![]() "In October, the world becomes simple again, trees jettisoning their lurid leaves and the flashy colors of summer giving way to the basic browns and grays of the earth. ![]() The Cardinals are just the Cardinals, and while it's of course our right to boo them if we want, it feels good to direct some jeers at the real enemy: strained bird metaphors and knee-jerk odes to scrappiness. While it is always fun - and a nice writing exercise - to either squint meaningfully like an Eminent Man Of Esquire or bash away at the "return" key like a turnt-up Woody Paige, it is equally clear that everyone who responded needed this in some way. "There is a story about a place where men play a game." - BREWERY AD C 1890-1900 (Getty). The challenge: craft the opening or closing of yet another article hymning The Cardinal Way or The Best Fans In Baseball or some other exhausted aspect of this exhausted thing, and to make it as awful as possible - either as thuddingly pompous in the glossy magazine mode or as locked into the dim one-sentence-paragraph certitude of olde-style sports columnizing. In hopes of moving the conversation away from these astonishing/annoying Cardinals and their wonderful/horrible fans, I put out a call on Twitter for the most annoying Cardinals-related prose. If this metaphor is not doing it for you, it is probably simpler and just as effective to say that Our National Cardinals Conversation stinks and is no fun for anyone. The conversation floats free of its ostensible mooring and is pulled irretrievably further out by various undercurrents until it sits, in distant waters, half-swamped at the center of a howling suckstorm. No, the frustrating part about Our National Cardinals Conversation is how rote it is - the annual hallelujah choruses from the Crustoid Sportswriter Men's Choir, the reflexive, overheated trashing of the city and its fans in the usual quarters, and the reflexive, overheated response. It may not even be the fault of the polarizing Best Fans In Baseball, who are indeed pretty great fans and can also indeed be irritatingly triumphal and bigoted and small-minded and maddeningly, backhandedly smug, all of which makes them no different than literally any other fans of any team in any sport. This is not really the Cardinals' fault, the way this conversation has drifted into choppier and more meta-everything waters. ![]() But the Cardinals are just a baseball team, and while there is such a thing as an irritating baseball team - the Cardinals are, in ways that incite both rank envy and righteous oh-come-the-bleep-on scorn, such a team - the bigger and increasingly curdled National Cardinals Conversation is increasingly not about the Cardinals. It is about the Cardinals for their fans, of course, both the awful ones and the far greater number that are just happy to cheer for a team that wins so much. At this point, after four consecutive Octobers, it's barely even about the St.
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