ST. LOUIS – There is something beau tiful about seeing those uniforms playing these games, about seeing these franchises facing each other, something comforting about the Cardinals and the Tigers playing each other in the World Series.
Baseball has undergone so many changes in the past few years, in the past few decades. Records have tumbled. Attendance marks have been shattered. Supplements and steroids have changed the way the players look. The DH and specialized pitching and five-inning starting pitchers have changed the way the games look.
The Arizona Diamondbacks won a World Series. The Florida Marlins won two. There should have been a law passed a long time ago to keep day-glo colors completely out of the World Series, although that horse seems to have left the barn for good.
Yet there, on the field at Busch Stadium, are the St. Louis Cardinals, wearing their bright-red warm-ups, wearing the second-most-famous cap and the second-most-famous uniform in all of baseball, the interlocking “S,” “T,” and “L” and the birds-on-a-bat taking a backseat to none other in the sport besides the Yankees’ patterns (and even the most ardent Yankees bashers have to concede that much).
Over there, on the sidelines, waiting to take their cuts in the batting cage, are the Detroit Tigers, with their traditional road grays, with that orange Old English “D” on their caps, with their Marlboro Man manager and their get-your-uniform (and your pitching hand) dirty mindset players.
In New York, we tend to forget that baseball existed in the American League before Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees, and that it existed in the National League before the Mets were born in 1962. Hey, it happens. Baseball is nothing if not a parochial sport, espousing the same spirit as the old saying that all politics is local. Well, it’s true. All baseball is local, at least the most relevant portions of it.
But it is also a sport that relies most heavily on its ancestors, on its antecedents, on its history. So every now and again, it is good that the final two participants be rooted in the game’s most ancient past. We had that a few years ago, when the Red Sox met the Cardinals in a World Series rematch of 1946 and 1967, even if 2004’s four-game swamping bore little resemblance to those two seven-game classics.
And we have it again this time around. The Cardinals and Tigers have also met in two seven-game skirmishes, the Gas House Gang Cardinals prevailing in 1934, the Mickey Lolich Tigers eking by in 1968, and already these teams seem almost destined to take this World Series to the second weekend, which would be a nice change of pace from the past two years.
“You have two classic teams, two classic franchises, two classic fan bases, and so you would think it should all add up to one classic World Series,” Tigers manager Jim Leyland, a skipper out of the classic mold, said a few days ago. “It’s great for the game when you have a link to its history. You get people realizing that there’s some good baseball being played in these cities, and has been for a very long time.”
St. Louis, especially, revels in its history almost as much as the Bronx does. It’s a testament to just how dominant the Yankees have been in their history – and a reminder that their 26 championships have come at the expense of 26 would-be National League champions – that the Cardinals are the NL team with the most world championships, and the second most in major league baseball beyond the Yankees, with nine. And they’ve been stuck on nine for a while.
“I think we all have an appreciation for what the Yankees have meant to New York and to baseball,” said Kelly Splendisch, a Cardinals fan walking the grounds of the Arch yesterday morning. Splendisch is 65 years old, a retired engineer, and a Cardinals fan since 1946. “My father made me listen to the World Series when I was a kid, and I was hooked. But that’s the way it was if you grew up when I grew up in the Midwest. I was a St. Louis kid. But it didn’t matter where you were – Colorado, Kansas City, Arkansas, Nebraska – you were also a Cardinals fan. They were like a religion out here.”
And still are.