Mike Sweeney hits home run for sick boy

Matt Herndon is an 11-year-old kid from Overland Park, Kansas, who was in the hospital on Wednesday night with a brain aneurysm when he got a call from his favorite baseball player, Mike Sweeney. As Sweeney is his favorite player and the time seemed right, Matt asked Mike to hit him a home run in that night's game. Then Sweeney, being the nice guy he is, went out and did just that!

You can see the extra bounce in Sweeney's step as he trots around the bases after his 1st inning home run, a two-run shot off Sidney Ponson. "I never ran so fast around the bases after hitting a homer," he says. Then, as Pat Borzi of MLB.com reports:

Thursday morning, Sweeney almost teared up when describing the postgame phone message he got from Herndon. The boy had called many of his friends in Overland Park to tell them of Sweeney's call.

"He said they couldn't get the game at the hospital, but when I homered, all his friends from Overland Park started calling," Sweeney said. "He said, `You did it, Mike!'

"David said that Matt told him this was the greatest day of his life. That boy's got some courage. He's a hero now."

I thought this stuff was reserved for books and tall tales of American icons. Well, Sweeney is kind of a mythic figure in Kansas City...

(Take that, Onion.)