St. Louis Cardinals’ Adam Wainwright wins Roberto Clemente Award for humanitarian work
Major League Baseball announced Monday that St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright is the recipient of baseball’s 2020 Roberto Clemente Award, providing official recognition of a career spent in service to others off the field even as Wainwright continues to defy expectations and excel on the field.
“Well I was driving,” Wainwright said, describing the circumstances under which he learned he won the award, “and I almost ran into an oak tree. It’s a feeling where, every year when I see the name of the winner announced, I love going in and seeing what they’re doing in the world.”
Named for the Pittsburgh Pirates great who died in a plane crash while on a relief mission to Nicaragua in 1972, the Clemente Award is given annually to “the player who best represents the game of Baseball through extraordinary character, community involvement, philanthropy and positive contributions, both on and off the field,” as described by MLB.com.
“More than anything, almost more than the great player he was, what you remember about Roberto Clemente is his legacy off the field and inside the clubhouse and what he was able to accomplish in Puerto Rico,” Wainwright said, also crediting Clemente’s wife, Vera, for keeping that legacy and spirit of charity alive over the intervening decades.
“As a human being, that means a lot to me.”
Wainwright is the sixth St. Louis Cardinals player to receive the award, following Lou Brock (1975), Ozzie Smith (1995), Albert Pujols (2008), Carlos Beltrán (2013) and Yadier Molina (2018). Those six St. Louis Cardinals’ winners represent the largest amount of any individual organization.
“I think if I was going to look at what all of our players have been able to accomplish in our charitable efforts over the years, I think a big part of that is knowing where we play, what organization we play with, the history behind the St. Louis Cardinals organization,” Wainwright said. “This tradition of being charitable goes way back inside the St. Louis Cardinals clubhouse, but beyond that, in the entire city of St. Louis.”
Adam Wainwright’s charitable reach
Big League Impact, established by Wainwright and his brother Trey in 2013, is the primary arm through which Wainwright and his family coordinate with ball players throughout the country to maximize their charitable reach. The organization’s annual fantasy football contests raise thousands for various causes, and is presently operating a campaign led by Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Nick Ahmed to feed and provide medical care for 70,000 children in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, a large amount of Wainwright’s charity work has been dedicated toward reducing the threat posed by food insecurity. Big League Impact has ongoing partnerships with Food For The Hungry and Operation Food Search, as well as Water Mission, a clean water charity which seeks to reduce the risk posed by tainted supplies in disadvantaged areas.
In addition, Wainwright and his wife, Jenny, personally donated $250,000 through the foundation at the outset of the pandemic-related baseball stoppage to ameliorate the effects of missing salaries for minor league players.
The Wainwrights are also heavily involved in assisting victims of sex trafficking. Their partnership with Crisis Aid of St. Louis has supported the building of housing for trafficking victims. In both 2018 and 2019, Wainwright’s annual Waino’s World karaoke fundraiser was held for the organization’s benefit.
Crisis Aid is also heavily involved in the building of sanitary and sustainable water systems throughout the developing world, from which Wainwright has seen enormous benefits for those in need.
On his first trip to Honduras, Wainwright explained, they visited a village on a hillside which relied on a river two miles away for its water. By implementing an end-to-end water filtration and sanitation system, his relief mission was able to provide tangible assistance to 1,500 people.
“We dug a well deep down,” Wainwright said, “and then we installed 21 taps to run all the way through the community. So 1500 people, the farthest they ever had to walk outside their front door to get water was 50 feet.
“The thing that never gets talked about is sanitation. We implemented a hand washing station and system for people who have never used a toilet in their life. You want to talk about a difference in a water system is when you actually have sanitation to go along with your clean water.”
The onset of the pandemic has prevented Wainwright from traveling on relief trips this winter as he ordinarily would, but he said that the connections made over the years of work have allowed him to develop relationships with individuals on the ground in affected areas who have been able to provide him with constant updates.
Is Wainwright’s future with the St. Louis Cardinals?
Wainwright, who has pitched every inning of his 15-year major league career for the Cardinals, remains a free agent.
“All I can control is being ready for when that call does come, from whoever it comes from,” he said. “Then I have a decision to make. What happens if a bunch of teams call in and they want the old guy’s services, and St. Louis doesn’t? Those are things I’ve got to weigh, I’ve got to figure out.”
In fact, Wainwright received a text message from Molina on Monday morning both congratulating him for the award and posing a question about free agency. What, the query was posed, was that question about?
“You can ask it,” Wainwright said with a wry smile, “but I’m not gonna answer it.”
Why Adam Wainwright plays baseball
Instead, for nearly 40 minutes on Monday morning, Wainwright bounced from topic to topic, recalling instantly the details of charitable endeavours and specific geography in Haiti and Ethiopia as well as the challenges posed by COVID-19 and the delivery of simple sustenance, backpacks full of food, to students in the St. Louis area who, due to remote learning, may be missing out on their most reliable source of nutrition — a school lunch.
“That’s one area where COVID has hit the hardest, in the schools. A lot of times, these kids eat the best at school. And they go home on the weekend and they don’t have anything.”
Just one fantasy football draft fundraiser this year, Wainwright explained, raised enough money for 50,000 backpacks to be sent home with food insecure students in St. Louis.
“Fifty thousand backpacks full of food is a lot of food. If I played all 15 years just for the backpacks or just for the one water project there, that would’ve been worth it.”
