But where do they exist? I certainly don't follow them. I'm not one to constantly stalk the #stlcards hashtag on Twitter but are there really people who think Matt Holliday should ride the pine? Because I haven't seen these fans. Maybe there's a random crazy here or there, but in a world in which there is a decent following of people who think Joe Kelly should replace Jaime Garcia in the Cardinals rotation, is the occasional loon really worth giving attention unless he's representative of a major trend?
The fact that there are fans calling out the "haters" should not be a huge surprise to anyone--Cardinals fans are interesting like that. More than any other fans in sports, it seems, fans regard the St. Louis Cardinals truly as a religion. And not in the way that Green Bay Packers fans regard the team as religion--they're specifically regarding the team's wins and losses as the gospel. The Cardinals players aren't merely vessels to lead to world championships--they're deities. To insult Matt Holliday, or any other Cardinal, is blasphemy.
The problem is how St. Louis Cardinals "media" (henceforth to be known as media) continue to push this notion of a mass anti-Holliday uprising. References to the "Church of Clutch" or "Clutchy McClutcherson" imply a sufficiently large group of people. I'm not trying to take a major stance on Matt Holliday here--that's what statistics are for. Statistics will indicate that he's a really good hitter, a mediocre fielder, that he had a pretty good 2011 NLCS and an abysmal 2011 World Series. But what I will indict is media taking the easy way out.
Media criticizing fans who criticize the team is the equivalent to political commentators saying that both major parties are crooks--whether they're right or wrong in their assessment, the reason they're saying it is because it makes it sound like they're taking a stance when in reality they're taking about as inoffensive of one as is humanly possible. It's the equivalent of the DJ 2000 from The Simpsons--"Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns." It's a non-starter.
The thing is that obsessively positive coverage of Matt Holliday (or Yadier Molina, or Adam Wainwright, or Albert Pujols when he was a Cardinal, or anyone really) is reflective of a uniform lack of skepticism in St. Louis sports media. Now, I recognize that the Sports pages are more or less a secondary Entertainment section, but at least that section has negative reviews for movies. I'm not advocating that sports media needs to be the Enquirer or something. But considering that this is the city's baseball writers who, upon the biggest star in the city being discovered to be harboring androstenedione in his locker, effectively blackballed the reporter who reported the story. If Steve Wilstein was Woodward and Bernstein, local sports media wasn't Richard Nixon--it was G. Gordon Liddy.
With this said, I understand why the myth of the Holliday haters, as well as countless other made-up "haters", continues to exist. It's not because the reporters themselves are still effectively entertainers. If you're a Cardinals beatwriter or columnist or something like that, you aren't Deadspin. You aren't running some kind of exposé meant to expose a dark undercurrent. Nor perhaps should you be. This is sports we're talking about--not military reporting. And sports fans, but Cardinals fans especially, don't seem to really want to know that their heroes aren't probably every bit the scum that their adversaries are. We could talk about how even Fernando Vina and Cody McKay were taking steroids back in the day. We could talk about how we stole a highway segment named after MARK FREAKING TWAIN to name it after Mark McGwire. But it's a lot more fun to yell "MVPee!" and pat ourselves on the back anyway.
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