October 20, 2011 [LINK / comment]
The Texas Rangers are slight favorites to win this year's World Series, but nobody should discount the St. Louis Cardinals. Indeed, the home team used their home field advantage last night, defeating the Rangers 3-2. The Cards got on the board first in the fourth inning, thanks to a two-run double by Lance Berkman, then the Rangers tied it with a two-run homer by Mike Napoli in the fifth inning. The deciding run came in the sixth inning, when pinch-hitter Allen Craig singled, allowing David Freese to score.
Just like last year, etc., I present the home ballparks of the two World Series teams, for easy comparison. As you can clearly see, the two stadiums bear several strong similarities...
One of my long-planned Web site chores has been to integrate the ancient "quasi-blog" posts into the formalized blog archive system that I instituted in November 2004. Baseball blog Archives. It was a real "trip down memory lane," The very first "blog post" was February, 2002 (exact date uncertain): Expos "twist slowly in the wind." That was a reference to the agonizing delays in making a decision on relocating the Montreal Expos to another city. As we all know, it finally happened three years later. That saga can now be revisited in more detail on the updated Peter Angelos "rants" page. Be aware that each of those "reconstructed" blog posts includes a note at the bottom to explain why the time stamp is different than the indicated date: 'NOTE: This is a "post facto" blog post, taken from the pre-November 2004 archives.'
An interesting observation from a fan of this Web site:
[T]his year's pairing of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers will be the first time that both teams are from pre-Civil War slaveholding states. The closest we've had to an all-Southern World Series. (Missouri did not secede from the Union, of course).
He later clarified that it was the first time for two such states. The World Series of 1944 and 1985 took place entirely within the state of Missouri, of course.