Tag: St. Louis

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

St. Louis Spirit

CREDIT: AP

Let’s start this week with a time warp. Think back to when you were 13 years old. Try and pinpoint a moment from your 14th year that you can close your eyes and envision today. The setting, the time of day, the people you may have been with.

I was 13 in 1982 when the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series in seven games over the Milwaukee Brewers (Harvey’s Wall-Bangers, that crew was called). That was the Cardinals’ last world championship until they shocked the sports world two weeks ago by upsetting the Detroit Tigers and winning the 2006 series after the fewest regular-season wins (83) by any champ, ever. I watched Game 7 of that ’82 Series in the living room of my family’s apartment in Northfield, Vermont. It was a Wednesday night, when Bruce Sutter — just this year inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame — struck out Gorman Thomas to clinch the championship. It was the ninth world championship for St. Louis but the first of my lifetime and the franchise’s first in 15 years, what seemed like an eternity at the time for my father.

I remember trying to out-smile my dad as a mob of fans stormed the artificial turf at “old” Busch Stadium. And I remember thinking, surely, this would be the first of many such celebrations.

It was twenty-four years — almost a quarter century — before my heart again pounded the way it did on October 20, 1982. We don’t get all that many 24-year cycles in a lifetime, so I’ll be relishing the Cardinals’ 10th championship for as long as I can share the memory. But how different, this celebration.

What’s happened since 1982 — age 13 for me — besides the hundreds of Cardinal games I’ve seen and listened to? High school happened. College. A wedding. More than 130 issues of Memphis magazine hitting the streets with my name next to “managing editor” on the masthead. Best of all, I’ve welcomed two daughters since 1982. (They’ll remember this World Series, let me assure you.) And worst, my dad isn’t here this time to try and match my smile.

Amid the glow of merely winning, Dad would love the improbability of this championship. St. Louis managed to win the World Series in five games with merely two RBIs from baseball’s “perfect” player, Albert Pujols. (Last week, the Elias Sports Bureau announced that Pujols is only the sixth player since their ranking system was devised in 1981 to score a perfect 100 for a season.) How perfectly appropriate that the Series MVP was a player — 5’7″ shortstop David Eckstein — whom Pujols could eat for lunch. Smallest player on the field; the player with the fewest “tools”; a castoff from a team with which he won a championship, but a team that felt it could improve without him. Nice way to acquire your first new car, Mr. Eckstein. (That yellow beauty, though, needs a coat of red paint.)

This is the second of at least 52 weeks during which the words “St. Louis Cardinals” must be prefaced by “world champion.” The joy I recall from my days as an 8th-grader has lost some context as I’ve gained adulthood and all the rites that come with it. I wonder, with a pounding but heavy heart, just where my dad might be now, knowing how happy this long-awaited victory would make him. This is where I gain a little faith and, with inspiration from a certain Disney movie starring Danny Glover — a Murtaugh, it should be noted, in another of his popular roles — a speculative theory on what happened as the Tigers botched one play after another in the sloppiest Fall Classic we’ll see in years: Perhaps, Cardinal Nation, just perhaps, St. Louis had a little help from its own angel in the outfield. Imagination — no, belief — has a life span much longer than 13 years.

Categories
News

Summer Bummer

Seeing the Cardinals in the World Series brings back a painful memory. No, I don’t mean when they got swept in the 2004 series by the Red Sox. And I don’t mean their clinching loss, at home, to the Astros in last year’s National League Championship Series. And I don’t mean when the 2002 team was taken out by the Giants. Or when Arizona scored in the bottom of the ninth in Game 5 of the 2001 playoffs to eliminate them.

What I’m referring to is one of those experiences that, even 13 years later, still makes me shudder. Almost every time I see a Cardinals player in their home white uniforms, a part of me winces at what could have been.

It was the summer of 1993. I was on the road a lot back then. I had decided that, wherever I was, life was more interesting somewhere else — no doubt prime material for a therapist to work on, but my way of dealing with it was to keep moving. Travel was among my myriad addictions, many of which I pursued at my favorite destination: Grateful Dead concerts.

The great thing about a Dead show, other than that they were my favorite band and there were thousands of other people there for the same reason, was the collective sense of craziness. It was the safest place in the world to get loaded and weird, because nobody among the throngs could ever look at you and say, “Dude, you’re high” or “Dude, you’re weird” — not when there are naked people walking around, and people dressed as clowns, and people sucking balloons of nitrous oxide, and people offering to adjust your chi for a hit of pot, and … well, you get the idea.

I was in the middle of one of these manic scenes, somewhere in the Midwest, possibly Indianapolis. Details are a bit fuzzy. And somewhere in the surging sea of insanity I saw a familiar face, an old St. Louis friend from my college days. Let’s say his name was Bill, because it just might be that he’s now an elected official somewhere in these great United States who doesn’t want everybody to know that he once roamed the Midwest in search of places to get loaded and weird.

We were all talking about how great it was that very soon the Dead would be playing in St. Louis, and I mentioned that I might go to a ballgame while I was there. One of Bill’s buds says, “Hey, you should give me a call. My sister knows Ozzie Smith. I can set you up with some tickets.” (Ozzie Smith, for you younger folks, was the Derek Jeter of his day, and if you don’t know who Derek Jeter is, please stop reading now.)

The thing is, somebody you’ve never met saying to you, in a Dead-show parking lot, that they know Ozzie Smith and can hook you up with tickets is really no more weird, or even memorable than, say, somebody running a disco in the parking lot after the show, or a school bus painted in Day-Glo colors, or people passing around an invisible “energy ball,” or … well, again, you get the idea.

In other words, it didn’t occur to me that, upon arriving in St. Louis, I should actually call this guy and say, “Gimme those tickets!”

We got to St. Louis on a Sunday, and some friends and I went to the game. We got cheap seats in the outfield, and the Mets killed the Cards, 10-3. We were so far away from the action (and so, um, loaded and weird) that just now I looked up the game on baseball-reference.com and realized Dwight Gooden pitched 7 innings for the Mets — which makes the story even worse, as you’ll soon see.

The next night at the St. Louis show, out of all the freaky faces flying around, the first one I see is the Ozzie guy, and he is pissed. “Dude!” he says, “What happened to you? I had Ozzie’s tickets for you at will call!”

Even now, after writing that, I have to stare at the words: Ozzie’s tickets. At will call. For me.

Turns out his sister was Ozzie Smith’s agent, and apparently in my foggy behavior I had told the guy I’d call, and so four seats, Ozzie Smith’s seats, front row, right behind home plate, under my name, with Dwight freaking Gooden on the mound … went unclaimed. With me, the idiot, loaded, sitting in the bleachers watching little mini-baseball players (mostly Mets) run around the bases.

The Cardinals won the World Series this year, with me rooting for them. But it was difficult to watch their home games with some peace of mind. I kept thinking about Ozzie Smith and those seats behind home plate.

Categories
Opinion

Dubious Distinction

St. Louis had only one weekend to enjoy its World Series championship before a survey came out naming it the most dangerous city in the United States.

Memphis knows the feeling. This summer, the Memphis metro area (including parts of Arkansas and Mississippi) was ranked the second-most crime-ridden among the 100 largest metro areas in the country, based on FBI crime reports. And, based on instances per 100,000 population, it was number one for burglary and robbery and number two for murder behind New Orleans.

People who study crime patterns — including Michael Heidingsfield and Tom Kirby at the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, Lieutenant Joe Scott at the Memphis Police Department, and the FBI — agree that city comparisons are badly flawed because of demographic differences. (The city of St. Louis, for example, includes only one-fourth the population of St. Louis County.) But they admit that they’re as inevitable as football rankings and can’t be ignored in a media age that bombards readers, viewers, and listeners with a steady diet of “best and worst” lists. And crime rankings are an illusion with a powerful impact. They clearly influenced Mayor Willie Herenton to ask for more cops and are driving people to leave Memphis.

The MPD and the crime commission look at trends within Memphis. Maps and trends tell stories. But a general statement about an increase or decrease in crime is meaningless. There are four main categories of personal crime (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) and three categories of property crime (burglary, theft, and auto theft).

Murder gets the most publicity, but your chances of being murdered by a stranger are miniscule. Over the last 15 years, the mean number of murders in Memphis was 160 a year, and Scott thinks Memphis, now at 137, will be below that in 2006. Of the 128 murders this year in which the perpetrator has been identified, 99 were black on black. In 71 percent of murders, victims knew their killers. There were 137 murders in all of 2005, 105 in 2004, and 213 in 1993.

“In the 1990s, we were a much more violent city,” says Scott.

Then there’s the problem of sample bias. What about gunmen who wound their victims, shoot and miss, or threaten someone but don’t pull the trigger? There is no single category for that, although the difference between a shooting and a murder is usually a quarter of an inch, as New York City police commissioner William Bratton notes in his book Turnaround.

Some bad news: The rate for aggravated assault has nearly doubled in 10 years and soared more than 30 percent last year alone. Larceny-theft has trended upward for 10 years. And the burglary rate is consistently one of the highest in the country. Overall, the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) count of violent crimes for Memphis was up 25 percent in 2005 and, at the current pace, will be up about 3 or 4 percent this year.

Some good news: MPD clears 55 percent of felony assaults, a number Scott calls “amazing.” Burglary was down in the month of October compared to the first nine months of 2006. Car theft is down 15 percent this year because police busted some chop shops and manufacturers have made cars harder to steal. And forcible rape has dropped more than 60 percent in 10 years, although the crime commission says reporting procedures account for some of that.

“Over the last three months, the things we implemented have helped,” said Scott. “I think Blue Crush is slowly starting to make some type of difference.”

Like football rankings, crime stats can be maddeningly complex. The Survey That Slimed St. Louis, aka the Morgan Quitno Awards, is compiled by a private research and publishing company. The Shelby County district attorney general’s annual report looks at both Memphis and Shelby County. The UCR looks at metro areas. Television is preoccupied with the crime of the day. The crime commission would seem well-suited to bring some clarification to this, along with some policy recommendations.

Shoot the messenger if you like, or pick a different one, but the final measure of how dangerous a place Memphis is probably depends on your personal experience.