Editor's Note: We are currently running a contest for Fanposts explaining why you are a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. More details of the contest can be found here. We've gotten a lot of great submissions and you can read them all and submit your own here. The post below is a fantastic example that deserves attention.-CE

October 1982: A tired father attempts to soothe his fussy 7 month old. Nothing works - bottles, rocking, pacifiers are all summarily rejected. At wit's end, he props the baby in a car seat and turns the radio on to KMOX for the Cardinals-Brewers World Series matchup. Improbably, the baby stops crying and listens wide-eyed to Jack Buck calling the Series. The relieved father uses this trick six more times over the next eight days.

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May 1989: "Daddy, this card says that Terry Pendleton likes bowling." Her father grimaces. "Terry Pendleton is going to hurt himself doing that. He doesn't need another year like last year at the plate." She looks at the card again, careful not to bend the edges of the Topps card, so clean-looking this year with the white edges and swooping team names across the bottom. "Let me show you," he says. "It's easy to see if you can just do the math."

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August 1991: Lou Brock is the girl's favorite player. The Christmas before, her parents got her a placard with Lou Brock's career stats on it. She hasn't taken it out of the protective plastic; she's too afraid to ruin it. It sits on her nightstand and she looks at it every morning. Lou Brock is in town for a charity event. He's signing things for kids in town afterwards, but only for a short time. Her dad is the security guard for the event, so he takes a card each for the girl and her brother to be signed by Lou Brock before the event. She doesn't want to miss her chance to stand within inches of Lou Brock, though, so she carries a worn Cardinals pennant through the line anyway to have Lou Brock sign. He smiles brightly at her. "Do you like to play baseball?" he asks her. She nods. "I bet you're the best on your team," he says. "Yes," she answers, even though it's a lie (she's not that good at all, all gangly limbs and angles). When she returns to her family, her brother is so angry that she got an extra signed item that he attempts to forge Lou Brock's signature on his own pennant in his chubby, elementary school scrawl. She keeps both pennants to display on her wall.

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February 1996: Her grandmother presents her with a folder with Ozzie Smith on it for her birthday. Inside are dozens of blank scorecards. "Your dad says you use these to keep track of the games," her grandmother says, a hint of perplexity in her voice, as though they were some foreign object dropped from the clouds. "This man on the cover - is he pretty good at baseball?" "Jesus, Mom." her father groans, putting his head in his hands.

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August 2004: She and her father have a game. He works the door at a local bar. Whenever guys get into too loud arguments about baseball (which is often), he bets them a beer that any random person at the bar can beat them in a baseball trivia game. The marks nearly always pick her, and she always wins. The owner catches on eventually and asks her father about the game. "It's kind of a scam," he says sheepishly. "Yeah, but it's a good scam," the owner replies.

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October 2006: With tickets to Game 4 of the World Series, she won't be deterred by rain. "They NEVER cancel Series games," she reasons. She sits in the stadium until they start shooing people out. Game 5 becomes the makeup date, but she has an important grad school test that day. She visits the professor's office. "I can't take it then. You can fail me, but this means something." Startled by her vehemence, he allows her to take the test that morning instead.

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October 2011: Her phone beeps as she's celebrating the improbable Series win. It's her dad. She's been texting him for years without getting a single response ("Can't figure the damn thing out. Don't know why people bother." he gripes.) The message reads "This is dad. waht a series. can you bleive that??" She laughs.

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August 2016: Her baby sits on her lap in the shade of the overhang in right field. She balances the baby on one leg and the scorecard on the other. Her baby can count the positions and chant "Yadi Yadi Yadi" already, much to her pleasure. She reaches out her chubby hands to grab the pen and scorecard. She doesn't know what the lines and circles mean yet. But she will.