3 posts tagged “world series”
What are your predictions for the World Series?
Some team will win. The other team will lose. It will all quickly fade into history and not be the least bit relevant to anyone except a few die-hard fans who have nothing better to do than obsess over minutiae.
They were supposed to lose to San Diego in the first round of the playoffs. That didn't happen.
They had no chance against the Mets. They won.
Everybody expected Detroit to crush them like bugs-- after all, a cardinal is a tasty snack for a tiger, right? It wasn't even supposed to be close, and a sweep seemed eminently possible.
Well, so much for Goliath. Cardinals in five, and it didn't even seem like a fair fight. Congratulations to the MLB champion Cardinals!
Now you get the regular Patti back for the next fifty weeks or so. You know, the one who never notices that professional sports exist, isn't even sure what sports are in season at any given moment, and who never under any circumstances would post in oversized red text. It's OK, the freaky sports fan Patti can't hurt you anymore.
I'm not much of a sports fan, to put it mildly. I've always thought that professional sports were silly, and a waste of time, energy, and money. Whenever someone finds out I'm from Oakland, they invariably ask me about the As or the Redskins or whatever the local in-season team is, and I just give them a dumb look. The amount that I know about local sports is barely above zero, and the amount I care is slightly less than that.
However, one just does not grow up in St. Louis without being a Cardinals fan. You can ignore the football team (whoever they are these days), pretend that hockey doesn't exist, and skip out on any other sports in the area, but you just do not live in St. Louis without being a stark raving lunatic Cardinals fan.
Last summer I was in town for my mother's wedding, and while I was there Mom's neighbor came over to visit. Hazel is in her late 80s and is suffering the effects of age-- she can no longer remember what day of the week it is or whether she remembered to go to church, but by god she knows what the Cards are doing in great detail. And man oh man does she have opinions. I would not be the least bit surprised if she tried to call Tony La Russa up to give him a piece of her mind about a pitching choice she disapproved of.
Years after I moved away from St. Louis, I was walking through a hardware store on the west coast and I heard something that made me stop dead in my tracks. It took me a few seconds to realize that what I'd heard was a radio broadcasting a baseball game, with Jack Buck as the announcer. His voice and cadence were so overwhelmingly famliiar to me that I was instantly transported home-- in my head it was a lazy, muggy summer afternoon, with ribs on the barbecue in the backyard, and baseball on the radio. Jack Buck is the voice of my childhood. Names like Stan Musial, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, and Ozzie Smith echo in my head like old friends, and to this day I can tell you about the bad call at third base during game 6 of the 1985 World Series, and how it cost the Cards the championship.
Tonight my beloved redbirds hit a two-run homer in the top of the ninth to clinch the national leage pennant, and there was much whooping and hollering in my part of the world.
