It started so well.  Every time the Pujols homer was replayed, my oldest son (3 years old) would shout, "He hit it!  Pujols hit it!".  My two yeard old began copying his older brother and I was looking forward to a great game.

Just didn't happen.

Soon, my kids wanted to watch dinosaur videos and my wife took them upstairs.  They didn't come down much except to say good night because I think my wife could sense the dark cloud pervading our living room as I watched the game.  Very quiet and very sullen, I could only respond with monosyllabic grunts by the end of the game.

Oswalt was too powerful and the Cards' bats looked slow.  They consistently looked overmatched on his fastball.  Wouldn't you think they would be sitting dead red after a while?  Edmonds, Sanders and Walker looked very old this series (excpet for Walker's double last night and Reggie's HR in Game 1) and it was sad to see so many breakdowns in fundamentals from the OF to Molina.  And Mulder choked on the bunt.  He should have thrown to third and was rattled after that.

I had an uneasy feeling about him - saw it first hand out here too many times in Game 5s when the A's played the Yankees.  I wish he had proven me wrong.

With the end of the season, so comes the end of Busch as we all know.  I wasn't aware that the Cards were leaving KMOX until I saw the posts.  And I loved the Mad Lithuanian's post on the last night at Busch.

Busch is special for me because it's where my Dad and my grandmother introduced me to the game.  My birthday comes in early April, so the three of us (or 4 with my little sister sometimes) would go to an early season game when the Cardinals were in town to celebrate it.  

The love of Cardinals baseball was engrained in me early.  My grandmother was deaf and she enjoyed watching sports as it was purely a visual experience - no dialogue necessary to follow the story.  My grandfather would have the radio on in the kitchen and he would have coffee and I would have dessert as we listened to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon.  My dad would listen to Cards games on the radion when he would drive.  These are the sights, sounds and scents of my childhood.

Those things meant so much to me that when I turned 30, I flew my Dad and me back to St. Louis for the opening weekend vs. Milwaukee in 2000.  We watched games just like we did when I was a kid.  Only the seats were a lot better than the bleacher seats we had when I was young.

I'll miss Busch with the arches at the top to signify it was a St. Louis specific structure.  I thought the recent renovations made it a great park to watch a game - green paint instead of blue, seats closer to the field and as a result, smaller foul ball areas.  The manual scoreboards and penants and retired jerseys.  

I'm probably overly sentimental, especially because the last game was not a triumphant one.  But I see enough ersatz retro designs at Pac Bell Park here in San Francisco.  After a while, it seems gimmicky and soulless, although the view from Pac Bell is phenomenal.  Perhaps I feel that way because I watch a team play there that I care nothing about.  I am a Cardinals fan and that means there's no room for any other team.

Ah well, I have a Giants fan in the office here for turning me on to this site and I look forward to all the hot stove activity.

For the record, I say keep Grudzielanek and Suppan.  Let Morris and Tavarez go and let's go with Anthony Reyes and Wainwright to see what they can do.  Go after Brian Giles in free agency and shore up the hitting as I think Edmonds is in a steep career decline.