Carlos Beltran

I started getting emails yesterday from my two brothers entitled, “Trash Talk”. They both live in northern California and are fans of the San Francisco Giants. I too am a fan of the Giants and have been since the fourth grade. Back then my heroes were the likes of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal. My brothers and I would root for and cheer on our beloved Giants, especially against their hated rivals, the LA Dodgers.

Them Bums featured luminaries of the likes of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and that thief, Maury Wills. Chris and I would listen together to the Giant’s ball games on one of our matching eight transistor radios. I never did figure out what the two extra transistors did over the cheaper six transistor model, but I never regretted paying the extra cost.

In the intervening years, deeper love has since grown for the Saint Louis Cardinals. I’ve lived in Saint Louis for the last thirty-two years. I guess that you could rate the Giants now as my second favorite baseball team. In between San Francisco and Saint Louis we lived outside of Washington DC, where the hapless Senators never generated much love from me. Then it was on to Michigan and the Tigers, but there too there was little love lost. This time it was not so much the fault of the ball club, but that of girls. I discovered girls, actually one girl in particular.

I remember taking my Anne and her cousin Anne Emily to their first MLB game. It was a romp. I forget who the Tigers were playing, maybe it was the re-branded Senators, anyway every time the Tigers were up to bat, we would be in our seats, watching them fire for effect. About the time that our beers were empty, the Tigers would be retired. We then all headed off to the bathrooms, bought another round and would be back in our seats when the Tigers were next coming up to bat. I think that this game left the twin-headed Anne with a rather skewed concept of MLB play.

In between Michigan and Saint Louis my brothers moved to Arlington, Texas. There they rejoined the once hapless Senators, now re-branded as the not much more effective Texas Rangers. Time passed and Anne and I settled into Saint Louis life. In both 1985 and 1987, both Anne and the Saint Louis Cardinals delivered. Anne delivered two boys, Dan and Dave and the Cardinals delivered two pennants and one World Championship.

Fast forward to last year’s World Series, featuring the Cardinals and the Rangers. It was about this time that the trash talk began. This talk kept ratcheting up through the series, right up to the Cardinal’s first last strike, in the sixth game of the series. Well, we all know how that turned out. Apparently though, there are some people who are slow learners. We’ll just have to teach them another lesson. 😉

GO CARDS!