BigRedChief
10-17-2004, 07:59 AM
From todays KC Star.
Better off Red
Forget — for a moment — the history, the heartbreak, the 105 wins this year. Living, breathing, sleeping and dying Cardinals baseball, for all the good and bad, is the reason we're the game's best fans.
AN ESSAY BY JUSTIN HECKERT
It was October, warm and dark, high in the upper deck in Busch Stadium, in the city by the river beneath the silver rim of the Gateway Arch, in between the foul pole and the green rectangular scoreboard and pennants and long-retired names, exactly 10 rows from the top, in left field — that's where I was sitting — during game two of the National League Division Series as my cherished St. Louis Cardinals fought for a two-games-to-none advantage against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Truthfully, I only sat down for maybe a third of the game; like the rest of the people there — like the rest of the great breathing corpus of 52,000 Cardinals fans, to be more precise — I was mostly up and out of my seat, braying at each strike and hooting at each hit, and in my actions behaved and was dressed accordingly: red button-up over red Cardinals T-shirt, with the birds-balanced-on-bats (you know, the most handsome logo in baseball), and my red cap with white letters, etc.
As far as one could see, there was not one empty plastic red chair in the gracefully aging bowl stadium, everyone dressed in the devil's color, to whom a lot of us would trade our soul to ensure this a championship season; but as I was saying, there were tons of us, wearing white, wearing light blue, wearing white-and-red or white-and-blue, or all three, jerseys, hats, bird heads, pants, shoes, face paint, the very colors of our country, now that I think about it; everyone was dressed this way, and that is how Busch appeared as I scanned its concrete circumference, taking pictures with my cell phone.
Dusk settled down into evening, still hot. We trailed 1-0. But then, in the second inning, came the delightful cool of a rally — the double, the bunt hit, a wild pitch, a liner scraping the bag at first — and how loud it became to those inside; we rose, we were up, and we were cheering, while dancing along with Fredbird to the strange beat of the Run Batted In; all of us were party to the insoluble and phenomenally nerdish act of slapping each other five. Beers were spilled in a haste to stand; food was knocked to the ground; the organ gave a groan as it came through all the speakers.
And the rest of the night on: 8 o'clock became 9, 9 turned to 10, the stars appeared and the arch was lost in the blackened sky, and the ushers called for pea-NUTS and Budweiser and cotton candy, as they meandered the rows, and the Cardinals lineup — which, let's not kid ourselves, is undoubtedly the most daunting in the history of the National League — filled the night not with its usual thunder, but instead yielded to a drizzle of clutch hits from unexpected players. My heart dove and leapt as if on a pair of wings; my feet left the ground as I thrust myself into the air.
We won the game, 8-3. And I say we because, as a Cardinals fan, the pronoun announces myself a small part of the team. How did we do today? How did we play last month? We had a hell of a year. You get the picture.
Cardinals fans. We have a great habit of filling the stadium, 3 million plus each year, for good teams and bad, a strange miracle for a city of no more than 380,000. With the numbers you cannot argue: we come from the city, from the bootheel of Southeast Missouri, from Southern Illinois, from Iowa, and Indiana, and Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and Oklahoma, from the banks and shores and mountains, where KMOX is still the radio voice of the team that can be heard across the country. We are not fans pinned to the heavy cross of a curse. We are not fickle with our undying passion, as are, say, countless other fans in sport; and we have a past of winning that is usurped by only that of the omnipotent New York Yankees. We bring to the stadium, regular season and especially playoffs, a home-field advantage unrivaled in baseball. But, that said, we have not been to the Series in a long time.
I am what you would call a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan. I was during last week's NLDS, I am during the National League Championship Series against Houston, and I have been since I could fit atop my father's shoulders and stare out at the green turf and the deep fences, in that gilded age of Whitey Ball and Willie and the Wizard. I do not remember our last championship; I was 2 that year.
Let me say that this publication more than once has attempted to send a reporter to the other end of the state to document the sights and the sounds of a Cardinals game, to wax about the phenomena of the Cardinals fans; and my hunch is that these reporters sat inside the press box while outside the harp of car horns and the trumpet blare of a thousand voices spilled onto Keener Plaza after a redbird victory; maybe they were in town for a day or two, as all writers summoned to write for out-of-town publications are, and saw what they could see during that time, columnists and baseball writers who cover sports but are paid to not be fans while doing so — and of course they failed because they could not understand. I mean, how could they?
Well, now this paper has summoned someone who understands.
Each morning, in my apartment in downtown Atlanta, I awaken to a framed picture of Busch Stadium, opening night circa 1996, the first year of its major renovation, when they brought the fences in. Busch is one of the oldest remaining ballparks in the country, even though it was built in the mid-'60s. The photo must've been taken from a helicopter, because the shot is from way up there, the players small in white uniforms and maybe trotting out to take their positions, and this was before they put the old-time scoreboard in, so the park still looks like a doughnut, with a perfect round hole at the top, patterned with the little mini-arches, red seats all the way around. Nineteen-ninety six was the stadium's 30th year, and the slogan around the frame reads, “It oughta be played on grass,” “It oughta be peanut shells and cotton candy,” “It oughta be family entertainment,” “It oughta be affordable …” BASEBALL LIKE IT OUGHTA BE.
This picture was a present, from my folks, who themselves are rabid Cardinals fans. They reared me under the red banner and the white hanky, of course to be waved during games. This summer, for instance, when I flew out to see them, we made big plans to catch a game in San Diego. When we showed up at the stadium an hour and a half early, we noted all the red hats and shirts of a good 8,000 or so other Cardinals fans, all sticking out like cold sores in the mouth of an otherwise unremarkable and quiet Padres crowd. During the game, as friar fans watched and booed, we were wily and obstreperous, yelling and making fools of ourselves. We even got a big away-game chant of “Let's go Cardinals” going. During two games in Atlanta this year, some friends and I purchased seats, and we went, decked out in all the apparel, and a coworker noted that “there were about as many Cardinal fans here” as there were Braves fans, and of course the Atlantans, spoiled as they are, were angered by the sheer force of us, that we had come hundreds of miles to root for a win.
I make my home in the South because of work, but my roots are in Cape Girardeau, Mo., and I recall, even in my teenage years of Felix Jose and Omar Olivares and Rene Arocha and Gregg Jefferies and Mark Whiten and 30- and 40-game-under-.500 seasons, I would sit in the basement, on school nights when I had the option of study, and I would listen to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon chatter through meaningless games, and I would listen from first pitch to last, from the pre-game show to post game, from when Mike was sober until he was not, to when Jack would spill out the unmatchable announcement of “That's a winner! So long for a little while,” and I would lay on the couch with my feet dangling over its edge and sometimes they would win, but more often they would not, and maybe Justin, you say, this isn't the most healthy way to spend a childhood, but of course I had a life, as well, it's just that — you know, the Cardinals were always a huge part of it.
So, anyway, in my apartment in Atlanta, I see the picture and think about 1996, when I was 16, that first playoff year since I could really remember, how I jumped so hard when we beat the Padres in the first round — when Brian Jordan knocked a homer to erase their chances of rally — that I broke a friend's table and afterward we poured soda like it was champagne.
Another framed picture, this one in my living room, is a panorama of the stadium the night Mark McGwire hit 62. I was in school, at Mizzou, and I taped the last 20 or so games of the season — this was before DVD — just so I could go back some day and watch them if he ended up breaking the record. Well, he did, and I have the tapes, all KPLR broadcasts, and sickly — once, yes — I have gone back as Ken Burns might go back over his own work, and watched most of them.
That year, my parents managed to sneak into the record-breaking game. I don't know how, but they did, and about a week later Mom, who is an English teacher, wrote a poem and addressed it to Mark McGwire and sent it to Busch Stadium. I do not know if he ever read it, but if he did, I wonder if he could appreciate where she was coming from. The story goes, before the game, Mom had witnessed two men lifting their father out of a car and onto the disabled ramp to the stadium, the two men being his sons, and she had watched them for a good while on that loud night, had come back home, and had written:
Oh so slight a man with white-gray face
He had a cap on down low and warm sweater
And belted pants pulled tight
Around the small waist
Together they lifted and scooted him
Out of the front seat
And onto the motor cart
Adjusted him
And the older son patted him
Twice on the shoulder
And pulled away in the brown car
As the other son went with him
Into the stadium
Next to the celebrity arrivals
In their fine outfits
Slowed by the autographs
What special thing had
The two sons done for the ticket
For the game of a lifetime
For the old man
Still in soft houseshoes
And now they took him inside
There in the great hope
Of flashbulbs and streamers
Confetti and fireworks
A record to be broken like
The old days of baseball
I wanted it to happen on the September evening
With the three quarters full moon
where the arch
Signals wide open dreams still
I wanted it to happen as much
For the old man
Who came in the brown car
Lifted out by his grown sons
I wanted the flashbulbs and streamers
And confetti, white fireworks
Against the Gateway's night skyline
For the old man
The moment, the history
This baseball
To see it in his cap low, warm sweater
And soft houseshoes
I wanted it
Like his two sons
Joe Posnanski, this paper's columnist of record (a great columnist, award-winning) wrote a piece about the myth of the Cardinals fan last year.
In this particular column — titled, “Cardinals fans just know they're baseball's best” — Joe asked how we could stoop to such egotism, calling ourselves Baseball's Best Fans, and he wrote that everywhere in St. Louis, be it while driving or walking, an outsider is reminded where he is constantly. And, having earned my stripes at MU, I'm well aware that columnists can come in and deliver a cheap shot. But I decided that Joe was not so much being mean as he was being misguided. He wrote that since we were not ranked No. 1 statistically in attendance, by figures, then we were not technically “No. 1.” Of course, he did not mention that the New York Yankees are always No. 1 (forget about the Mets), because they have a stadium that can hold 60,000, which can draw from 20 million or so people in the outlying area. St. Louis is smaller than Kansas City and Minneapolis and Dallas, as examples (all three of which it decidedly outdraws year after year), and always places in the top 10, up there with Los Angeles and Anaheim and Chicago, cities five times its size. I am assuming Joe has driven down I-70 and looked around at the emptiness, and other parts of the state in between here and St. Louis, because we're not talking about heavily populated areas here. And if St. Louis has 2 million metro — then, statistically, that means, impossibly, every man and woman and child there has been to a Cardinals game at least once this year.
We are the best, because we come to the games to show our support, for good and bad, because a lot of us have been raised to believe that's how it should be. I don't say we're the best with a great machismo, but at times we can be boastful fans, but that's just because we look at those who support other teams and don't feel they love and respect them the way we do ours. I mean … and I hate to say this … but those fans just don't understand. The players will tell you. Read their quotes. Many arrive and, because of us, want to stay for the end of their careers.
My life has been one full of great Cardinal stories, let me tell you, but the reason I have so many of them — I was at the game when Willie drove in Ozzie to win in '96, I have a signed Tommie Herr picture, I met Ozzie at a Wal-Mart, I went to the Cardinal caravan each year with thousands of fans in Cape, when the team would send the dregs of its lineup (Tom Pagnozzi, et al) down the river for publicity, I wear Cardinal red, I watch all the games on cable, even down here, and when Mark Whiten hit four home runs in one game I lay under the covers with the radio on, and I couldn't believe it, and we went to Busch on family trips, and we met Stan the Man, and when Jack died I was in New York and read the news online, in my apartment in Manhattan I broke Lorie's fish head because I stomped the floor after an Edgar Renteria home run, this year I dragged Mary El up to St. Louis and paid for box seats so she could “see a real baseball game”, like it oughta be seen, and then the blessings of these last few years with La Russa and the playoffs, everyone just thankful that they've been good, and this year's team, with all its victories, hope upon hope that they'll bring us home a trophy, and, and … oh, yeah — the reason I have so many of these stories is because I'm a Cardinals fan, and have followed the team, and I will go to my grave as one of the Best Fans in Baseball.
What does it feel like to be a Cardinals fan? Well, I guess I forgot to say …
I've got to get ready for the game.
Better off Red
Forget — for a moment — the history, the heartbreak, the 105 wins this year. Living, breathing, sleeping and dying Cardinals baseball, for all the good and bad, is the reason we're the game's best fans.
AN ESSAY BY JUSTIN HECKERT
It was October, warm and dark, high in the upper deck in Busch Stadium, in the city by the river beneath the silver rim of the Gateway Arch, in between the foul pole and the green rectangular scoreboard and pennants and long-retired names, exactly 10 rows from the top, in left field — that's where I was sitting — during game two of the National League Division Series as my cherished St. Louis Cardinals fought for a two-games-to-none advantage against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Truthfully, I only sat down for maybe a third of the game; like the rest of the people there — like the rest of the great breathing corpus of 52,000 Cardinals fans, to be more precise — I was mostly up and out of my seat, braying at each strike and hooting at each hit, and in my actions behaved and was dressed accordingly: red button-up over red Cardinals T-shirt, with the birds-balanced-on-bats (you know, the most handsome logo in baseball), and my red cap with white letters, etc.
As far as one could see, there was not one empty plastic red chair in the gracefully aging bowl stadium, everyone dressed in the devil's color, to whom a lot of us would trade our soul to ensure this a championship season; but as I was saying, there were tons of us, wearing white, wearing light blue, wearing white-and-red or white-and-blue, or all three, jerseys, hats, bird heads, pants, shoes, face paint, the very colors of our country, now that I think about it; everyone was dressed this way, and that is how Busch appeared as I scanned its concrete circumference, taking pictures with my cell phone.
Dusk settled down into evening, still hot. We trailed 1-0. But then, in the second inning, came the delightful cool of a rally — the double, the bunt hit, a wild pitch, a liner scraping the bag at first — and how loud it became to those inside; we rose, we were up, and we were cheering, while dancing along with Fredbird to the strange beat of the Run Batted In; all of us were party to the insoluble and phenomenally nerdish act of slapping each other five. Beers were spilled in a haste to stand; food was knocked to the ground; the organ gave a groan as it came through all the speakers.
And the rest of the night on: 8 o'clock became 9, 9 turned to 10, the stars appeared and the arch was lost in the blackened sky, and the ushers called for pea-NUTS and Budweiser and cotton candy, as they meandered the rows, and the Cardinals lineup — which, let's not kid ourselves, is undoubtedly the most daunting in the history of the National League — filled the night not with its usual thunder, but instead yielded to a drizzle of clutch hits from unexpected players. My heart dove and leapt as if on a pair of wings; my feet left the ground as I thrust myself into the air.
We won the game, 8-3. And I say we because, as a Cardinals fan, the pronoun announces myself a small part of the team. How did we do today? How did we play last month? We had a hell of a year. You get the picture.
Cardinals fans. We have a great habit of filling the stadium, 3 million plus each year, for good teams and bad, a strange miracle for a city of no more than 380,000. With the numbers you cannot argue: we come from the city, from the bootheel of Southeast Missouri, from Southern Illinois, from Iowa, and Indiana, and Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and Oklahoma, from the banks and shores and mountains, where KMOX is still the radio voice of the team that can be heard across the country. We are not fans pinned to the heavy cross of a curse. We are not fickle with our undying passion, as are, say, countless other fans in sport; and we have a past of winning that is usurped by only that of the omnipotent New York Yankees. We bring to the stadium, regular season and especially playoffs, a home-field advantage unrivaled in baseball. But, that said, we have not been to the Series in a long time.
I am what you would call a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan. I was during last week's NLDS, I am during the National League Championship Series against Houston, and I have been since I could fit atop my father's shoulders and stare out at the green turf and the deep fences, in that gilded age of Whitey Ball and Willie and the Wizard. I do not remember our last championship; I was 2 that year.
Let me say that this publication more than once has attempted to send a reporter to the other end of the state to document the sights and the sounds of a Cardinals game, to wax about the phenomena of the Cardinals fans; and my hunch is that these reporters sat inside the press box while outside the harp of car horns and the trumpet blare of a thousand voices spilled onto Keener Plaza after a redbird victory; maybe they were in town for a day or two, as all writers summoned to write for out-of-town publications are, and saw what they could see during that time, columnists and baseball writers who cover sports but are paid to not be fans while doing so — and of course they failed because they could not understand. I mean, how could they?
Well, now this paper has summoned someone who understands.
Each morning, in my apartment in downtown Atlanta, I awaken to a framed picture of Busch Stadium, opening night circa 1996, the first year of its major renovation, when they brought the fences in. Busch is one of the oldest remaining ballparks in the country, even though it was built in the mid-'60s. The photo must've been taken from a helicopter, because the shot is from way up there, the players small in white uniforms and maybe trotting out to take their positions, and this was before they put the old-time scoreboard in, so the park still looks like a doughnut, with a perfect round hole at the top, patterned with the little mini-arches, red seats all the way around. Nineteen-ninety six was the stadium's 30th year, and the slogan around the frame reads, “It oughta be played on grass,” “It oughta be peanut shells and cotton candy,” “It oughta be family entertainment,” “It oughta be affordable …” BASEBALL LIKE IT OUGHTA BE.
This picture was a present, from my folks, who themselves are rabid Cardinals fans. They reared me under the red banner and the white hanky, of course to be waved during games. This summer, for instance, when I flew out to see them, we made big plans to catch a game in San Diego. When we showed up at the stadium an hour and a half early, we noted all the red hats and shirts of a good 8,000 or so other Cardinals fans, all sticking out like cold sores in the mouth of an otherwise unremarkable and quiet Padres crowd. During the game, as friar fans watched and booed, we were wily and obstreperous, yelling and making fools of ourselves. We even got a big away-game chant of “Let's go Cardinals” going. During two games in Atlanta this year, some friends and I purchased seats, and we went, decked out in all the apparel, and a coworker noted that “there were about as many Cardinal fans here” as there were Braves fans, and of course the Atlantans, spoiled as they are, were angered by the sheer force of us, that we had come hundreds of miles to root for a win.
I make my home in the South because of work, but my roots are in Cape Girardeau, Mo., and I recall, even in my teenage years of Felix Jose and Omar Olivares and Rene Arocha and Gregg Jefferies and Mark Whiten and 30- and 40-game-under-.500 seasons, I would sit in the basement, on school nights when I had the option of study, and I would listen to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon chatter through meaningless games, and I would listen from first pitch to last, from the pre-game show to post game, from when Mike was sober until he was not, to when Jack would spill out the unmatchable announcement of “That's a winner! So long for a little while,” and I would lay on the couch with my feet dangling over its edge and sometimes they would win, but more often they would not, and maybe Justin, you say, this isn't the most healthy way to spend a childhood, but of course I had a life, as well, it's just that — you know, the Cardinals were always a huge part of it.
So, anyway, in my apartment in Atlanta, I see the picture and think about 1996, when I was 16, that first playoff year since I could really remember, how I jumped so hard when we beat the Padres in the first round — when Brian Jordan knocked a homer to erase their chances of rally — that I broke a friend's table and afterward we poured soda like it was champagne.
Another framed picture, this one in my living room, is a panorama of the stadium the night Mark McGwire hit 62. I was in school, at Mizzou, and I taped the last 20 or so games of the season — this was before DVD — just so I could go back some day and watch them if he ended up breaking the record. Well, he did, and I have the tapes, all KPLR broadcasts, and sickly — once, yes — I have gone back as Ken Burns might go back over his own work, and watched most of them.
That year, my parents managed to sneak into the record-breaking game. I don't know how, but they did, and about a week later Mom, who is an English teacher, wrote a poem and addressed it to Mark McGwire and sent it to Busch Stadium. I do not know if he ever read it, but if he did, I wonder if he could appreciate where she was coming from. The story goes, before the game, Mom had witnessed two men lifting their father out of a car and onto the disabled ramp to the stadium, the two men being his sons, and she had watched them for a good while on that loud night, had come back home, and had written:
Oh so slight a man with white-gray face
He had a cap on down low and warm sweater
And belted pants pulled tight
Around the small waist
Together they lifted and scooted him
Out of the front seat
And onto the motor cart
Adjusted him
And the older son patted him
Twice on the shoulder
And pulled away in the brown car
As the other son went with him
Into the stadium
Next to the celebrity arrivals
In their fine outfits
Slowed by the autographs
What special thing had
The two sons done for the ticket
For the game of a lifetime
For the old man
Still in soft houseshoes
And now they took him inside
There in the great hope
Of flashbulbs and streamers
Confetti and fireworks
A record to be broken like
The old days of baseball
I wanted it to happen on the September evening
With the three quarters full moon
where the arch
Signals wide open dreams still
I wanted it to happen as much
For the old man
Who came in the brown car
Lifted out by his grown sons
I wanted the flashbulbs and streamers
And confetti, white fireworks
Against the Gateway's night skyline
For the old man
The moment, the history
This baseball
To see it in his cap low, warm sweater
And soft houseshoes
I wanted it
Like his two sons
Joe Posnanski, this paper's columnist of record (a great columnist, award-winning) wrote a piece about the myth of the Cardinals fan last year.
In this particular column — titled, “Cardinals fans just know they're baseball's best” — Joe asked how we could stoop to such egotism, calling ourselves Baseball's Best Fans, and he wrote that everywhere in St. Louis, be it while driving or walking, an outsider is reminded where he is constantly. And, having earned my stripes at MU, I'm well aware that columnists can come in and deliver a cheap shot. But I decided that Joe was not so much being mean as he was being misguided. He wrote that since we were not ranked No. 1 statistically in attendance, by figures, then we were not technically “No. 1.” Of course, he did not mention that the New York Yankees are always No. 1 (forget about the Mets), because they have a stadium that can hold 60,000, which can draw from 20 million or so people in the outlying area. St. Louis is smaller than Kansas City and Minneapolis and Dallas, as examples (all three of which it decidedly outdraws year after year), and always places in the top 10, up there with Los Angeles and Anaheim and Chicago, cities five times its size. I am assuming Joe has driven down I-70 and looked around at the emptiness, and other parts of the state in between here and St. Louis, because we're not talking about heavily populated areas here. And if St. Louis has 2 million metro — then, statistically, that means, impossibly, every man and woman and child there has been to a Cardinals game at least once this year.
We are the best, because we come to the games to show our support, for good and bad, because a lot of us have been raised to believe that's how it should be. I don't say we're the best with a great machismo, but at times we can be boastful fans, but that's just because we look at those who support other teams and don't feel they love and respect them the way we do ours. I mean … and I hate to say this … but those fans just don't understand. The players will tell you. Read their quotes. Many arrive and, because of us, want to stay for the end of their careers.
My life has been one full of great Cardinal stories, let me tell you, but the reason I have so many of them — I was at the game when Willie drove in Ozzie to win in '96, I have a signed Tommie Herr picture, I met Ozzie at a Wal-Mart, I went to the Cardinal caravan each year with thousands of fans in Cape, when the team would send the dregs of its lineup (Tom Pagnozzi, et al) down the river for publicity, I wear Cardinal red, I watch all the games on cable, even down here, and when Mark Whiten hit four home runs in one game I lay under the covers with the radio on, and I couldn't believe it, and we went to Busch on family trips, and we met Stan the Man, and when Jack died I was in New York and read the news online, in my apartment in Manhattan I broke Lorie's fish head because I stomped the floor after an Edgar Renteria home run, this year I dragged Mary El up to St. Louis and paid for box seats so she could “see a real baseball game”, like it oughta be seen, and then the blessings of these last few years with La Russa and the playoffs, everyone just thankful that they've been good, and this year's team, with all its victories, hope upon hope that they'll bring us home a trophy, and, and … oh, yeah — the reason I have so many of these stories is because I'm a Cardinals fan, and have followed the team, and I will go to my grave as one of the Best Fans in Baseball.
What does it feel like to be a Cardinals fan? Well, I guess I forgot to say …
I've got to get ready for the game.