a shortage in Central America and he asks, “What do you need?” When the notion comes that 300-plus acres of farmland near Jesup, Georgia, could be turned into food for the poor and hungry and he asks, “Where do I dig?” When a virus strikes and his season is fouled and so much of the world seems to ask, “What about me?” he asks, “What can I do?”
Going on three decades ago, Trey Wainwright, seven years older than his brother, built a mound in the backyard. He strung a shrimp net 60 feet, 6 inches away and outlined a strike zone. He drove 90 minutes to Jacksonville, Florida, to buy a real pitching rubber and a home plate and sunk those in their proper places. Adam threw baseballs at a shrimp net, became a star, made a ton of money and then set out to change what small parts of the world he could. Trey went off to become a lawyer in Atlanta.
“I aspire to be him when I grow up,” Trey said with a light laugh.
What began eight years ago with dissatisfaction for the return on charity golf tournaments and memorabilia auctions, that in 2013 became four 12-team fantasy football leagues with $2,500 buy-ins, today is a multi-million-dollar global initiative for Big League Impact. Résumés submitted by major league players for Roberto Clemente Award consideration routinely include participation in Wainwright’s leagues and programs.
“For Adam, it’s very much a component of faith that motivates him,” said Linebrink, the former big-league reliever and director of partnerships for Water Mission. “Adam is such an intellectual person. He looks at baseball at such a deep level. Me, when I pitched, I just faced in a southeasterly direction and let it rip. He is so nuanced and he takes that approach to his whole life. He wants to change the world and it consumes him.”
It’s big out there. So Adam and Jenny think about the children of the Cap-Haitien orphanage whose hands they held, who today have places to learn and operating restrooms and doctors and clean water. They think about the children of those little villages who needed to feel better and then needed a hug, to know they mattered. Jenny reminds herself of the story of the little boy and all the starfish on all the beaches, knowing they couldn’t possibly save them all, but neither could they leave them alone. So they gather one at a time.
“It’s a little overwhelming to think how much you’ll never be able to do,” she said, “but I think you have to put that out of your mind and work at what you can do.”
They think of the lady and her bucket in a million villages.
“If I’d just played 15 years to be able to make that one water project, it’d have been worth it,” Adam said. “But knowing we’ve got those all over the world is pretty powerful.
“When we look back at our career, that’s what we’ll be most proud of, I would think. When we wake up in the morning, we realize what God has given us. By knowing that, we know what we have to give others.”
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