An American Institution

Let us take a break from politics and government for a moment. As you can no doubt surmise, July 4th is one of my favorite holidays. It is a showcase for so much of what I love about this county and my particular corner of it. I assume this is true for other areas of the country as well, but here in small town Illinois this weekend will be celebrated with parades, fireworks, softball tournaments, carnivals, flea-markets, soapbox derby races, car shows, tractor pulls and the like. Tomorrow night you will find me on blanket somewhere in the outfield of the Hopedale, IL softball diamond. I'll be eating donuts made by the local Lions Club and watching my kids chase fireflies until the fireworks start. (Incidentally, the fireworks are still kicked off every year with the whole crowd standing to sing our National Anthem. It can be a very moving experience, but perhaps I'll write about it some other time.)

This year we can add one more Midwestern institution to the mix of Independence Day festivities. The Cubs are coming to St. Louis for the weekend. It doesn't get much more American than baseball, and it doesn't get much more Midwestern America than Cubs vs. Cardinals on the 4th of July weekend. I can't, however, do any better than Buzz Bissenger, so here is an excerpt from Three Nights in August in honor of this weekends festivities.

The rivalry between the Cubs and the Cardinals is probably the oldest and perhaps the best in baseball, no matter how the Red Sox and Yankees spit and spite at each other. That's a tabloid-fueled soap opera about money and ego and sound bites. That's a pair of bratty high-priced supermodels trying to trip each other in their stilettos on the runway. But the Cards-Cubs epic is about roots and geography and territorial rights. It's entwined in the Midwestern blood and therefore refreshing and honest and even heroic. It isn't simply two teams throwing tantrums at each other but two feudal city-states with eternal fans far beyond their own walls, spread throughout not only he Midwest but also deep into the South and the West. The Cubs started amassing their empire through WGN, it's crystal-clear radio waves sweeping out of Chicago into Iowa and Wisconsin and the Dakotas. Until the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953, no other National League team was in the upper Midwest.

As for the Cardinals, they were for a period of time baseball's westernmost team, and its southernmost, too, until the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958. The Cardinals' retort to WGN was KMOX, whose fifty thousand watts fed millions starved for big-league baseball. Carried by its powerful signal, Cardinals games rolled south from St. Louis, across Missouri into Arkansas and Mississippi, and west in Oklahoma and Texas and even beyond, if the night sky was right.

In Peoria and Decatur and dozens of smaller Illinois farm towns, factions developed, with half the population tuning to WGN and half turning on KMOX. But the rivalry goes farther back than radio, deep into baseball's mythic youth.

It might have originated on June 24, 1905, when the Cubs' Ed Reulbach and the Cards' Jack Taylor each pitched eighteen-inning complete games before the Cubbies won 2-1. The mutual contempt was only sharpened by more recent heroics, such as the nine showdowns in the late 1960s and early 1970s between the Cubs' Fergie Jenkins and Cards' Bob Gibson. In seven of these duels, both men pitched a complete game, four were decided by one run, and two of them produced a final score of 1-0. Once, in 95-degree St. Louis heat, as terrible a heat as this hemisphere can muster, both pitchers went the distance undaunted by the departure of homeplate umpire Shag Crawford, who found the weather so insufferable that even he quit in the middle of the game. St. Louis fans also hearken back to Bruce Sutter's spit-fingered fastball, perhaps the greatest contribution to pitching since Mordecai “Three Fingers” Brown refined the curve ball. Cubs fans exult in the memory of Ryne Sandberg's stroking that splitter for two back-to-back homers in 1984, a deliciousness made more delicious because Sutter had once been a Cub himself before going over to the dark side.

The inevitable implosion of the Cubs – the sad fury of their futility – only gave the rivalry an added extra, with nothing more fun for a Cards fan than to watch the Cubs self-destruct with their own special brand of pathos...

(Three Nights in August -Buzz Bissenger

This year might be an exception. If both teams can keep up their success, we should be watching a Chicago vs. St. Louis fight for the NL pennant this fall. But, as they say, there's a lot of baseball yet to be played. Have a happy Independence Day.

~ Gabriel