In the name of progress, they’re tearing down the happiest home in baseball.
When it came time to turn out the lights for the last time at Busch Stadium, the people of St. Louis refused to go home.
Long after the final out eliminated their home team from the playoffs, thousands of spectators lingered Wednesday night in a condemned ballpark to say goodbye.
Their chant of “Let’s go, Cardinals” not only rocked the old house, it spoke to every fan in America who has kept a faded ticket stub under glass to remember the good times.
Approaching 40 years old, this stadium on the banks of the Mississippi always has been a gray lady considered too round, too unoriginal and too homely to be celebrated by romantics who pen baseball odes to Wrigley Field or Fenway Park.
But I slowly came to see the home of the Cardinals in the same fond way as a fan who scrawled graffiti of thanks on Busch Stadium during her final days.
The best nest ever.
What makes a ballpark beautiful is never concrete and steel. It’s always the photographs and memories.
Classic sports architecture can only be built with love.
Baseball was never my game. I couldn’t hit the curve, and as a kid, playing center field always seemed as interminable as standing in line at the frozen custard window.
A ballpark, however, will forever be my perfect spot to hang on boys night out, because the game provides just enough action to fill the gaps in conversation.
While I can still hear broadcaster Jack Buck giving the gravel-voiced order to “Go crazy, folks, go crazy!” when Ozzie Smith hit a playoff homer 20 years ago, the talons of Redbird Nation failed to hook me.
Nevertheless, as Yadier Molina lofted a weak flyball that ended a St. Louis dream of one more World Series in the cathedral where worshippers religiously wore red since 1966, there was something in my gut that felt like nostalgia, because there were so many smiles from the past to bury.
The best summers of my life were wasted at Busch Stadium.
On a hot August night, the place could be steamy as a sauna, but felt like heaven. Me and my college buds. Drinking Buds. Laughing too loud to keep score or harbor a care.
In 1978, Bob Forsch threw a no-hitter as my brother and I camped in the bleachers. So, all these years later, why does the sweat pouring from “Silent” George Hendrick’s face as he took BP wearing a rubber suit in 95-degree heat remain a far more vivid picture?
All the little scribbles outside the lines of a scorecard is where the valuable mementos are hidden.
At Busch Stadium, it was the water-balloon war instigated by my crazy pal Jay in the parking lot, not the stolen base by Vince Coleman that sticks in the brain. In the same ballpark, when my friend Bill dropped the news he had found the right woman to marry, we exchanged fives higher than after any two-run double by Jack Clark.
Twenty-five years later, both those buddies are gone. A heart attack got one. Cancer took the other. But every time I entered the ballpark next to the Arch, they walked in the gates alongside me.
Maybe you had a grandfather who bought your first ballpark frank at Ebbets Field in the 1950s. Or an uncle who taught you the nuances of the double switch at Bears Stadium when Denver was young. You know how it feels to have a wrecking ball taken to your heart.
In its dying days, Busch Stadium was easily maligned as the last of the cookie-cutter stadiums from an era when plastic grass was all the rage. As retro stylish as they are, visit Coors Field or Camden Yards and it’s difficult to tell the sport’s cutting-edge theme parks apart. Funny. The old gray lady of St. Louis stayed around so long she became unique.
Sure, every customer stood and clapped in unison when the Clydesdales marched around the warning track. That didn’t prevent the ballpark from being as personal as 50,000 different stories it could tell.
We’ve all been told baseball is a game played without a clock. Sometimes, it even proves to be true.
On a hot summer night in the Midwest, what’s really cool is how sitting in the stands, drinking Buds with your buds, nobody ever checks a watch.
I miss Busch Stadium. I miss those guys.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
