Anyone Got World Series Tickets?

Better watch out for all those Johnny Come Lately Cardinals fans.

I’ve been there before.

I once had a neighbor who stopped me at our property line. He knew I was a sports writer and he told me “You gotta help me get World Series tickets.”

Huh?

This guy had not attended a sports event in his entire life. He was the kind of guy who chilled out on local culture, the highest brow. He would go to the symphony and the opera, but the last place you would find him alive on Earth was in Busch Stadium.

Now that the Cardinals had made the 2004 World Series, he was ready to jump on the bandwagon. He had to have tickets to a game. I suppose they were supposed to be box seats, fifth row or better. I can even guess, he didn’t want to pay for them?

The Cards are 1-1 in the series, and I’m getting a steady diet of needling emails from my brother in Dallas. I suppose he might have attended a Ranger game or two in his 20 years in Dallas. He used to live in St. Louis, of course, and now he’s all Texas, all the time.

He’s got the Rangers in six, just like the rest of the folks down there. Give them some warm weather, and they are ready to shred the Cards!

I worry a bit about people who are just obsessed with Cardinals baseball. There seems to be a never-ending contest on TV who can lay claim to being the biggest Red Bird fan of them all. Some people have rooms entirely dedicated to Cardinals memorabilia. It seems like for some, their entire wardrobe is Cardinals gear, head to toe.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think its important to be a dues-paying member of Cardinal Nation. But being obsessed like that may be being a little over the top?

I remember the day after the Rams won the 2000 Super Bowl title. Souvenir stands sprung up in a ton of vacated storefronts around St. Louis. People acted like if they didn’t buy a souvenir of the Super Bowl on Day 1, their luck might have run out. This went on for at least three months.

Funny how the front-runners seem to be everywhere. Now that St. Louis is in the World Series, everyone seems to have hitched a ride on the bandwagon. I remember one year, they put World Series tickets on sale, and the Cards front office staff was bombarded with some 250,000 requests.

Maybe not so much any more. Some claimed there were upwards of 3,000 empty seats when the Cards took the field for Game 1 this week.

That old front-runner, Johnny Come Lately bandwagon just keeps on rolling through the Lou. Whoo whoo.