World Champions!
What a wild couple of weeks it has been...
My wife laughed at how nervous I got watching the final outs. My girls found out they could talk me into letting them stay up way past their bedtime if they watched the games with me. I neglected various household chores and projects I should have been working on to watch grown men play a boy's game. I was so frustrated after watching the 'Birds pitiful performance in an August showdown with the Phillies that I did something I usually make fun of and I called St. Louis Sports Talk Radio to vent my frustration over the radio airwaves...twice. (Of course, rumor has it the team was listening and that it helped motivate their postseason run).
When it was all said and done, the St. Louis Cardinals won their first world championship (a misnomer, my friends from England remind me, since really only Americans and few Japanese really care...) since 1982!
The best part: I got to watch the game with my dad and 2 brothers from our childhood home 90 miles east of St. Louis. We're all at different points in life, so it's rare we get together, and we couldn't have planned this if we tried. But just an hour or so before Ben turned 20 years old, we got to celebrate together in the family room we grew up in, and that was pretty amazing.
Forgive me for getting sappy and sentimental for awhile, but several years ago I found the following quote from Ken Burns' PBS documentary on "Baseball" and it's stuck with me ever since. For those of you who don't understand how a game can be a big deal, maybe it's because it's not really just about the game...
"It measures just 9 inches in circumference, weighes only about 5 ounces, and is made of cork wound with woolen yarn, covered with two layers of cowhide, and stitched by hand precisely 216 times. It travels 60 feet 6 inches from the pitcher's mound to home - and it can cover that distance at nearly 100 miles an hour. Along the way it can be made to twist, spin, curve, wobble, rise or fall away.
The bat is made of turned ash, less than 42 inches long, not more than 2 3/4 inches in diameter. The batter has only a few thousanths of a second to decide to hit the ball. And yet the men who fail seven times out of ten are considered the game's greatest heroes.
Baseball is played everywhere: in parks and playgrounds and prison yards, in back alleys and farmer's fields, by small children and old men, by raw amateurs and millioaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed, and the only one in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years, while they have conquered a contintent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights and the meaning of freedom. At the game's heart lies mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilirating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conversative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.
It is a haunted game in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss and impresishable hope - and coming home."
If you still don't understand it, try watching The Natural and Field of Dreams. If it's still eluding you, just celebrate with the Strother boys and Cardinal Nation, and join me this spring for a backyard BBQ and some wiffle ball with the kids in the backyard.
