A Ring for Puma

Sprawled out on a blanket with my son at the top of a still-green Art Hill, October 25th, 2011. While my four year-old son played, I was reading a cookbook. A cookbook. I never read cookbooks. But I was definitely thinking more about Game 6 of the World Series than about photographs of three-layered Italian rainbow cakes.

Fast forward those easy four and a half years since my son was born, and it was time for championships once again. I had come in late to the race. One of the first images I saw on the television about the play-offs was a woman wearing a stuffed squirrel on her hat, interviewed at a local downtown bar after the Cards clinched the NLDS in Philadelphia.

Enter Lance Berkman. I was oblivious to who this guy was – strangely – even living in St. Louis where everything breathes baseball. My first inspiring thought was, “He doesn't really look like a Lance…” I had tracked him the past couple of weeks leading up to Game 6. Maybe it was because he was so affable, maybe it was because he's a goofy Texan (I hear a lot about Texas from all my in-laws), but I think the real reason he became an instant favorite is because he turned down the idea of a trade to Texas (despite being hard core Lone Star state loyal), because he loved the Cardinals so much.

He deserved a World Series ring.

Game 6 was postponed one day by rain. This delay had helped work me into an ever-escalating bundle of nerves. Who cared if I hadn't tracked pure baseball the past five years? I was back like I had never been gone, and this time, I wanted Big Puma to get that ring.

Looking back, despite all the hype leading up to, during, and after that ridiculous game, I remember only two concrete things: sitting on my bed staring at a very non-HD 20” screen where Lance Berkman was stepping up to the plate for the final time. “Really?” I thought to myself, and the Creator of the Universe. “The one guy I really want to get a ring, and he's going to be the final out? That's a little cruel, don't you think?” Pause for reverence. So when he knocked in that game-tying RBI-single sending Jon Jay and his 'fro bouncing across home plate … I didn't move for a few seconds. It was all over so fast after that, the only thing I remember next is my whole family calling me up over the speakerphone with my three sisters screaming and yelling in the background. Make that the entire city. I doubt there was even one person in St. Louis who wasn't going bonkers at that moment.

Did I sleep after that?

Maybe; probably. But it wouldn't drain out of my head again. No more gaps between baseball. As I stood in the stadium to applaud Lance Berkman and the other Cardinals heroes just three days later during the Championship Ceremony, I already knew it was going to stick this time.