The Chris Moeller Archives

This woman-- lets call her Tabitha-- was telling me today about her 5-year-old son, whom she is raising to be an Indians fan. Over the weekend, the son told her that he was rooting for the Cardinals in the playoffs. The child apparently has this extraordinary ability, even at his vernal age, to sit and watch an entire baseball game on television. This means that there exists a boy in America that has not yet completed the first grade, but has already seen at least 150 commercials for "Conan" on TBS.

Anyway, Tabitha told her son that he couldn't root for the Cardinals because he was an Indians fan. The Indians didn't make the playoffs (again) this year, she said, but they "might" be in the playoffs next year. This vague promise of future Tribe success evidently stretched the limits of even this boy's unique attention span. "Mommy, I like the Indians and the Cardinals," he announced, which bothered his mother still, though I was quick to call her out on her hypocrisy when Tabitha announced to me, in her very next breath, that she was rooting for the Texas Rangers, of the remaining four playoff teams, to go all the way.

All sports fans that are parents have certainly been in this situation. I'm not a parent-- I mean at least not that I know of, am I right, fellas?-- but I've often speculated about how I would handle such a situation. Most parents have no qualms about pushing their team allegiances on to their children. My cousin in California, a Los Angeles Angels fan, has his children, 7 and 5, directing the worst school-yard taunts imaginable at the Los Angeles Dodgers. A friend from back home is raising a pair of Chicago Cubs fans now out in the Kansas City suburbs. I've often wondered, with great hope, if his pair of charming little moppets wouldn't one day be swayed by their friends towards the relatively-benign local nine (the Royals)-- and away from the hideous Cubs-- if they end up spending large portions of their lives in that city. Only time will tell.

Part of me thinks that I wouldn't try to sway my own children-- despite that rich, red blood coursing through my veins-- because that's the way it was allowed to happen for me. My parents were sports-minded, but for the most part, non-committed as rooters. I found the Cardinals on my very own when I was of an age not very different than Tabitha's son today. I caught Redbird Fever during the summer of my 7th year, in 1982. Like this boy, I discovered the team on national television. I lived in a different part of Iowa, but the Cardinals there were, like here, of the Midwest, but by no stretch of the imagination, the local team.

There was a family member that tried to sway me. A second cousin (though we were a generation apart) from Wisconsin attempted to get us all Milwaukee Brewers World Series tickets that fall. When he visited Iowa late in summer, it was not yet known that the Brewers would reach the Fall Classic, nor that the Cardinals would ultimately be their opponents when they arrived. I told him the Cardinals were my team. He said he would get us all-- that is, the family-- tickets provided that we pulled for the Brewers. To this day I'm not 100% sure that he was joking. All I remember beyond that is that I answered him in the moment with a defiant "no," and then no Moellers from Iowa wound up going to the World Series that year.

The Cards won that Series in 1982. It was the franchise's ninth championship-- and my first. The next summer Dad drove us to a pair of ballgames at beautiful Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and he bought me a book to read in the car called simply "The Cardinals," which was a statistical catalog of all the players in Cardinals team history, 1876 through 1982 ("Ody Abbott to Ed Zmich"). That book-- and the rest, as they say-- was history.

I thought of that 7-year-old boy from 1982 again today. I have such great reverence for him-- so young, so innocent, so goddamn charmed. The Cardinals and Brewers are doing battle again this week, this time for the National League pennant, and for the Cardinals, what would and could be, after one more round, their 11th championship. That's why even though my conversation with Tabitha was interrupted by work, I felt the need to send her a follow-up email later in the afternoon asserting myself directly, and perhaps impolitely, into her family life. I told her straight away-- you've gotta let that boy of yours fly. He's looking up into that azure sky, and he wants to leave the nest and soar with the eagles, except, wait a minute, the color is wrong. Those aren't eagles at all. Let him go, mom. Let him go.