Happy Thanksgiving

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving holiday. Whenever I think about Thanksgiving I can't help but also think about Air Supply...

I Didn't Die

Forgive me father, it has been over a month since my last blog. A lot has happened over the last month, and I can't believe I haven't taken the time to write about any of it. Firstly, my Cardinals finally won another World Series, their 10th one to be exact, breaking a championship drought of 24 years. It was an incredible and unlikely post season run, which brings to mind once again the dichotomy of media coverage and hype when it comes to professional sports and especially Major League Baseball. As per usual, the Cardinals were given little chance in competing in the post season, but there was even more skepticism than normal (even within the ranks of the Cardinal faithful) as this team had backed into the playoffs with admittedly one of the worst regular season records. However, the Cardinals soon raised the eyebrows of the legions of naysayers and the hopes of their fans as they dispatched the lowly San Diego Padres who are owned by St. Louis in the post season; 1-12 or 1-15 or something like that.

Ok, that was cute, but now the mighty Mets were ready to bring the redbirds back down to earth, and thus the baseball gods, the Fox network, and the biased portion of the media could yet still be appeased even though the Yankees had already been eliminated by Detroit. However, what resulted was the 3rd riveting NLCS in as many years involving the Cardinals- not that anyone has noticed. Game 3 notwithstanding, every inning seemed to carry immense weight in the final outcome of each game. Pitch selections were agonized over and managerial decisions were examined ad nausem, which naturally resulted in a memorable series that was pushed to an excrutiatingly nerve-racking game 7 at Shea.

After the elimination of the Mets and, ultimately, the Detroit Tigers, the Cardinals were less a team who finally played to their potential on the sport's greatest stage and more lucky overachievers who surely must have made a deal with the devil himself to earn the franchise's 10th World Championship. Hell, if it had been the Yankees or Red Sox in the same position then all we would have heard how it was one of the greatest comebacks of all time; I can just hear the lame, over-produced lead-in to Baseball Tonight that would have surely happened if the roles could have been reversed. Cue cornball gladiator music, misty edged video featuring humiliating defeats leading up to a championship crescendo, and the narration of Harold Reynolds Karl Ravech:

"Against all odds, great teams find the courage to compete when it counts the most no matter what obstacles litter their path. There are few teams that could muster the wherewithal to finish the regular season like a lamb but come out of the post season like a lion. However, not all teams can look to their past for inspiration and call upon the ghosts of DiMaggio, Gehrig, and the Babe for guidance. Only the men who wear pinstripes are capable of writing this unlikely story, only the Yankees can pull off this sort of miracle."

...And fade to black.

You laugh, but even honest Yankee fans would acknowledge that if a similar situation would befall them as fate had in store for the Cardinals this year then the story would sound completely different. I don't know, I guess I really don't give a shit what the rest of the world thinks, it's just that I don't want to hear how the 2006 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals are the luckiest team in the history of the universe for the rest of my life.

Oh well, as always, go Cards!

Stay tuned for tales from South Dakota and highlights of the 2006 pheasant hunting trip.