October is over. So is Tony La Russa’s career, and the overlapping of those two is way more divine than I could have hoped for. He made up his mind in August which makes sense retroactively; the nadir of the 2011 Cardinals felt like everyone’s last straw. At that point coming out on his terrace for coffee of a morning must’ve felt like shingles all over again—or the world’s worst kidney stones; Tony was never more Al Swearengen than when they were both weirdly sick. (Unless it was the entire pennant tumult, which transduced La Russa from curmudgeonly vizier to on-blast villain and back again so often I lost total track of which I was speaking, guttural profanity or flowery Victorian.) In any case the finest Cardinals season of my life, or at least the one that made me a paranoid schizophrenic, is over and for the first time ever in November, I’m not sick of baseball.
There was a lot of mirroring of Obama’s Marketer-of-the-Year presidential campaign from 08: out of nowhere, a terrible August, then kicking the shit out of a historically-overmatched narrative-free opponent. I kept blogging that sometimes baseball wants the story to end well, and the Cardinals were the opposite of a media conspiracy: a real story. There were little pieces of periodic despair that ended up getting sucked into the engines; this team wasn’t an underdog, it was a foregone conclusion. All the pundits picking against them, sometimes every game, apparently never read much young adult baseball fiction. At some point would it have killed a national writer to just grin headily and admit the Cardinals were the only logical champions? Game 7 was like ultra thizz for anyone outside the Dallas metroplex; ionic love of baseball, rolling toward history. My dad & I agreed we watched the game like it was the regular season; David Freese took the suspense into the woods and beat it to death. Thanks again Spicoli!
I can’t get the Berkman AB out of my head. That’s when I knew. There was a great Grantland piece about Berkman, how calm he was after that hit. He shook McKay’s hand at first base real casual, like he’d just agreed in theory to sell McKay a pickup truck or something. I watched Berkman all season with a little bit of a wince only because I remembered Edmonds being on the Cubs in 2008, how it felt watching him change his identity (temporarily, as it turned out, but it was THE CUBS.) If you know an Astros fan, make them a mixtape. Berkman inscribing himself in the Cardinals HOF for all eternity in one season, well that shit had to be hard. (It was for Yankees fans, even, who put a lot of disgruntlement on the internet about Lance Berkman II: Fat in the Bronx.)
But it all came down to Carpenter. I really hate to keep self-congratulating, but I called this Carpenter shit. All those innings, all the no-decisions due to offensive no-shows, the velocity problems, the elbow problems, and then the mini-Tudor-like finish to get above .500 in the archaic W-L table redefined his ace status almost on the fly. But the greatest Cardinals pitcher since Gibson was still missing his Gibsonian moment, a game everyone remembers where they were during. That was Game 5 at Citizens Bank. Then, in Game 7 of the WS, Carpenter did it again on a smaller scale; it wasn’t as pretty but it controlled all the best vibes of Cardinal pitching performances from Grover Cleveland Alexander in the slime years, to Gibson’s Game 1 68, to Bruce Sutter, the original Jason Motte, swearing off fatigue against the original-douche Brewers. Chris Carpenter not giving a fuck is more than a meme; it’s salvation. Chris Carpenter saves, I spend.
At the end of the parade when everyone reconvened at Busch the players were wearing those ugly black World Champion hoodies. I always forget how disorienting post-steroids baseball players look out of uniform; it’s not like football and basketball where everyone’s either grotesquely muscled or adenoidally tall. Most baseball players look like Aaron Boone. All but the most famous ones are in permanent mufti and I had to really concentrate, even after all these games, on whose face was whose. (There’s still one I can’t place and I’ve been over the roster in my head fifty times.) Baseball’s theory of relatability has been broken down before, but I can’t wait for this team to suit up again. They can’t all be back but I’d extend every last mother’s son of them if I could. LaRussa too; his departure is a blog all its own.
