Happy, Deanne?

The sun sets on Busch Stadium and the Cardinals’ 2007 season. Three hours later St. Louis would defeat the first place Cubs, their first win in ten games, only to lose the next two. The Redbirds will have their first losing season since 1999.

Overheard at Joe’s Pizza tonight:

Kid: Guess what I learned in class today!
Father: What?
Kid: Amisare Waswere.

(pause)

Father: Amazon Weather?
Kid: Nooooo, Amisare Waswere!

(pause)

Kid: Amisare Waswere!

The father’s still not getting it.

Kid: Am Is Are Was Were
Father: OOOOOOHH. Oh. Oh.
Kid: Mom! Amisare Waswere! A verb is when you, like, do something!
Mother: Like Amisare Waswere.
Kid: Yeah!

Illinois, home to the worst economy in the Midwest, is not exactly rolling with extra tax dollars right now. Who is at fault is unclear; who is unaware is not: Springfield.

After the debacle of a budget negotiation that saw our Governor (D) and House Leader (D) practically come to blows, we were still left with an appropriations bill laden with probably-not-so-constitutional vetoes and several lawsuits by the executive branch aimed at the legislative. All this because the former wanted to expand spending on state programs such as health care, mostly with taxes on businesses that would have been disastrous (we won’t even mention the 107-0 General Assembly vote against it…oops…)

I’m all for universal health care, but Illinois does not have the money right now. All this does is give the concept a bad name, and provide ammunition to its opponents. But that’s besides the point.

What Illinois does have the money for, with the right tax plan, is to increase funding to the Regional Transportation Authority. The RTA oversees the three branches of Chicagoland public transportation: the CTA (city trains and buses,) Metra (suburban trains) and Pace (suburban buses.) User fees for the various modes of transport are reasonable as RTA receives funding from the state to make up the rest, a logical use of a certain portion of state tax dollars.

The problem is that RTA, specifically CTA, does not have adequate funding for this fiscal year, and threatened early in 2007 that if more dollars were not allocated to its coffers in the new state budget that a “doomsday scenario” would be reached where thirty-some bus lines would be cut and fees on certain CTA trains would go up a dollar or two. Given that many of the regular patrons of mass transport are lower income earners that need the services of CTA to get to work or school, that’s a big jump in a non-optional expense.

Of course no money was found in the budget, because there really wasn’t money found for much of anything. The reasons: there’s really no more money to go around, and even if there were legislators wouldn’t have been able to agree on how to spend it anyway. Which brings us to the Governor’s announcement today that he will buy RTA time by releasing all of their state money to them at once in order to keep the lines 100% operational while Springfield looks under the cushions and the car seats. This extra $24 million up front was good enough for RTA to push their doomsday device button-pushing back from this coming weekend ’til November.

Where legislators will find money, I’m not sure, and neither are they, which is a shame since the answer is staring them right in the face: gas taxes in Chicagoland. While RTA’s funding is really a tiny drop in the state budget ($37 million out of $51 billion, asking for a total of $110 million,) taking more money from general tax revenues is unfair to the South of I-80 Crowd (as well as the West of I-39 crowd.) So raising the tax on gas by four to five cents per gallon in Chicagoland and devoting that cash exclusively towards mass transit would raise the necessary funds only from those regularly benefit from the service. Yes, gas prices are already high, but an extra sixty cents every time you fill your fifteen gallon tank would hurt a limited number of people, and perhaps drive a few to *gasp* use mass transit when possible, which would fill an empty seat on the red line and put a few more dollars in CTA’s tank.

Of course, this won’t happen, even if residents of Chicagoland were up in arms demanding it. Will County recently asked the legislature for permission to have the county board vote to have a referendum asking the voters if they could raise the gas tax no more than four cents. The bill passed the General Assembly, only to be vetoed by the Governor.

Excuse me? Will County can’t decide whether or not the people get to vote on whether or not they can raise more funds through a slight gas tax? I understand the Governor’s aversion towards taxes, and it’s a far superior position to one of “tax and spend.” But it’s ridiculous to keep a local government from asking its people for permission, especially when the people have to vote yes for the tax to take effect. We’re not talking about a unilateral board decision that the people have no say in. Instead, the Governor decided for all of Will County.

After this, what hope can RTA have? There are no funds just sitting around in some state CD at Regions Bank to dip into. Additional funds will have to be raised, but any logical course of action won’t be allowed. Chicagoland should enjoy their two-month reprieve, because come November it’s going to be a lot colder in the Windy City, and some people are going to do a lot more walking.

As much as it annoys me when the masses deflate the Reigning World Champs by speaking ill of their mediocre 2006 regular season, I think I’m beginning to enjoy the idea of rooting for a sub-genius ballclub. It takes all the pressure off.

The author of the now-defunct Redbird Nation blog wrote in August of 2004 that the Cardinals that season seemed to win “every. damn. day.” and his summation was dead-on. Imagine how anxious and bored fans can get during the last week of the season once their team has clinched a playoff spot and how the subsequent four-game series at the fifth place club’s ballpark seems to exist only to delay the upcoming fun of October. Then take that feeling and apply it to the entirety of the year’s eighth and ninth months. That’s how Cardinals fans felt in 2004, starting on July 20 after the Pujols Game at Wrigley when the Redbirds came back from 7-2 and 8-3 deficits to sweep a two-game series with the 2003 division-winning Cubs, putting Chicago ten back in second place with no more meetings between the two. The Champs are dead; long live the Champs! Just two more months before a game matters again!

(I know. You’re totally sympathetic towards the fans being forced to root for such a successful club. I know. Anyway…)

After 105 wins and six months of dominating the Senior Circuit the Cardinals lost Chris Carpenter and the offense got tired, and the Red Sox promptly swept the NL Champs, dancing with Jimmy Fallon on Bob Gibson’s mound and inflicting three years and counting of smarmy Bill Simmons columns onto the world. God, I hate the Red Sox even more than the Yankees.

A year later St. Louis won 100 games, but again the offense struggled, this time a series early as the Birds fell repeatedly in Houston, winning a single game there only thanks to Albert Pujols Brad Lidging the shit out of Brad Lidge and giving me the opportunity to turn “Brad Lidge” into a verb just in time for Scott Podsednik to go and use it in the World Series. Congrats on that five-year contract extension, Ozzie!

To sum it up: two seasons, 205 wins, just one pennant, no world title. Each year that last best-of-seven series turned a campaign of joy and high expectations into a disappointment ready to be filed away in the same folder as 1985, 1987, and pretty much every year since 2000.

Then came 2006.

On May 25, 2006, the Cardinals had a record of 31-16, the best in the NL and second in all of baseball only to the Tigers, whom the Cards trailed by only a game and a half in the meaningless overall standings. They led the Reds by four in the Central and were considered by most favorites to run away with the Central for a third straight campaign, especially with Houston off to a tepid start. This time they had to win it all.

Over the next month, the Cardinals went 11-16, reducing their lead to just two games over the Reds. While they would stabilize in July, by August 25 they were only seven games over .500 and had a one-game lead over Cincinnati. After a summer of lackluster play, they were still considered easy frontrunners for the Central crown. Mediocre as they were, so was everyone else in the division.

We know how this ended: St. Louis struggled mightily in September, dragged down by injuries to Rolen, Edmonds and Eckstein, and limped into the last day of the season needing Atlanta to beat Houston in order to avoid a makeup game with the Pirates and a potential one-game playoff in Houston. While Anthony Reyes was shelled at Busch, Bobby Cox did his duty, and the Redbirds, somehow, won their third straight division title, making everyone in Mound City roll their eyes and say, “Fuck, now we get really embarrassed!”

Then their team went 11-5 in October and won their tenth world title. OMG WTF? How?

This 2006 club, good as it was for most of the season, was not a club that seemed to win “every. damn. day.” Or even, at times, every. few. days. And, in retrospect, it made the playoffs a hell of a lot easier to live through. In 2004 it was not only heartbreaking but even almost embarassing to see the Cardinals lose in the World Series, as it seemed to invalidate everything they had accomplished over the previous six-and-a-half months. Falling short in ‘05 against the perenially underachieving Astros, a team that they bested just one year prior, was even more humbling. But who really expected the Redbirds to do anything in 2006?

It sucked to see ESPN’s experts all pick your team to get drummed out in the NLDS, but on the other hand it released a lot of pressure. If San Diego had beaten the Cardinals in the playoffs (an admittedly laughable premise that causes my sides to hurt,) Cards fans could have shrugged their shoulders and said “yeah, we sucked this year.” A loss to the Mets in the second round would be even more explainable, and losing the Series to the Tigers, while certainly not enjoyable, would have been an acceptable finish as well as, at that point, almost anticipated. The 2006 playoffs, unlike the two previous years, were a pressureless,
expectation-free zone.

Which brings us to 2007. After tonight’s latest impotent performance by Mark Mulder, the Cards will sit four games out of first place with an upcoming four-game series at home against Chicago that, much like the five-game series at Wrigley in ‘03 that ended the Birds’ hope for October, could knock the Cardinals out of playoff contention. I’ll be there Saturday night along with two Cub fans who will certainly give me loads of ha-ha shit on the ninety minute drive back to Effingham.

But you know what? So what. This Cardinal team sucks, and, for that matter, so do the Brewers and the Cubs. Just maybe not as much. The winner of the Central, thanks to the way the MLB playoffs work, could go far just like the Birds did last year, and if they do then it’s because they’re the better team by virtue of doing what no other team could: winning when it counts the most. But who really thinks any of these teams will? While it helps for St. Louis fans that their club won the World Series last year and the aura of that victory will hover for a while, Brewer and Cub fans can take the same comfort if (when) their team falls short in September or October: it’s great to have a dominant, feared club, but ultimately for those teams it’s win-it-all or be ridiculed. When your team sucks, you can sit back and enjoy whatever success they achieve without being humbled by their failures.

It’s kind of nice having this weight off your shoulders. Now I know what it’s like to be a Pirates fan.

It’s one of those pauses again, where the blogging stops and the world stops, waiting, breathless, anticipating the return.

Although I really didn’t think it had been since August friggin’ thirteenth that I’d last written. In the time since I last spoke here, my wife and I put on a combined two years. Damn.

To be fair, I was mostly away from the collective internets over the Labor Day holidays. Emily had to finish her field work for her graduate research at the various dolomite prairies of the greater Will County area, and needed the three day weekend to ensure sufficient time to complete the often mind-numbing sampling. This time, for the first time, her loving husband was “lucky” enough to accompany her into the field.

Most people don’t understand the concept of a “prairie”; until I met my plant biologist spouse, I certainly did not. Prairies are TALL. (Or at least the ones my love dabbles in; I should not automatically disparage the entire franchise.) That grass growing along the interstates in Illinois? Think bigger, and bring a scythe. One would usually figure that finding 180 three-inch square pink flags would be a relatively simple task given how the neon color stands out strikingly against the drab greens and browns of late summer plant life, but when the flag is just over a foot tall and the grasses surrounding it often rise another three or four above that, then may the greatest of luck be with you.

It took searching, but we found her plots, which then meant Emily got to kneel down and list off various plant life found at certain points in the small square while I feverishly jotted down abbreviations of plants that I’d never heard of, nor will ever encounter again. The good news was that we got to do this while swatting away giant mosquitoes that migrated there from World 4 of Super Mario Bros. 3 and made the usual drudgery of having your blood sucked by a disease-riddled insect tons more fun by adding the additional twist of having the bite hurt like all hell.

Emily’s car windows had been acting up recently, and of course being three hours from home motivated the passenger side front glass to finally stick halfway down. Seeing as how several of her plots were located in areas known for shady activities, including a strange man once staring at her and her advisor for no reason for a few minutes while they were out in the field, neither one of us wanted to leave openings for trouble. Pep Boys, being the only “decent” car repair place open on the day He rested, got $95 to raise a window and disconnect the power motor, but not before we were told that our car was a piece of crap. Indirectly. Jokingly.

Still.

My presence helped Emily keep her sanity, and my sore right hand helped her work double time - literally. We were able to finish up in half the time expected and enjoy a Labor Day cookout complete with badminton and a most comfortable pool, and a 9 AM to 9 PM marathon of The Office Season 3 on Tuesday that will go down in history as the Laziest Day Ever. Even if I had good internet access, how could I possibly blog on the Laziest Day Ever?