Aug. 21, 1997

Dear Frisco,

DC and I took our young Panamanian friend Carlos to Busch Stadium to see the Cardinals play the Braves. Carlos is a Braves fan, due primarily to Ted Turner's indoctrination of Latin America via TBS.

Carlos' dad, who has never been to America, wears Braves regalia. All of Carlos' friends in Panama love the Braves, too.

It's reminiscent of the days before everybody could see baseball on TV, when Cardinal fans could be found across the Midwest because of the team's extensive radio network.

"This is the Cardinal baseball network," Harry Caray used to say, and you knew you were plugged in and rooting with folks from Little Rock and Texarkana and Omaha.

It had been a few years since I'd been to a professional baseball game. Not since all those games we saw at Candlestick thanks to our good baseball-hating friend Ellen getting the season tickets in her divorce. The strike was a lot like a divorce, and I was one of the disenchanted.

Perhaps because so much money is involved now, things have changed at the ballpark. Baseball is a lot more like watching MTV and "Jeopardy" than the game I loved as a boy. Baseball then was the first thing I thought about on a summer morning, a game whose pure symmetry rewarded fairness instead of foulness and promised the sweetness of going home. It offered the possibility of the perfect game.

But now baseball is a game of distractions.

Between innings in St. Louis, they show highlight clips of Cardinal players on a big screen while current hits rock the house. There's also a roving cameraman who follows around an emcee asking spectators quiz-show questions about baseball.

One woman won two tickets to anywhere Southwest Airlines flies.

What would John McGraw think?

Between other innings, a costumed character called Fredbird cavorts atop the dugouts with pretty girls who catapult into the crowd what appear to be balled-up T-shirts.

What does Tony LaRussa say?

But Busch Stadium is a much better ballpark now that real grass has replaced the Astroturf and the spectators have been brought closer to the field. Ala "Field of Dreams," you can almost imagine the ghosts of Enos Slaughter and Curt Flood roaming around, saying, This is more like it.

Food at the ballpark also has undergone a transformation. Carlos downed a pizza and some nachos along with the traditional peanuts and beer.

DC, who quickly disclosed the limits of her baseball knowledge by asking if anybody had any points, said Candlestick used to serve sushi but I just remember the tofu dogs.

A few innings into the game, four attractive young women showed up and sat down in our aisle. Behind us, a guy who was already slurring his words thought he, not Lou Gehrig, was the luckiest man alive.

After a few innings of fending off his hopeless advances, the young women left for parts of the stadium unknown. He suddenly started paying attention to the action on the field.

For me, all this distracted from the ballgame, which I thought was plenty exciting all by itself.

I explained to DC both managers' artful use of the sacrifice bunt, a play she found honorable and worth cheering. Tom Glavine took a shutout into the ninth, but Mark McGwire tied the game with a two-run homer, and DeLino DeShields hit another homer to win it in extra innings.

Carlos was crestfallen. I was glad all over. DC was glad the game was exciting and didn't care who won.

In a perfect world there are no dancing girls on dugouts and no emcees asking baseball trivia questions. There is only baseball.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.