The Live and In-Person Blowout

This past Thursday I had the opportunity to see a Cardinals game in St. Louis with my mom, dad, and brother. I don't usually go to more than one game a year. Going twice is a good year. Going three times in one year is about as likely as a member of the Chicago Cubs not making the 2008 All-Star team.

I don't intend to go on another anti-Cubs rant here (still trying to preserve that slim sliver of integrity), but come on. Kosuke Fukudome and Alfonso Soriano made the team? I thought Soriano was only batting like .195, but it turns out he does have a respectable batting average of .283. In fact, his and Fukudome's stats are relatively similar, except Fukudome only has seven home runs compared to 15 from Soriano. They're pretty good numbers, but not really All-Star Game starter numbers. But I guess it's pointless to get into this argument. We go through this every season—the fans from one team go nuts and vote in some bum with a batting average lower than the population of Frohna, Missouri. Hey, it ain't a perfect system, but at least it gives the fans something to do. Although, I've always thought it might be fun to band together every voting baseball fan and have them all vote in a completely undeserving player, like Paul Bako or some other backup catcher. You know he'd have a blast and probably wreck up whatever hotel he's staying at. It might add a little flair to the allegedly boring MLB All-Star Game. (Although, I'll tell you why I absolutely love the MLB All-Star Game next week.)

Anyway, I don't usually go to more than one Cardinals game a year, so in order to maximize the fun factor of the experience, it's essential that absolutely everything goes exactly to plan (Cardinals win + good hot dogs + no jerk fans of the other team sitting close to me).

I got one out of three Thursday night against the Mets.

We'd been in St. Louis for all of about 10 seconds when the rains came pouring down (coincidentally set to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain"). Fortunately, that ended up not being a big deal—the game was only delayed 45 minutes or so, so it gave us time to eat before game time. Also, my mom was feeling faint at one point and scored some free water from a first aid station. We decided that in the future, this strategy could be used as a clever alternative to paying five bucks for bottled water. Try it out.

The game finally started and we all sat down to see if Cardinals rookie Mitchell "Don't call me Wade" Boggs could run his record to 4-0. Unfortunately, things weren't looking so good after 2 walks, an error by Boggs, and what seemed like about a thousand infield hits put the Mets up 3-0 after one inning. Our confidence was shaken, but no big deal—it was only the first inning, after all, and a subsequent 1-2-3 second inning had us back in the game in no time.

Good feelings lasted approximately one half inning as the Mets began to really rack up the runs in the third and had run the score up to a catastrophic 9-0 by the end of the inning. As more and more runs piled up, I squirmed in my seat more and more and thought, Boy, there sure are a lot of Mets fans here tonight. I didn't think the Mets had any fans in the entire universe except for maybe a couple of crazy radio show callers in Queens and one guy in Montana. One particularly rowdy and irritating group of Mets fans sitting somewhere behind us called for David Wright to be named league MVP, and when Jose Reyes hit a bases-clearing triple, they started doing that "Jo-se! JoseJoseJose! Jo-seee! Jo-seee!" chant, which is the most annoying chant in the entirety of baseball, for the record.

When the bleeding finally stopped, it was 11-1 in favor of the Mets. You'd think I'd be pretty disappointed by the outcome, and in a way, I suppose I was. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself and didn't have a really good time—more so than at any other blowout loss I've seen in person. I guess the Cardinals were out of the game so quickly that I accepted it immediately and was content to just sit and have some laughs with my family while the Cardinals struggled to hit or pitch or breathe down on the field.

Also, this game gave me an opportunity to scratch one off my list of sporting events I want to see in person before I die:

- Cardinals blowout victory (10 or more run lead) in which everybody but the drunks have cleared out by the 7^th inning

- Cardinals blowout loss (10 or more run deficit) in which everybody but the drunks have cleared out by the 7^th inning (DONE)

- Game with a walk-off home run (unlikely)

- No hitter/Perfect game (really unlikely)

- All-Star Game (Next year? Here's hoping, but I really doubt it)

- World Series (preferably a clinching game, but I'll take what I can get)

- Eagles game at Philly

- Super Bowl

- Wrestlemania

Don't ask me why I thought seeing a game like this was deserving to be on the list—I just thought it would be a good time (and it turns out it was). Realistically I'll only cross off one more of those items in my entire life, but it's better than nothing, I suppose.

Oh, and the hot dogs were really good. One out of three wasn't so bad after all.