Kerrville, Texas – A 7-year-old boy was found huddled on the roof of an overturned pickup truck during the historic floods that engulfed the town. He didn’t give his name. No one knew who his parents were. There was only a crumpled, wet piece of paper in his pocket, with three words written on it:
“I love Cardinals.”
Willson Contreras, the star catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, was at the flood relief center at the team’s request. When he saw the boy sitting alone in a corner of the camp, his eyes vacant, his arms clutching a tattered baseball cap, he stopped short.
“I don’t know why, but in his eyes… I saw a different version of myself. A kid who had been abandoned by fate—and needed someone to believe he was worth keeping.”
That night, Contreras didn’t return to the hotel. He stayed by the boy’s side—giving him the temporary name Eli, since the boy didn’t speak, only looking up when he heard that name in a nurse’s lullaby.
Eli didn’t say a word for three days, until Contreras placed his own glove in his brother’s hand and said,
“I lost everything. But someone believed in me. Now I believe in you.”
The boy smiled shakily—his first since the flood.
Three weeks later, Willson Contreras did the unexpected:
He filed for legal adoption of Eli.
“It wasn’t because I felt sorry for him. It was because I’d never seen anyone like me—but braver than me at that age.”
The first day Eli walked onto Busch Stadium with his new “dad,” holding hands, more than 40,000 fans stood and applauded.
A reporter wrote:
“Eli lost a home in the flood. But he found a family – and a father – in the flood of baseball.”
Baseball can’t stop the flood. But it can rebuild what it has taken away.
“When Eli first called me ‘Dad,’ that was the most important moment of my career,” Willson Contreras said at the adoption press conference. “Not the World Series. Not the Golden Glove. This.”