If there was
one thing missing from the St. Louis Cardinals’ 2006 World Series win over the
Detroit Tigers, it was the sense of animosity. For while these two teams have
seldom met, their meetings have almost always been calamitous affairs.
The 1934 World
Series pitted the rough-and-tumble Gashouse Gang against a Detroit team and crowd
still as sharp and ruthless as Ty Cobb’s spikes. The series was begun in earnest
when Dizzy Dean walked across the batting practice field into Detroit’s home dugout to
deliver a brash declaration (one of many to come). It ended in a 4-3 Cardinals
victory, but not until Dean had been beaned on the basepaths and the irascible
Ducky Medwick had succeeded in compelling the home crowd to pelt the field with
every type of flying projectile.
The Cardinals
and Tigers were not to meet again until 1968, in a ferociously fought World
Series that came before crowds that were newly vibrant and enraged. The nation
was still roiling in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, race riots,
and burgeoning university protests against every conceivable norm of the
previous generation. The formalized conflict of baseball helped audiences to a
cathartic release: We recognize the enemy and they is them.
That series
tilted Detroit’s
way, again after seven hellacious contests. The worthiness of these champions
could be doubted by no one.
In the decades
that followed, though, both cities committed a form of slow hara-kiri, emptying
out their middles in a rush of suburban white flight. Middle class families fled
their city limits by the blockfull, leaving downtowns to become ghost
towns.
Few American
cities were harder hit by this phenomenon than the once bustling-townships of
Detroit and St. Louis. In the last twenty years, both of
our fair towns have found themselves in the #2 spot on the “Murder Capital of
the US” list, with only the other to look
down upon. The fearless Whiteyball Cardinals appeared on a collision course with
Sparky Anderson’s powerful Tigers in the late eighties – in such as series,
coinciding with the height of this urban decay, the fan frenzy could have been
palpable. However, it was not to be.
Instead, both
cities were well into a well-intentioned urban renewal by the time the twin
Cinderellas – the wildcard Cardinals and the worst-to-first Tigers – met in
2006. Both teams were playing in new ballparks, and were acting as though
smiling politely and painting stripes on one’s face was the equivalent of
displaying one’s colors - as though civic pride were more important than rooting
pride.
The teams
themselves played the part as well. Tony La Russa and Jim Leyland were more than
cordial to each other in a series that featured nary a brushback pitch nor
dugout warning. When scandal hit the series in the form of Kenny Rogers’ tarry
palm smudge, La Russa played the gentleman before the Detroit faithful, and
simply looked the other way. In baseball’s Valhalla, Mickey Cochrane and Frankie Frisch goggled in
disbelief.
Of course, this
turned out fine for the Cardinals in what ended as a 4-1 championship over the
exhausted Tigers. But what started as a surprise year for the Tigers rolled into
a momentum-changing event for the franchise. Tigers owner Mike Ilitch renewed
his commitment to fielding a competitive team, a commitment that began when his
GM convinced him to pay Scott Boras rates for the two premier free agents of
2005, Magglio Ordonez and Ivan Rodriguez. The Tigers knew they were overpaying,
but in the team’s accounting ledger, the premium was billed under the line item
“Cost of Winning Back the Fans.”
In this past
off-season, Detroit looked at a
sparsely-populated free agent field and decided to get creative, dealing with
Florida for
two of GM Dave Dombrowski’s former draftees, the Marlins’ elder stars Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis. For off-season excitement, this was a master
stroke, one that immediately placed the Tigers in the argument with the east
coast perennials as “The Team to Beat.”
However,
doubters were whispering. Willis is not the same pitcher as he once was, a man
whose wild, unrepeatable mechanics have gone over the edge. Cabrera has always
been dogged, fairly or not, with the “lazy” tag. Whether these whispers reached
the boardroom or not, the Tigers signed both players to premium long-term
contracts that accurately reflected their media stature, if not their future
performance.
All season
long, Detroit
has scuffled under the weight of this expectation; however, except for the
surprising White Sox, no one in the division has jumped ahead. With
flame-throwing reliever Joel Zumaya back and youngsters such as Armando
Gallaraga contributing, the Tigers have slowly built up a head of steam and are
pushing to earn their way back into the national conversation. The Cardinals
should expect to face a Tigers team with a lot more bite than when they last
met.
© 2008
stlcardinals.scout.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
rewritten or redistributed.