This year, as in so many years, the Cardinals are on top of their division and have the best record in baseball and second-highest attendance. My pretext is to see my mother but it's really to look at the numbers of the departed great players on the walls of Busch Stadium: Stan, Ozzie, Red, Gibbie, the first name will do it.Īnd it works. I migrated east, but, as so many of my friends do, I return to St. Whether this is healthy is another question. They come together, black and white, friend and foe, in the amicable harmony of a lighted greensward near the river called Busch Stadium.Ī 558-Million-Year-Old Mystery Has Been Solved Ed YongĮven today, the worldwide diaspora of Cardinals fans is bonded by the heritage they share.
They do not boo anyone, as residents of the decadent East so often do. Cardinals fans are famously good sports: applauding exemplary performances by their own players and even by rival players. Musial set the tone for good sportsmanship that Cardinals fans see as characteristic of St. African American players like Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Ozzie Smith, and Willie McGee became local heroes in a city otherwise painfully divided by race. An indelible memory of my childhood involved nothing more than lying in bed one full afternoon listening to Musial crack five homers in a double-header. A whole generation of kids in the Midwest came together listening to Musial's exploits on KMOX, the big clear-channel radio station whose signal brought us all together. When I grew up there, the modest Stan Musial was our shining knight, our Galahad.
More than any other institution, the Cardinals have exemplified the Midwestern virtues the citizens of my home town live by, year after year. Louis natives found solace in the organization that publicly defined the better angels of our nature: the proud St. But, even in those dismal days last August, St. What began with Ferguson ended in charges of citywide racism and wrong-doing. Louis, like me, the past year had already been an annus horribilis.
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