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The Cardinals lost. Good. Fuck those guys.
Please believe me, this is not a reactionary insta-hate piece or an attempt to kick 'em when they're down. My hatred for the St. Louis Cardinals is borne of a long-standing distaste for baseball in general and the Cardinals in particular. It is an antipathy fueled by a 36-year diet of fawning media coverage (so many puff pieces about pitchers and catchers reporting to spring goddamn training) and the public's gluttonous consumption of this same nauseating coverage.
It is a bile generated by having so many post-season wins gleefully reported in the intermission of so many plays that have fuck-all to do with baseball.
It is a seething greasefire of hatred that burns in my heart every time I see the St. Louis Blues pushed to the bottom (or the inside!) of the sports page during a Stanley Cup hunt because the fancy boys this town worships won a meaningless May game. Meanwhile the Blues can't get supplementary scoring, or their stars are squeezing their sticks, or the power play is untracked and the goalie's gone blind — who knows? It's always something with the Blues when the playoffs start, but all anyone wants to talk about is those cheese-eating Cardinal mofos and how "they play the game the right way" or some such shit.
Well, guess what fuckos? You may play the game "the right way" (though even that's debatable), but the Cubs played the game "the winning way." And now I'm gorging myself on schadenfreude (and brauschweiger, my preferred organ meat whilst gloating) while everyone in this otherwise lovely city has a sad in their heartspace.
Look at this egregious shit. Awww, we're all family and we're all hurting. This is the kind of soft-headed garbage written about the Cardinals All. Year. Long. Cardinals players are painted by the local media as the beautiful, ecologically-friendly hybrid of a Jedi knight and a baseball saint. The current manager, Mark Marthes (don't correct me, I don't care what it really is), wrote a manifesto — A MANIFESTO — and somehow St. Louis came together as one in praise of his genius. You know who else wrote manifestos? Karl Marx and the Unabomber. Draw your own conclusions.
I'm not sad. I'm not hurting. I feel like watching Don Cherry's Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Hockey and retaping my stick (phrasing). I feel like drinking another office beer and watching highlights of Tuesday night's win over Calgary. Look at the rejuvenated Scottie Upshall (former Philly Flyer, by the way; that's a pedigree you can trust) bang away at the Flames goalie in the crease (phrasing, again) and then work the one-timer to lethal perfection a few plays later. Did you see that ice-cold snap shot from Troy Brouwer that knotted the score at 2-2? Are you as enthused as I am about the young man-beast on defense, Colton Parayko? It may be the beers talking, but I'm semi-erect about this year's Blues team.
Yeah, yeah, I know what happens in the playoffs. It's happened every year since this team was gifted to this hockey-averse, baseball-fondling city. But it's October, the sexiest month of the year, and the Cardinals are as dead as two of my four braunschweiger-choked ventricles, while the Blues are gloriously, wonderfully alive. And they're playing great hockey.
You'll be able to read about in the local paper once the standard two weeks of written mourning is observed. Oh, but then there's the World Series coverage, so factor that in and you can read about the Blues — no, nope. Early November is when we get the "look back in sorrow at what might have been" think-pieces, so that pushes the Blues coverage to December. Right, but that's when they start pimping the Cardinals' Winter Warm-Up and count down the days 'till spring training starts...
Fee-fi-ficky-fo-FUCK, I hate the Cardinals.
Paul Friswold is the RFT's Arts & Culture Editor. Did we mention he also hates the Cardinals?
