I remember Ozzie Smith and Lee Smith, the players that most dominated my perception in the games I saw in person. My brother likely remembers Mark McGuire. There were others, of course, but there are always particular gloves that a fan watches avidly, bats that weigh heavier in our psyche.
The last time the Cardinals won the world series, I was in my last year of law school. I watched the series-winner on a hand-me-down TV from my Uncle Frank that required the channels to be changed with a pair of pliers. At that last out I got phone calls from my Dad and my brother, all of us cheering, all of us watching from various TV sets in our lives and linked at that moment only by the distant smell of a ballpark and a cellphone.
This series was infintely sweeter, due wholly to the Cardinals' hungry fight for a title nobody saw coming. And it was Game 6 that inked its way into history, and into my warehouse of baseball-themed memories.
Game 6 for the underdog is always about more than winning the series. Game 6 is about proving, at the very least, that you will make your opponent bleed for that win. For a team that had been counted out so often and so fervently over the last season, Game 6 was, at first, an exercise in disaster. It felt like proof that the Rangers should be the victor, that the team that nobody expected had gotten there on a fluke, a series of happy circumstances and minor miracles, and barely deserved a pennant, much less a ring. The magic of Carpenter's arm against the Phillies, the 3-homer history-maker by Pujols, Molina's incessantly perfect from-the-knees missile to second, all were forgotten in those first seven innings, with the Cardinals looking sad, tired, and desperate.
But it's the power of that late-in-the-game desperation that made this Game 6 pure magic. Pure baseball. Two outs-two strikes saving graces from Freese seemed straight out of The Natural, perfect heat attached to a bat that would surely crack under the pressure of I-want-to-play-this-game-tomorrow. Game 6 became exactly what it is supposed to be, an angry, defiant roar from a team that knows how to look presumed defeat in the face and say, "not yet."
And it's that two outs-two strikes, bottom of the ninth (or eleventh) inning feeling that weasels its way under the skin of my family, of any baseball family, of any fan who holds their breath on that last pitch. Because whether we've played the game or only watched it, we can all feel that hollow ache in the dugout. We can feel the wire fence we gripped, watching our last batter swing that last bat, from a bench littered by Big League Chew, our helmet gripped sadly in one hand as we accept defeat. Or we've been poised at shortstop, willing our pitcher to throw one more sneaky strike, one more hit-worthy ball, and we've watched that grounder peel to third, to first, and a 1-2-3 inning sends us home with a win. We've sat on bleachers and smelled hot dogs mingled with fear and sweat and potential, hoping that this is a good day, that this is a moment we'll want to remember forever.
It's the sound of leather and wood making contact on a chilly October evening, the wave of sound crying disbelief and I-knew-they-could-do-it bouncing off stadium metal, that remind any baseball-lover why this game is the game that raised you, the game that taught you to run through first base, to wait for the pitch, to always strike out swinging.
It was a game that any true lover of the sport could recognize as historic and inspiring. And it's the game that every Cardinals fan will remember in every future moment when our boys are behind, when they're bruised and near-defeated and we're tempted to walk away, to turn off the game, to leave them alone in their shame. It's the game that will remind us that they will bleed for the win, that they will fight the spectre of failure with every swing and dive and pitch left in their bodies. It's the game that will always remind us why we love them so much.
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