St. Louis Cardinals pitching prospect Ryan Sherriff has been walking to and from work (and to and from everywhere else) since he arrived in Jupiter, Fla. for spring training. But thanks to teammate Adam Wainwright, he no longer has to.
The 26-year-old left-hander had no idea what was going on when a Cardinals employee kept asking him for his license, and he assumed it was for a prank. Sherriff’s current license still has the picture he took when he was 16, a photo he calls the “ugliest picture known to man,” per the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derek Goold.
However, Sherriff found out what his license was being used for when he received a call telling him there was an all-expenses-paid Nissan Altima rental car waiting at the ballpark for him whenever he left.
“Waino got me a rental car,” Sherriff told Goold. “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.”
Wainwright had found out Sherriff was making the 10- to 15-minute walk to work every day and had to walk even farther if he needed groceries. The starting pitcher asked Sherriff if he wanted him to buy a bike or a car for him, but the southpaw turned the offer down. Wainwright felt the need to do a good deed, though, after recalling the time when a teammate who noticed he would wear the same shirt to the ballpark for days at a time left a full box of new shirts in his locker.
“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.”
Still, Sherriff wanted to return the favor for Wainwright’s random act of kindness. He went to Wainwright’s Twitter and bought him three of his favorite things according to his bio: a $20 Chick-Fil-A gift card, a jug of sweet tea, and (some A1 steak sauce that Sherriff thought was) barbecue sauce.
Thumbnail photo via Steve Mitchell/USA TODAY Sports Images
