Wild Cards

I was so looking forward to the baseball game today. The Cards have been following the playbook that brought them success last year: laze about all season until the end, then pour it on until you win the World Series. And now here they are in the one game that will determine who goes to the next level. The ONE game, which, right there, goes against All That Is Baseball and Holy. The Wild Card game.

At some point in the seventh inning, lulled by the Cheetoes and comforter and rainy cold weather and the Cards’ lead, I fell asleep. When I woke up, all the umpires were huddled in the middle of the field and there was a lot of uproar.

“I have missed a crucial moment,” I thought, and because I have not yet upgraded my glasses I read the score wrong. “We’re losing? What happened? And why is there trash on the ground? Earthquake?”

So then, for the next half hour while I watched the TiVo backlog I kept thinking that something had happened in which a) we had lost three runs b) the umpires were frightened and c) trash went everywhere from some type of junk bomb. And it was nice that I thought we were losing, because I watched the action with all the tension intact.

But no, we were winning. Winning because an ump made a call so bad it screwed up a team’s mojo. (We call that a Denkinger here in Saint Louis.)

I cannot find a photo that really demonstrates the amount of trash the fans threw … and threw … for eighteen minutes. And a little bit of my heart cheers for those fans, because sometimes a boo isn’t enough, even if it’s followed by an official Protest with a capital P.