The Unique Pain of Rams Fandom

The St. Louis Cardinals are a team I root for. The St. Louis Rams are my team. There is a difference.

The Cardinals are the team that everybody roots for. They're the team that people who don't like sports watch because they're the team that wins. They aren't the team for sports fans--they're the team for fans of parades. There are few, if any, teams in professional sports in the United States for whom being a fan is easier than the St. Louis Cardinals--this is a team that has never finished back-to-back full seasons with  a losing record in my mother's nearly fifty-six years on Earth. For Cardinals fans, "pain" is being eliminated in the playoffs or maybe (GASP!) occasionally having to settle for a couple mostly irrelevant weeks in September.

Pain for a Rams fan is a decade of irrelevance and constant threats of the team leaving town. It's knowing that my team, the team whose successes and failures actually alter my mood, may leave me and knowing that a substantial segment of St. Louis will be happy to see it happen.

St. Louis, at its core, isn't a good sports town. That's not even a unique indictment--few towns are. But it's a town full of people who have deluded themselves into believing that the relative lack of passion for the Rams is somehow unrelated to the lack of on-field success of the team. Note, of course, that the popular non-Rams teams in the area are uniformly teams with tremendous, successful histories (Packers, Steelers, 49ers, Cowboys--the Cowboys ones even try to defend their fandom by claiming that they "suck", since they evidently have a dramatically different definition of ineptitude than anybody who has watched the last decade of the Rams). The next fan of the Jacksonville Jaguars I meet in St. Louis will be the first. But everybody has an excuse. Everybody has family in the successful NFL city (yet I don't know hoards of Pirates or Stars fans, oddly enough); people became fans before the Rams moved to town (again, nobody ever seems to have jumped on board with the Buffalo Bills, and if they did during their early 90s heyday, they appear to be long gone). Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.

But this isn't about the Rams losing or even the Rams being non-competitive. It's about the seeming inevitability that it's going to end and that there is not a damn thing I can do about it. And all I will have is a Cardinals team with self-congratulatory, "loyal" fans (until the team sucks, at least) and a hockey team that is eight years removed from being terrible and thus having the #30 attendance in the NHL. And it's considered a joke. The fact that a region whose entire identity is (sadly) built around sports doesn't care. The times got tough and the masses got going to Lambeau. And St. Louis refuses to believe that it could happen again with a different sport, as though St. Louis in September of 1999 was still fully invested in baseball above all else.

If the Rams move, and I'm not going to say "when" they move because I refuse to speak in the vernacular of the bandwagoning shits who may cause my team to move in the first place, it would create a permanent hole in my sporting heart. It will make me root less for the Blues and especially for the Cardinals. I don't think I will be able to go to Busch Stadium, see people trash-talking what losers the Cubs are, and compartmentalize it as something other than "these people cost me my team". That these people haven't earned their success with anything beyond minor heartbreak.

Of course, if the Cardinals fall apart and start losing 100 games a season (it seems crazy, but it seemed crazy after 1999-2001 that 2007-2011 would happen for the Rams), Busch Stadium will be a ghost town, relatively speaking. Not after one season, but if the Cardinals had a decade, say, like the Kansas City Royals had from 2000-2009, an average attendance of around 20,000 would be reasonable to expect. And then maybe I'd frequently pick up cheap tickets on Stubhub and maybe it'd feel like my team for the first time in my life. But it sure seems like some kind of sick personal issue that I would need a team to play poorly to feel like I belong as a fan. It makes me think of the legendary Groucho Marx quote: "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member."

Of course, maybe if the Rams get good again in St. Louis, I wouldn't feel the same way. Maybe that's how I know they're my team, after all.

Audio Johnapedia--Game 5 and the Offseason

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8_5dfo2vik

Charlie

Tonight, the only dog I have ever owned passed away, a month shy of what would have been his sixteenth birthday.

Charlie Brown was adopted by my family in November of 1998, when I was in fourth grade, and we knew early on that Charlie was going to be around for a while—his father was adopted by my uncle, now 50, while he was in college (for historical reference, he was named Spuds MacKenzie). He died in the mid-2000s. And Charlie held up his end of the bargain.

Charlie was always there for me, even if he didn’t know it. Obviously he didn’t know it—even after hearing it thousands upon thousands of times, it’s doubtful he ever learned my name. But whether he really grasped it or not, Charlie was always there.

When my dad and I leapt out of our seats to bob-and-weave after the Rams won the Super Bowl, Charlie was there (startled, and presumably not very happy with us, but nevertheless there). When I needed a hug while watching news coverage on 9/11, Charlie was there. When I was an unhappy high school freshman, totally incapable of making friends after being immersed into a social situation in which a vast majority of my school went to the same middle school which I had not attended, and I felt destined for a permanently lonely existence, Charlie was there. When I overcame my social struggles, and then when I graduated from high school, and then when I went away to college, Charlie was there. When I moved back in after college and when I moved out a year and a half or so later, Charlie was there.

I can say with absolute certainty that Charlie didn’t remember any of those things. I doubt he had memories, really—just enough to know that he loved sitting in one specific recliner in the living room, he hated the sound that a toaster makes, and he had a definitive preference for “human food”. But for me, his presence was valuable in ways I couldn’t begin to measure. It is completely impossible to explain, but I am glad Charlie was there for so many important years of my life. I assume this is the way most pet owners feel—I probably just needed somebody to be my friend, whether it was a human or a small animal, and he was that.

He, like most dogs, was constantly happy. When my family got Charlie, we didn’t even have dial-up; in the ensuing decade and a half, my eyes were opened to a much more cynical world than I had anticipated (whether that was because of the internet or just growing up as a whole, I’m not entirely sure). But Charlie was always happy. Even as he was dying and certainly going through pain, he lit up the lives of not only me but my family. Anybody outside of my family who met Charlie probably didn’t think much of him and I can’t blame them—until he went almost totally deaf late in life, he would bark at just about anybody who walked through or near our front door. But to the four of us, he was a galvanizing ally who kept us together through the enormous changes that happen as a family’s children go from 9 to 25 and from 8 to 23.

I’m sad that Charlie is gone, but I’m happy that he was able to go peacefully, and I’m delighted that he was ever a part of my life.

Audio Johnapedia 42--The Haiku NFL Preview

http://youtu.be/yJEUG9tr9xU

I have given up on embedding, but click this link and you can watch what I'd have just embedded here anyway. Timestamps are there too!

A Hypothetical Question about Barry Bonds

NOTE: This is not a blog post in any traditional sense of the word. This is just a way to post a long question that would otherwise require an obnoxious number of tweets.

Let's say that Bud Selig, about to end his tenure as MLB commissioner and ravaged by guilt, makes a bombshell confession: A conspiracy to prevent Barry Bonds from breaking Hank Aaron's all-time home run record which in turn is now keeping Barry Bonds from reaching the Hall of Fame.

Bud Selig is the former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and is known to have a close relationship with Hank Aaron, the great Milwaukee baseball icon. Under this hypothetical, which I cannot stress enough has no basis in reality, Bud Selig became alarmed that the great record of the terrific baseball ambassador Hank Aaron would be threatened by Barry Bonds, a frigid and generally unlikable personality. And as such, around the time of Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco making their confessions of steroid use, Selig and MLB planted evidence that Barry Bonds used steroids--connections to BALCO, whispers of improprieties, etc. Mind you that MLB is not creating or in any way affecting Barry Bonds's on-field performance--he is still putting up his 762 career home runs and absurd walk rates and what have you. The purpose of the conspiracy was to force Barry Bonds to wilt under pressure while chasing 755 and it did not, though the cloud of steroid suspicion remains to this day.

Now, to recap, we now know that the evidence surrounding Barry Bonds was cooked--the only reason we now have to suspect Barry Bonds did steroids is that he hit a bunch of home runs and he physically grew. But nothing tangibly connecting him to PEDs in any way exists. He has the exact same statistics that he has now and he was still playing in an era in which PEDs were rampant--we just don't have any strong reason to believe that he was one of the people doing PEDs.

What percentage of votes does Barry Bonds get for the Hall of Fame in 2015? Does this percentage change if we can somehow amend the story to include evidence that somehow proves a negative and that Barry Bonds definitively did NOT do steroids?

Audio Johnapedia 41--John and Gabe revisit their stupid preseason MLB picks

Eh, just follow the link. This is mostly just for accounting purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_t8MQC0fjE

John's 2014 MLB All-Stars

By request, I created my own MLB All-Star teams. I was asked to judge from a "reward the best first half" perspective--I have no particular ideological bias towards this or towards the "pick who you think is the best player" school of thought. This isn't an explainer--if anybody has anything specifically to ask or just comment upon, I welcome it. I just don't feel like saying "he's good" in 68 different ways. With the bench and non-starting pitchers, I listed alphabetically because I didn't spend a ton of time differentiating guys unless they were on the bubble.

American League

Starting Lineup:

RF Jose Bautista

CF Mike Trout

2B Ian Kinsler

1B Edwin Encarnacion

DH Victor Martinez

LF Alex Gordon

3B Josh Donaldson

C Salvador Perez

SS Erick Aybar

SP Felix Hernandez

Bench:

C: Yan Gomes, Derek Norris

1B: Jose Abreu, Miguel Cabrera

2B: Jose Altuve, Robinson Cano

SS: Ben Zobrist (on the ballot as 2B but is a capable SS)

3B: Adrian Beltre, Lonnie Chisenhall, Kyle Seager

OF: Adam Jones, Brandon Moss

SP: Yu Darvish, Corey Kluber, Jon Lester, David Price, Max Scherzer, Masahiro Tanaka

RP: Dellin Betances, Sean Doolittle, Greg Holland, Andrew Miller, Glen Perkins, Koji Uehara

National League

Starting Lineup:

LF Andrew McCutchen

SS Troy Tulowitzki

1B Paul Goldschmidt

RF Giancarlo Stanton

C Jonathan Lucroy

DH Yasiel Puig

CF Carlos Gomez

3B Todd Frazier

2B Dee Gordon

SP Clayton Kershaw

Bench:

C: Evan Gattis, Devin Mesoraco

1B: Freddie Freeman, Anthony Rizzo

2B: Daniel Murphy, Chase Utley

SS: Jhonny Peralta, Hanley Ramirez

3B: Matt Carpenter, Anthony Rendon

OF: Billy Hamilton, Hunter Pence

SP: Johnny Cueto, Zack Greinke, Ian Kennedy, Stephen Strasburg, Julio Teheran, Adam Wainwright

RP: Aroldis Chapman, Steve Cishek, Zach Duke, Kenley Jansen, Craig Kimbrel, Pat Neshek