OK, Clean Slate Time

I think I may have been born a baseball fan, but I haven't been to a baseball game since the Cardinals made me pay for their new stadium, which opened in 2006 (the first game I ever went to was at the old stadium in the 1970s -- nosebleed seats to watch the Cards lose to the Atlanta Braves).

It was a really bad thing. The Cards' owners had an aggregate net worth of something like $15 billion, but wanted the taxpayers of St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and Missouri to pick up the stadium tab.

St. Louis County voters petitioned to put a measure on the ballot forbidding the County Council to allocate tax money for the stadium -- so the Council hurried things up and authorized the issuance of bonds before the election took place to stop them. Then another petition to put a measure on the ballot forbidding the use of taxpayer money to pay off the bonds, but it got thrown out in court.

Disgusting. Just haven't been interested in baseball since then. Until this week, I probably couldn't have even named anyone associated with the Cardinals except for Tony LaRussa, Mark McGwire and Albert Pujols.

But you know, all that mess was the corporate welfarist team owners and the politicians, not the players. And after five years and those last two World Series games (Tamara had game six on the tube and I was walking by and let myself get sucked into it in the 9th), I think I'm ready to bury the hatchet. Next year, I think I'll go see a game in that stadium I paid for.

That sixth game was a humdinger, wasn't it?