David Freese after walk-off homer
I’ve been slow to congratulate the St. Lous Cardinals on their remarkable World Series victory. My only excuse is that I am a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, and the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry is comparable to that between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. But even a Cubs fan needs to tip his hat to this year’s world champions.
St. Louis’s improbable victory fits the outlines of comedy as it is described by Northrup Frye in Anatomy of Criticism. Facing elimination, the team experienced a miraculous reversal of fortune—actually a series of reversals—that allowed it to emerge victorious.
According to Frye, comedy is the mythic expression of spring, which celebrates the escape of life from the clutches of winter. If comedies often feature improbable twists and turns, this is to emphasize life’s cunning. We see this when the orphan turns out to be of high birth so that he can marry the heroine, when the heir proves to be of age so that he can make a critical decision for himself, when the sought-after love object has a twin who will do just as well, when the old man spectator turns out to be a benevolent uncle who can sort everything out. We don’t worry that these developments are unrealistic. We laugh with delight.
There was a lot of delighted laughter amongst Cardinal fans in the last two months of the season. On August 26 they were 10 ½ games behind the Atlanta Braves and, on the morning of September 6, still 8 ½ games behind. Going into the final three games, the Braves had to lose all three of their games and the Cardinals had to win all three of their games for St. Louis to make it into the playoffs. The Braves complied by losing the first two games and then, after giving up a ninth inning lead, the third as well. Meanwhile the Cardinals won all three. The Braves’ collapse was the biggest in baseball history.
The Cardinals next had to face the heavily favored Philadelphia Phllies. In the fifth and deciding game, the clubs’ two aces went toe to toe, with the Cardinals coming out on top with a 1-2 victory.
There wasn’t the same kind of drama in the National League Conference Championship when they beat the Milwaukee Brewers four games to two. But the World Series was another matter.
The Texas Rangers had a 3-2 games league and, in the extraordinary game six, twice had two-run leads while being one pitch away from the championship. Down to the last out in the bottom of the ninth, Cardinal third baseman David Freese hit a one ball-two strike pitch for a two-run game-tying triple. Then, in the tenth innings, Cardinal outfielder Lance Berkman delivered a two-run single off a two ball-two strike pitch to tie the game once more. In the following inning, Freese hit a walk-off homerun to send the series into a game seven. After such fireworks, the final game, which the Cardinals won easily, was almost anticlimactic.
The sports events that most grip our imaginations are those which invoke archetypal stories. The Cardinals-Rangers match-up was not just two teams from middling cities fighting for a championship. The unfortunate Texas Rangers found themselves up matched up against the mythos of spring. What emerged was a classic comedy for the ages.
Follow-up thought
The one problem with invoking the spring archetype when talking about a World Series win, of course, is that the accomplishment occurs when the leaves are turning brown and snow is beginning to fall. The baseball season may resemble winter in that it is a long and arduous slog, but of course we associate baseball with the laid-back days of summer.
Another archetype that comes to mind is the escape artist. I explored that archetype in a post on Philadelphia quarterback Michael Vick if you want an extended description, but suffice it to say that it includes such literary characters as Br’er Rabbit and Mac the Knife. We rejoice when, miraculously, the escape artist eludes death. The Cardinals’ end-of-the-season and playoff heroics had that magic.
See also my post on how people respond when a sports event seems to follow a Hollywood movie too closely. “It’s like a movie” becomes the ultimate compliment because movies, fearful of overly obvious cliches, often avoid the kind twists and turns that the Cardinals’ playoff run took. The only way it would have been more like a movie is if Game #6 has occurred as game #7.
