Cards in World Series again
The Cardinals are National League champions for the 18th time, and the third time in the last eight years. This trip to the World Series is the sixth of my lifetime for the club, but I've come at it this year from a very different direction. I devoted about the same amount of time to the team as I have in the past, but since they won the Series in '06, I've allowed myself to really relax quite a bit.As the papers reported, the Cardinals came from out of nowhere in September to qualify for the playoffs, and maybe that's why I've been sleeping like a baby this cycle. The players made a conscious, collective decision late in August to just relax and go for broke, and that strategy has been clicking for both the team and for me. I've even missed a part of some of the games on television, and this is unprecedented. The Occupy Iowa Movement broke out in my backyard a week and a half ago (with seemingly no regard to the Cardinals postseason schedule) and it's been occupying me as well. The partnership of the two events has been very stimulating actually. It's terrific when an energizing Cardinals' pennant race is able to combine its force with an all-but-entirely-unrelated powerful social movement. Objectively there's no connection between the two whatsoever, yet it's interesting to note that the Cardinals also dominated the National League in 1967 and 1968.
As I've aged, I've become more reasoned. Consciously, I think I've always known that my individual actions do not effect the outcome of the game-- whether I score the game or not, where I'm sitting as I watch a game, what I decide to wear that day, etc.-- but either out of habit, or because of the superstitions that the institution of baseball subtly promotes through its rhythm and tradition, I have found myself in the past often getting bogged down with such supernatural foolishness. Save the omens and curses and charms for the Cubs fans, I have now decided, and by the way, that's been working out great for them.
So, to that end, I have no intention of minding the unwritten rules of the game this time around. I'm not concerned about jinxes or karma. I'm going to call 'em like I see 'em, as the umpire says, and I see great things in the team's immediate future. I believe the Cardinals are going to sweep the Texas Rangers in 4 games this week.
It's a great Fall Classic match-up between the clubs to be sure. Don't get me wrong. St. Louis has been one of America's great baseball cities-- maybe its greatest-- ever since that October day in 1926 when Rogers Hornsby and the kid Cardinals took down Ruth, Gehrig, and the Yankees for their first world championship. The victory parade that followed in downtown St. Louis rivaled, and even preceded by one year, the parade the city would hold for Charles Lindbergh and his "Spirit of St. Louis" after the aviator's return from Paris. Dallas, for its part, has been one of America's great baseball cities too. Since roughly September of last year.
The city of St. Louis and its National League franchise introduced the concepts of both beer and hot dogs to the baseball park. The Texas Rangers introduced the world to George W. Bush.
St. Louis is Cahokia Mounds, site of an ancient indigenous city dating back to the year 600 and today, an officially-recognized World History Site. It is Lewis and Clark, the World's Fair, the King of Beers, the "St. Louis Blues" and incomparable cultural figures like Miles Davis, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Josephine Baker, Chuck Berry, and Tina Turner. It's Gateway Arch monument is the most inspired example of art for art's sake in the public square in United States history. The Dallas/Fort Worth "Metroplex" has arguably the worst suburban and exurban sprawl in the U.S., the second-largest number of freeway-miles per capita in the nation, yet still measurably the fifth worst traffic congestion. Dallas gave us the Kennedy assassination, Vanilla Ice, and the worst of all, Dr. Phil.
The Cardinals have boasted many of the game's great players: Rogers Hornsby, Frankie Frisch, Dizzy Dean, Ducky Medwick, Stan the Man, Enos Slaughter, Red Schoendienst, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Ozzie Smith, Mark McGwire, and Albert Pujols. The Rangers have inducted Rusty Greer into their team Hall of Fame.
The Rangers do have one hell of a team this year. They exploded for 17 hits and 15 runs in the clinching game of the American League Championship Series against Detroit. (Good grief, Texas, save some of those tallies for the next round. You can't execute a man more than once. I mean... unless you've developed a way. Pardon my ignorance.) The Rangers won 96 regular-season games and led their league in batting. But the fun is going to end beginning on Wednesday. It took the Cards only 30 nights to erase a 10 1/2 game deficit to the Braves. They defeated each of the Phillies' aces-- Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Roy Oswalt-- in a single playoff series, then posted a team batting average of .310 in their six-game series against a 96-win Milwaukee club. So I don't think they're too likely to be intimidated by the ghost of Charlie Hough and the haggard remnants of the second edition Washington Senators. Again, Cardinals in four.
posted by CM @ 8:18 PM
3 Comments:
Oh, please. I've hard you trash this expanded playoffs/wild card system so many times. If the Cardinals deserved to be there then you would be truly nervous because they'd have something to prove and historic to live up to, but you know in your gut they got hot at the right time and snuck into the WS when they had earned watching it on TV.
Remind me again why the Brewers have to prove themselves against the Cardinals again, after they did it in 162 games? I know you've explained this to us many, many times.
Um, maybe it's because the Cardinals have now been in the playoffs nine times during the 17 years of the wild card system, and during every one of the previous eight times, they went in as the champions or co-champions of the National League Central Division. This year, long past their due, they're gaming the system for all it's worth and that is HYSTERICALLY AWESOME!
Also, it's just flat terrific, independent of the wild card, because so many teams in the Central Division are incapable of competing against the Cardinals while keeping their pie holes shut, and now those teams, including the 2010 and 2011 Central Division Champions, have to watch the Cardinals in the World Series AGAIN!
9 times in 17 years? I didn't realize they had choked that many times.
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