The Cardinals need to get their shit together

Major League Baseball released the 2026 season yesterday for some reason. Who was hankering for it on August 26? Anyway, outside of the Cubs finishing the year in Boston? Against the Red Sox? It's nothing to get all that interested in with 30 games left in this season.

But, a cursory effort at making fun of it served as a reminder that something has been missing in recent years, and it's starting to have an effect on our youth.

It all started with a jokey pessimistic "prediction."

Which resulted in this jokey reply from Praz.

Oh, dear.

What it revealed, beyond Praz only demanding the bare minimum wins over Milwaukee, was how out of mind the Cubs' real rivals have become to a particular portion of the fanbase.

As much as I enjoy the thought of the St. Louis Cardinals having descended so far into mediocrity for long enough that they've become irrelevant to a significant segment of our fans, it turns out that it's a problem.

It's not a problem because Cardinals fans have become increasingly apathetic (but just as inbred--that will never change). It's a problem because as rivals go, the Brewers aren't up to the task.

The history isn't there. The two teams have only shared a league for 30 years, and the Brewers are mostly pretty dull. They've been successful over the last decade, which is impressive, but they do it in a somehow less compelling Tampa Bay Rays way. Ryan Braun was around to hate for a quite a while, and Christian Yelich has been annoying us with his weird overbite since 2018, but mostly their guys come and go and the only lasting impression they make is when Prince Fielder sits on a cushioned bench.

When I was growing up, the Cubs had rivals that were full of stars, and better yet, most of those stars were complete assholes.

We hated Keith Hernandez, and Bruce Sutter was a traitor even though he got traded away (maybe that's where Cardinals fans got "trader" for Albert Pujols), and Tommy Herr was a dick, and whichever alcoholic catcher they had at the time was awful, and the only fun thing Whitey Herzog ever did was try to strangle his own shortstop on the field.

And it wasn't just the Cardinals. The Mets were basically an asshole convention, with guys like Ray Knight, Gary Carter, Wally Backman, Lenny Dykstra, Daryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden and that wasn't enough so they went out and traded for Keith Hernandez so we could hate him in another time zone!

And the Phillies had Mike Schmidt who homered three times in every game he ever played against the Cubs and they went out and got Joe Morgan and Pete Rose!

The National League East was great. Even the Expos and Pirates had guys worthy of our hatred.

You rooted for the Cubs (who, at the time were like 70% Phillies that we used to loathe) and it was so aggravating, and fun, to scream at the opponents.

And to their credit, the Cardinals kept it up over and over again. And just when you thought they were getting boring they hired Tony LaRussa, the biggest asshole of them all, and we had a brand new batch to hate. Jim Edmonds preening around the outfield and slowing down to dive at routine fly balls to try to make SportsCenter, Albert Pujols breaking into the big leagues in his mid 30s and pretending to be 21, Yadi Molina starting off being too fat to catch then spending the bulk of his career as the most overrated player in baseball history and then finishing it up by returning to his oblong glory. Matt Morris openly rooting for the Astros to win games to try to keep the Cubs from winning the division. Steve Kline just being detestable. Even when The Genius finally decided to retire as manager to spend more time on his real passion, driving while intoxicated, they hired glassy eyed Mike Matheny, a man who literally retired as a player early because of repeated brain injuries from foul balls to the mask. And he was easy to hate.

But that's all over, now. The Cardinals are bad, and worse, they're boring, and it's still fun to beat the shit out of them, but they have left a void that no other team in the pathetic NL Central can possibly fill. The Reds can't get their shit together, the Pirates don't even try and the Brewers field the professional equivalent of an NCAA Division III roster full of scrappy white guys, that turns over every other year with a whole new band of somehow even more nondescript scrappy white guys.

Even when they go on a ridiculous heater like they have amazingly done twice this year, it's more of an inconvenience than anything. We know they aren't going to do anything in the playoffs. They're the equivalent of Fairleigh-Dickinson beating Purdue as a 16 seed. Two days later their season was over anyway. Sure, it's fun for them, but what about us? We need somebody to hate other than our own owners, general manager and left fielder!

Think of it this way. What are the two most indelible moments of the Theo Epstein regime? I mean other than hiring Dale Sveum and signing Edwin Jackson?

They are the final out of game seven of the World Series, and beating the shit out of the Cardinals in the playoffs the year before.

Those are the two things we wanted more than anything, and we got them both, and neither had any chance of feeling as good as we anticipated them to feel.

Because they ended up feeling even better than we dared to dream!

I've watched this video roughly 11 billion times over the last ten years, and I'm going to watch it 11 billion times more, because it's so good, and it will never get old.

I don't know how that video didn't sweep the Emmys and Oscars that year, it has everything. Pat Hughes was so confident that the series was over that he literally went into a preamble to set it all up, there was no fear that it was going any other way. And as great as Pat's call is, if you stick around to the end you get to hear Mike Shannon gurgle himself to death as he chokes out his call of the eternal changing of the guard in the rivalry.

That's what I fear this generation of Cubs fans will miss. We hated those Cardinals so much, for so long, that when it was all over it was a feeling we couldn't possibly contain.

Case in point, both the 2003 season and this season had a key late season Wrigley Field five games in four days matchup between the two best teams in the division. In 2003, it was all out war. Dusty Baker nearly went over and beat Tony up during a game. The Cubs won four of five and we drank so much to celebrate we barely sobered up in time to watch them sweep the Pirates in a double header three weeks later to win the division. The Cubs won three of the five against Milwaukee last week and it was so cut throat that the Cubs let their best player take a mental siesta for the middle three games.

2015 is the best example of how much this all meant, though.

Early in that season the Cubs went down to whatever version of Busch Stadium they're on now, and it went rather poorly. The Cubs lost two of three and were pretty outclassed. It was May 5 and they were already 6.5 games behind the Cardinals. But there were just enough glimmers of what might be that two sage baseball minds, Joe Maddon and me, were loudly proclaiming that the Cardinals needed to get their final licks in while they still could.

And two months later we looked like actual geniuses (not the Tony LaRussa kind). The Cubs had won the first two games of the series and down 4-2 in the sixth of the third game they rallied. Miguel Montero was up with the bases loaded and two outs, and on a 2-2 pitch from Michael Wacha he took what Yadi was certain was strike three. But it was called a ball and Yadi lost his shit. Yadi was still losing his shit when Montero smoked the full count pitch to right field and sent all three runners off to the races. Three runs scored while the ball was in play, and the Cardinals were frantically trying to relay it to the plate while Yadi was literally standing with his back to the field still screaming at the umpire. Yadi got thrown out of the game DURING the play. And yes, we learned then that it's the actual rule that if a player is thrown out during a live ball situation, his ejection does not begin until the ball is dead. The whole thing was incredible.

This is the actual photo that shows Dexter, Rizzo and Soler celebrating that they all scored while Yadi is STILL yelling at the umpire.

The Cubs led 5-4 and were in position for the sweep.

But then something happened that felt like a disaster at the time. Pedro Strop came in to try to nail down the save in the ninth. Pedro is an all-time great Cub, and one of our favorites, but to that point in his career he had struggled incredibly against the Cardinals. That ninth inning was a chance not just for the Cubs to prove to the Cardinals that things were different, it was a chance for Pedro to do it, too. And he got two quick outs. And the Wrigley crowd got on its feet and prepared for the best.

But Pedro walked Matt Carpenter.

And then, he gave up a two-run homer to Jhonny Peralta.

And the Cubs lost 6-5.

The Cardinals left that night convinced that it was just the same old Cubs.

When the Cubs won the Wild Card game in Pissburgh, to advance to the NLDS in St. Louis, the Cardinals should have been shitting themselves at the thought of having to beat our heroes three times in five games.

But they weren't.

They shut out the Cubs in game one of the series 4-0. Then in the second game, Carpenter led off the bottom of the first with a homer off of Kyle Hendricks.

And that's the last good thing that's ever happened to them.

The tide changed, and hard. Hendricks bunted in the top of the second and it made Jaime Garcia poop himself and it loaded the bases. The Cubs scored five runs in that inning including a Jorge Soler three run bomb that was part of Jorge reaching base in the first nine postseason at bats of his career (all against the Cardinals).

In game three every Cubs batter from leadoff (Dexter) to the sixth spot (Kyle Schwarber) hit a homer.

In game four Javy took John Lackey deep, Soler threw out fat Tony Cruz at home, Anthony Rizzo broke the tie and our large adult son added this just for fun.

Beating the Cardinals is just the best.

The Brewers don't do that for us, and never will.

The crazy thing is that if the Cardinals ever get good again, it will all come back in a flash. Our outright hatred for them is not dead, it's merely dormant. It's lying in wait, ready to return if called upon.

Because no matter how many times the Cubs beat the Cardinals, no matter how thoroughly they humiliate them, it will never be enough. We have a century's worth of payback to exact and those spineless weasels ran and hid just as we started to collect on all that they owe us.

Would it bother me if the Cardinals are never good, or relevant again? Not really.

But don't try to sell me on the Brewers as a rival. They're just a neighbor who gets in the way once and a while.

This would make a cool shirt, right?

And you know what? There might even be others.

Buy some crap