Times like these bring me closer to my father, as they do for so many St. Louisans. Baseball here has a connection like that, perhaps not in an exclusive sense but certainly in a nourishing way.
Baseball had a unique vitality in my boyhood home. It was ever-present, in stacks of newspapers and publications, paperbacks and Baseball Digests. It was chronicled in thick scrapbooks, filled by neatly trimmed articles and black and white photos, corresponded with personal letters from former participants and writers like Fred Lieb and Dick Young.
Baseball came to life through a Zenith radio and a tall glass of Pepsi. It occupied one corner of the living room to itself, furnished with a small table, a porcelain lamp and a reclining leather chair, accessorized with Elmer's glue, paper clips and scissors.
It sometimes sounded like Radio Free Europe, choked by extreme distances and primitive technology, penetrating the environment with waves of static interference and fragments of play-by-play. It arrived late at night, from New York, Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. It was Morse code only he could decipher, and he would do so, sitting in the chair, sipping the Pepsi, keeping a scorecard.
Baseball was about the Cardinals only in a begrudging sense, because it could no longer be about the Browns. Baseball was just a game like "The Honeymooners" was just a show, like Kay Starr was just a singer, like the "Iron Claw" was just a hold.
Baseball was a theology that sustained my father through a lifelong physical impairment, through several wars and nine children, through the rise and demise of his livelihood — the St. Louis shoe business — and ultimately through chipped beef on toast.
Football? That was the time between the end of the season and the start of spring training. Golf, fishing and tennis ... the "most boring activities in the world." Baseball was bulletproof, something noble, something honest, something safe. Baseball was gospel.
The game and its relationship with St. Louis has never been about appearances. Wearing red, "Nation" building, squirrel-chasing, clapping to Clydesdales ... that's all ceremonial. St. Louis didn't become the "best baseball town in America" until some marketing genius decided it mattered.
It doesn't. If you have to tell someone what kind of baseball town you are, you're not a baseball town at all. There is so much beneath the surface here, so much more than product persuasion and self-promotion.
Organized ball has been played here for more than 150 years. We were a baseball village long before we began agonizing over a baseball village, when the town ran north and south instead of east and west.
We had pennants before we had television, before we had airports. By the time baseball arrived in Arlington, Texas, St. Louis had been to the World Series 12 times. In October 1944 we had two teams in one World Series, played entirely at one ballpark. Travel-taxed sportswriters get a chill when you tell them that.
Baseball hasn't always been the clean, decorous, symmetrical package it is now. It was gritty, quirky, even awkward at times. It was choked by bus exhaust and cluttered with pavement-pounding streetcars. It was segregated by skin color and limited views, filtered through right-field screens and operated by hand. It smelled like cheap cigars, felt like sticky concrete and sounded like exploding paper cups. It was a neighborhood hangout, not a civic parade.
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