I was raised a Cardinals fan from infancy. The early days of baseball were uncomplicated. The Baltimore Orioles were the closest team proximity-wise — the only team for which it was actually possible to attend games — but I was an exclusive Cardinals devotee, as St. Louis is the ancestral homeland of the Hechts.
Out of pragmatism, I was willing to tolerate the Orioles and the ridiculous concept of American League baseball, but the peak of my significant live experience came in 2002, when I saw the Cardinals for the first time in Philadelphia. This game was everything a fan could ask for. We witnessed the classless Philadelphia sports fans futilely boo Scott Rolen, and I saw my first-ever grand slam en route to a Cardinals victory.
When the Expos came to D.C. and became the Nationals, it was the best possible development in baseball — but it complicated my family dynamic. The early years were never a problem. Even though the Nats and Cards would occasionally play each other, they were never in the same sphere of competition. As a Nats fan, you hoped to win the occasional game, and as a Cards fan, you expected to win the World Series. When the Cardinals came to Washington, rooting for the Cardinals was a foregone conclusion.
Just after the Cardinals’ second World Series win in this period of coexistence, the Nationals franchise became a contender in its own right. The Nats ended their 2012 regular season with the best record in baseball, setting up a dramatic National League Division Series showdown between my co-favorite teams. Accompanying this pairing, battle lines were drawn in my extended family. My mom, from Chicago and prone to the occasional pro-Nationals exclamation, was quick to voice her unquestioning support for the Nationals. Likewise my dad, who claimed he’d always preferred the Nationals, came down strongly in favor of Washington.
On the other side were my grandparents, who haven’t missed watching a Cardinals game in years. In 2011, I watched the World Series run play out in my grandparents’ living room, with my granddad wearing his personalized Cardinals shirt and my dog Maggie — the Cardinal’s official good luck charm — donning a Cardinals bandana.
Though I claimed perfect impartiality, the Cardinals had always held a special place in my heart. Not only did they have the edge in seniority — an admittedly unfair category — but they had reignited my interest in baseball with the previous year’s World Series, when they needed an unprecedented comeback just to make the postseason. Game six of the 2011 World Series remains the best sporting event I have seen in my life by a fairly large margin. David Freese, the hero, remains my favorite Cardinal of all time — even though he is no longer on the team.
While this was enough reason to support the Redbirds itself, they also held the edge in the indefinable “clutch stat.” Logically, if I could choose the World Series champion every year, I’d probably choose the Nats to get them on the board, but I rooted for the Cards because I knew they had a better chance.
After the Cardinals inevitably beat the Nats, I found it was suddenly frowned upon to like the Cardinals in the D.C. area. The Cardinals have understandably built up a lot of residual anger among fan-bases for their dominance in the last decade, but I struggle to accept they should be despised for their success.
Following a slightly down year for the Nats and a pennant for the Cardinals, this postseason again presented the potential for a Cardinals-Nationals matchup — this time in the ideal National League Championship Series spot. While corrupt umpires, a lack of offense and a deliberate game two sabotage by Matt Williams broke the hearts of Nats fans everywhere, preventing this matchup, it still shed some light on the future of my dual citizenship.
At its core, every sport is a zero-sum game, and every team you are not directly supporting is an obstacle. In baseball, as with other sports, I can only name two teams I actually like, but I can craft an intricate top-15 list of teams I despise. For me, the best-case scenario for an unaffiliated team is my apathy, which is contingent on a sub-500 record.
In 2012, with the first climactic showdown of these franchises, I realized I am first and foremost a Cardinals fan, but it hurts that this elicits the ire of my co-supporters of the Nats. The woes and curse of Washington sports extend far beyond the damage done by St. Louis, and I wish we could be united by our disillusionment and hopelessness instead of misplaced anger at the best franchise in baseball.
Christian’s column runs biweekly Fridays. He can be reached at c.hecht@cavalierdaily.com.
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