Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Nontraditional Columnist: Tradition is Inflexibility

Nontraditional Columnist: Tradition is Inflexibility

Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the move of the Cardinals from KMOX to KTRS in his column today:

This is no frivolous enterprise. There are plenty of legitimate, practical business reasons why the Cards are mulling a change. Yet in this parochial old baseball town that clings to routine like a pit bull gnawing on a bone, change is a strange and scary place. That is a quirky little characteristic of the Midwest, where the insular mood is to keep things just the way they always are.

Tradition, the bedrock loyalists call it. Inflexibility, the mystified outsiders mock it.

Let's reflect upon how baseball crosses generations. When I moved to St. Louis in the middle 1980s, I listened to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon calling two Cardinals World Series appearances. When I returned to Missouri after college, they were still in the broadcast booth. As a matter of fact, Jack Buck called games for the Cardinals for fifty years up until his recent death. Mike Shannon still calls games.

However, in the last couple of years, the Cardinals (singular corporate entity) has provided a number of other guys in the broadcast booth. That "See! You! Later!" guy and Wayne "When Will A Real Market Call" Hagin.

As the Cardinals has proven its flexibility by breaking its bonds to my youth, I've gone to fewer games. Now that the team will play in a new stadium that I don't associate fondly with growing up and which will bear numerous names in its existence and the games will play on a new, lesser radio station, I'll probably listen to fewer games, too.

Because the Cardinals is not a hometown team any more; it is a corporate franchise owned and operated by a company based elsewhere with no respect--none--for St. Louis and tradition other than the tradition of taking money from St. Louisans for baseball.

Of course, we insular Midwesterners wouldn't expect the well-travelled sports columnist to embrace tradition. He's only here in the local paper because it offered the best check for now.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:56 PM