With the general slowness of the offseason, it seemed like a good time to find out about the people that read this blog. If you’ve not commented before, this would be a great time to start. I think you will find it’s a fairly easy and painless process.
The question before you is why are you a Cardinals fan? How did you come to follow the Redbirds? (This, of course, assumes that most of the readership of the blog is a fan of the team from St. Louis. If you are fans of another team, feel free to substitute their name and tell that story.)
My first real baseball memory isn’t of the Cardinals, but of the Detroit Tigers. My family visited my aunt and uncle that were living outside of Detroit in 1984 and we went to see a game at the old Tiger Stadium. I remember that fall watching those same Tigers win the World Series.
However, in this area, it’s tough not to be a Cardinal fan. I remember in 1985, we had just moved into a new house and the cable had yet to be hooked up, so my dad stood in the kitchen listening to the Cards and Royals on the radio. I also remember being very disappointed the morning after Game 7 when the DJ on the radio said, “This one is for Whitey Herzog” and played “Goin’ to Kansas City.”
This is Cardinal country, mainly due to the fact that St. Louis is the closest baseball team, the fact that KMOX helped raise a generation of fans that are passing it down to their offspring, and the fact that the Cardinals usually win. When I really started following baseball, it was 1987 and the Cards were going to the Series for the second time in three years.
I latched on to Ozzie as my favorite player, followed by Big Mac (who I followed while he was in Oakland as well) and now Albert. Somewhere along the way I got onto message boards and now into blogging about the team. It’s been a gradual transformation and there’s no one definitive moment in my fandom, but it’s been fun all along the way.
And it’s a lot of fun to have my son very excited about baseball and the Cardinals already as well!
So that’s me. How about you?
