Will Leitch's team is better than your team
While watching the Cardinals/Nationals series-- and the Birds' mighty comeback in Game 5-- at a bar in New York City, Will Leitch came to the realization that his Cardinals had morphed into a team that everybody but Cardinals fans roots against. If his belief is accurate, and it's a product of the team's on-the-field success, I hope he's correct. I must be further gone in my loyalty, though-- I don't see it. Of course, I watch the games at home.---
Maybe Leitch is right. ESPN's David Schoenfeld wrote something similar on Sunday night, "Consider this: From 2002 to 2011, the St. Louis Cardinals appeared in more games than the New York Yankees. They won more championships than the Yankees. Over those ten seasons, the Cardinals appeared in more league championship series than the Yankees. So maybe the Cardinals should be considered baseball's evil empire. Ok, ok... the Yankees spent about $1.87 billion on payroll over that decade-- more than twice the Cardinals' $900 million. But it is interesting to note that the team taking advantage of the addition of a second wild-card team is one of the National League's powerhouse franchises."
Schoenfeld is understating it. The Cardinals have 11 World Series championships, five more than any other National League franchise, and nobody in the Senior Circuit comes close to touching the Cardinals for postseason games played since 2000. They are the National League's powerhouse franchise.
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Time for me to elaborate about my team loyalty, and to add to your Cardinals hatred: I thought Matt Holliday's first inning slide into second base last night was absolutely clean. If it wasn't, he would have been called out for obstruction. Giants second baseman Marco Scutaro only got hurt because he tried to complete the double play relay while a runner was effectively taking him out on top of the bag. You hang in, you take the risks. That's how it works. Pennant on the line, runner goes in harder, and the pivot man also stays in longer. They both did what they did because the stakes were huge-- inning over, or first and third with two out for the Cardinals in a must-win game for the Giants. As a two-time Oscar winner once said, "There's no crying in baseball."
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Will the Giants retaliate later in the series? Well, some of us still remember Giants' first baseman Will Clark going in hard and high at second on Jose Oquendo in 1988, touching off a brawl between Clark and Ozzie Smith just a few months after the contentious 1987 NLCS between the same two teams. Twenty four years later, Oquendo is still in uniform 100 feet away from the collision as the Cards' third base coach-- this was the payback.
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Donald Trump is capable of making even Alex Rodriguez likable. Whenever Trump starts pretending that his dominion extends to the sports world, like he's doing here, recall that he once single-handedly destroyed a professional football league.
posted by CM @ 6:35 PM
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