She Wasn't That Pretty

In a generally enjoyable column, Bill McClellan compares our upcoming football stadium troubles to a series of bad marriages. In his analogy, the Football Cardinals were our town's first wife who asked for a new stadium, and left us for Phoenix because we wouldn't give it to her:

Big Red was our first wife, and we were a good couple. She wasn't very flashy. In fact, she didn't win a single playoff game in our 27 years of marriage, but then again, we weren't exactly a matinee idol ourself. Nobody was confusing us with San Francisco or New York. We were just a pair of sensible shoes, Big Red and us.

She got tired of playing football in a baseball stadium. She wanted her own place. That really wasn't so much to ask after 27 years, was it? But we wouldn't go along with her plan, and she threatened to leave us, and that really set us off. We both said things we shouldn't have. Finally, she left us for Phoenix.

The only trouble is, this description leaves out what a lousy marriage it was. It's not just that she didn't win a playoff game in 27 years. From 1970 to 1987 (their last season in STL) they only went to the playoffs twice! In their last five years in town, they went 8-7-1; 9-7; 5-11; 4-11-1; and 7-8. Let's not kid ourselves--we were miserable in this relationship. We fought all the time, she kept making promises she wouldn't keep. Every year she promised to change, and she never did. This was not a healthy relationship.

And it's not like she left us, started going to the gym, and turned into a knockout. Heck, she's made the next guy as miserable as she made us! (From 1988-2008, the Desert Gridbirds have been to the playoffs once. If anything, she's treating the next guy even worse than she treated us).

And McClellan's next analogy is not very accurate either, as he compares the Rams to a stunning new trophy wife:

We went to Los Angeles for our second wife. We built her the stadium we had refused to build Big Red. We threw money at her. That's the only reason she married us, and we knew it. She was a head-turner. A Super Bowl winner, the Greatest Show on Turf. We were out of our class. A paunchy, middle-aged guy with a comb-over out there on the dance floor with a supermodel.

The LA Rams might have been a lot of things, but a supermodel aint one of them. In the five years before they moved to St. Louis, the Rams went 5-11; 3-13; 6-10; 5-11; and 4-12. Those numbers are almost Gridbirdesque. And in their first two seasons in St. Louis, the Rams head coach was RICH BROOKS, and they went 7-9; 6-10; 5-11; and 4-12. Maybe she was a looker back in the day, but she was on hard times when we ran into her. When San Francisco players said "Same ol' sorry Rams" after another drubbing of the male sheep, they weren't being ironic. Did we lose our dignity in the deal we gave her to move to the midwest? Yes, but not because she wasn't desperate, but because she wasn't quite as desperate as we were, and the odds were in her favor. In that part of his analogy, Mclellan gets it about right: There are only 31 others like her, and cities like us are a dime-a-dozen.

Still, we didn't trade for a supermodel. The LA Rams were the St. Louis Cardinals with a tan. They became the greatest show on turf after coming to St. Louis. In fact, to push the analogy to its limits, we ought to be able to say to the Rams, "Baby, when we found you, you were playing for a half-empty stadium in a heartless town that never really loved you. Do you really want to go back to that?"

It probably bothered Ms. Young, too

This was the headline the Post-Dispatch chose for the game story about Thursday night's assault on the San Diego Padres: "Pujols: 'It did bother me.'" The headline for the same story on Stltoday.com was "Pujols: 'It's tough. It's real tough.'"

Let's look past the pronoun 'it,' lonely without any antecedent to claim for its own in either headline. Instead, let us ask ourselves whether the lede of this story should be El Hombre's reaction to his line drive hitting Padre pitcher Chris Young.

In the story's third paragraph, we learn that

The gruesome aftermath traumatized Pujols, who admitted having little desire for the remaining innings of his team's 11-3 win.

And we have to wait until the sixth paragraph to discover

Young suffered a fractured and lacerated nose but never lost consciousness. He was assisted from the field and taken by ambulance to a local hospital where he remained overnight.

Umm, I'm all for the hometown paper covering the hometown team from a hometown angle, but is Albert's losing the will-to-play-on really more important than the extent of Young's injuries? This is not to say that Pujols' reaction isn't important--it absolutely is. But the headline's job is to identify the story's core. I mean, hitting someone with a line drive might indeed be tough, but not, I suspect, nearly as tough as being hit by a line drive.