A poignant scene from the baseball epic *61 shows an injured Mickey Mantle receiving an extended ovation as he steps into the batter’s box, while two semi-fictional Yankees newspapermen watch from the press box above.
“I’ve never seen him get a hand like this before,” one remarks. The other responds, “He’s never been the underdog like this before.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Derrick Goold posed a question in his excellent Opening Day piece: “Will a scrappy, feisty underdog team finding its stride energize the fan base?” At risk of overreacting to the Redbirds’ dramatic 9-7 win on Opening Day – likely the last time a sellout crowd will fill Busch Stadium for weeks to come – the answer is yes. But central to understanding how the organization finds itself rebuilding its relationship with The Best Fans in Baseball is recognizing why the answer is “yes.”
Goold recounts a century of achievement that created a regional fanbase and built the Cardinals into one of baseball’s premier brands. Most royalty franchises have origin stories where the identity of the clubs and the community merge: the love-able Bums in Brooklyn and cursed Bums in Chicago, the ruthless corporate titans in the Yankees’ Manhattan, the blockbuster glitz of Hollywood’s Dodgers.
But the Cardinals’ story is different: the team is loved by its fanbase because decades of innovation and success defy what it means to be a St. Louisan.
Living in St. Louis means expecting the other (Brown Co.) shoe to drop and drop hard. It means in elementary school you learn that before settling on sunny Orlando, Walt Disney wanted to put Disney World on the St. Louis Riverfront – but the plan fell through. It means living in a place that gets pushed two steps back for every meager step forward, and all you can do is console yourself with the greatest processed cheese product known to mankind.
Sep 7, 2024; St. Louis, Missouri, USA; Members of the St. Louis Cardinals hall of fame pose for a picture during a pre-game ceremony prior to a game against the Seattle Mariners at Busch Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Joe Puetz-Imagn Images
It’s a strange sort of inferiority complex because we know the truth: St. Louis is a gem. We want so badly for everyone else to see it– the blues, the Blues, the booze, the gooey-butter cake and toasted ravs. Meet a diaspora St. Louisan outside the city and you have an instant connection that feels truly unique; you’re members of the same secret club.
When Enos Stanley Kroenke – named after Cards’ legends Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial – packed up the Rams for Los Angeles, the blistering report explaining the move to the NFL pulled no punches. St. Louis was an economic and political hellscape, he said, but the strongest evidence that Mr. Kroenke wasn’t a St. Louis man was the report’s hilariously dismissive characterization of the Lou as “a baseball town.”
You could almost hear 2.8 million metro residents collectively channel Jack Nicholson’s indignation from the final scene of A Few Good Men: “You’re %$#@ right it is!”
Wearing a Cardinals cap is like wearing a Superman cape. 11-time World Champions. Baseball Heaven. It’s about all someone from the 314 can be righteously smug about. We still want the 100-year highlight video with Adam Wainwright’s song “Time to Fly” pumped straight into our veins.
But grappling with lost swagger is the only way to reconcile what happened these past few seasons: entire sections empty at Busch Stadium as far as the eye can see, a sight eerie and depressing and sad. The 2011 World Championship is living memory for most of us, and yet few have the equipment needed to play the commemorative DVD’s collecting dust. It wasn’t long ago and it feels like a lifetime ago.
Slowly, then suddenly, the Cardinals stopped defying their surroundings.
Which brings us back to Mr. Goold’s query – will the fanbase and the team embrace a new identity together? Goold reports that without any veterans in the clubhouse, the players feel “they are all in the same boat.” It’s a boat the city and its fans know very well – we’re in it with them.
– Andy Carroll
