WSJ: Our Favorite Pastime Preserved In St. Louis

[Migrant Redbird]

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St. Louis and its Cardinals are throwbacks, as steeped in tradition and respect for the game as no place else. Boston and Chicago fans for starters will argue, but those are large cities with competing sports allegiances. Here's a small market able to get three-million-plus people out to the stadium and compete against richer teams in the league for over a century.

OK, I'm proud of "Baseball Heaven" too, but Cardinals attendance used to suffer significantly in the down years until "Whitey Ball" changed everything. Now they pull top ten attendance in bad years, but it didn't used to be that way.

As at many other new fields, Busch went for the retro look, using red bricks and building a stadium exclusively for baseball. The Cardinals kept the dimensions from their previous home. Both the new and the old had reputations for "playing fair." No short porches in right field and none of the long alleys that many clubs favor. "We didn't want to create quirkiness," says Bill DeWitt III, the team president. "Our fans are traditionalists." But he offers another "competitive reason": "It's hard to get pitchers or hitters to come to a park that disadvantages them."

... The stadium feels as if it were built for the fans. I could find no bad sight lines.

It would have been nice if they'd paid more attention to sight lines. I was extremely frustrated at the old Busch II stadium when line drives would disappear from sight before reaching the outfielder if you were sitting in the second deck stands down either line. I was chagrined to discover that situation also exists in a few sections in Busch III, although perhaps not to the same degree. In my opinion, every seat should have an unobstructed view of every foot of the playing field.

The comments section is dominated by a surly Cincinnati Reds fan.

Our favorite pastime? Preserved?

Let's talk tradition...

The Cincinnati Reds used to have the first opening day game every year, because they were the first all-professional team (1869). In 2008 the MLB season started in Japan! So much for America's pastime. So much for tradition.

... Corked bats, steroids, HGH, and other PEDs, $200 million team payrolls... the MLB doesn't care about tradition and purity. It is a money driven sport. McGwire vs. Sosa was about one thing... filling seats. If the MLB chooses to sell it's soul to make money 'now' that's fine... that is the choice of the MLB.

But I am amazed at how the baseball writers and fans delude themselves. The good ol' days of "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet" are gone. Baseball no longer represents the core values of hustle and hard work. Maybe that's why Charlie Hustle will never see the Hall of Fame. Oh wait, the MLB wants to preserve the purity of the game by keeping Pete Rose out of the Hall, while reserving space for steroid induced record breakers.

By the way, check the records. The umpires involved in the Pete Rose gambling scandal remained in the game, long after Pete was banished. Go figure.

"Check the records"? I read the Dowd Report a couple times and I don't recall any allegations whatever that umpires were involved in the Pete Rose scandal. I think the whining Reds fan may have confused his Rose scandal with the NBA referee scandal.

In the thread at BOTB, other Cards fans took exception to some of the comments about "low Cardinals ticket prices". Awfully poor fact checking on the part of the WSJ reporter(s)! Still an enjoyable article, though.

[TakebackOPACY]

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The comments section is dominated by a surly Cincinnati Reds fan.

"Check the records"? I read the Dowd Report a couple times and I don't recall any allegations whatever that umpires were involved in the Pete Rose scandal. I think the whining Reds fan may have confused his Rose scandal with the NBA referee scandal.

The Reds fan is right... kind of. Dowd conducted a secret investigation into umpires at the same time as the Rose investigation. Apparently, MLB has conducted many secret investigations over the years. Someone in the press found out about this one, years later.

I'll try to dig something up, and I'll update this post.

UPDATE: Found it!! Umps Called Out Gambled; Didn't Pay Like Rose

One guy (Rose) gets a lifetime ban from the game. The other two (Frank Pulli and Rich Garcia) get two years probation and then are promoted within three years. There are differences in the cases, but I can't readily agree that the differences should warrant such an EXTREME difference in punishment.

EDIT: Here's a more opinionated piece from The Sporting News. A Bad Call by Baseball

[BaltimoreTerp]

Fans don't like to remember, and teams (obviously) don't like to remind people of the times when the team wasn't performing as well and the attendance dropped off. I've heard a lot of negative views on the attendance at Yankee Stadium during the late-80s and early-90s before King George's exile, but now that they're selling out everything (at least what is reasonably priced) you never hear of that.

In ten years when the Orioles have had a long contending streak you will never hear about the times the team's attendance fell below two million a year, just the long stretch of three-plus million after Oriole Park opened and during the next playoff run.

[Migrant Redbird]

The Reds fan is right... kind of. Dowd conducted a secret investigation into umpires at the same time as the Rose investigation.

Thanks! If I read about that investigation at the time, I forgot about it.

There seems to have been a little difference.

The umpires were disciplined for "associating and doing business with gamblers and bookmakers,".... [but] there was no proof or accusation that the umps bet on baseball,....

I do think that MLB probably should have disciplined the umpires more severely, though. The conduct of umpires is more insidious to the integrity of the game, because they make so many errors as it is, and it would be easy for for an umpire to make a crucial call that would favor his gambling associates by influencing the outcome of a game or series. Denkinger in 1985 is a prime example.... not that I'm suggesting that Denkinger's call was anything other than an honest mistake.