Archive for the ‘Cardinals’ tag
Albert Pujols, Jack Clark, and Our Loyalty to Clothes
The Albert Pujols will-he-won’t-he sign deadline passed last week, and now the best baseball player on the planet stands to become a free agent after the season. Rumor has it he was asking the Cardinals for $300 million, the richest contract ever, and the baseball stat wonks say he’d be worth every penny. He’s put together perhaps the best first 10 seasons of any player, and one would expect he can produce at the same level for at least another five (and the next five probably better than most hitters).
As a Cardinals fan, I obviously have a rooting interest in seeing the best player in the game stay with my team. Albert has said repeatedly that he wants to finish his career in St. Louis, and the Cardinals clearly have it in their best interests to sign him. It’s good for baseball for its marquee player to stick with one of its proudest franchises, and if ever a player was destined to show some loyalty, it was this player and this team. But so was LeBron James to Cleveland. Ask a Cavs fan how he feels about loyalty now.
Familiar Rivalry
This piece was originally published at the Lovable Losers Literary Revue.
I’VE LIVED IN CHICAGO FOR NINE YEARS, but I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan. I grew up in southwestern Indiana, just a two-hour drive on I-64 across the flat, oil rig-dotted wastelands of southern Illinois to St. Louis. On summer nights, Jack Buck and Mike Shannon lulled me to sleep with their baritone calls of Cardinals games on the local radio affiliate. My town was split about 70-30, Cardinals to Cubs fans, and my best friend across the street was a Cubbie diehard. We spent muggy July afternoons playing out the rivalry in his backyard: Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee versus Ryne Sandberg and Jody Davis. Grown ups told us that Cardinals and Cubs fans weren’t supposed to like each other, but that was hard to believe. For us, it was more like a matter of taste: Coke versus Pepsi or grape versus orange, just a convenient way to divvy up the teams for pickup games.
When I went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, I was in the minority for the first time. I met kids from the Chicago suburbs, northwest Indiana, Indianapolis, South Bend, Fort Wayne, and they all liked the Cubs. Cardinal fans popped up here and there, but for the most part, I spent my time with the Cubs diaspora, created by the universal reach of WGN.