It’s a tradition unlike any other. It seems like every fall baseball gets ruined for me. I love baseball, it’s my favorite sport. I think it would have to be for me to devote as much time as I do to the Cubs. But for going on 15 years now I just don’t watch any playoff games involving the St. Louis Cardinals. When I say I don’t watch them, I mean just that. I don’t watch the games. I’ll watch any other playoff game. The Rockies-Diamondbacks? Nobody cared, but I watched.

I realize I’ve missed some pretty famous things. The Red Sox apparently won a World Series in 2004 and last year. I guess they did. I saw them win in 2007, so I know they did that.

It’s not a passive aggressive thing. It’s purely aggressive. I aggressively hate the St. Louis Cardinals. I hate the team, I hate the way the media treats them, I hate the bullshit about the “Cardinals Way” and more than anything in the world, I hate their fans. I despise them.

Because they are the Cubs biggest rival, and because they have that weird, somewhat psychotic inferiority complex about how their shitheap of a town isn’t Chicago, I’ve never liked them. I didn’t have the full Wes Mantooth “straight up hate” for them until they hired the world’s biggest redass Tony LaRussa to manage them. Tony’s gone, but his bag of syringes, his pitching change hyperactivity, his sign stealing paranoia and his beanball-ordering retaliation strategy has been passed along to his former catcher, CTE-pudding brain Mike Matheny who:

once missed an entire playoffs because he cut his hand with a hunting knife in the clubhouse

had to retire early because of concussions

had to take the job because he lost millions of dollars in bad real estate investments.

Apparently the Cardinals beat the Dodgers again, and are in their fourth straight NLCS.

This shit has to stop.

The only way to get the strange racist cult that self-proclaims things that are wholly untrue to stop, is to start beating them soundly.

Right now it seems like the only team who takes that task seriously are the San Francisco Giants. And, apparently, its up to them to do it again. But that’s not going to last anyway. We can’t count on them long term.

So who else is going to do it? The Dodgers have proven they can’t. They can spend half a billion dollars on a team, and they still have an inconsistent offense and a terrible bullpen. The Nationals can’t get out of their own way. Pissburgh? Oh, please. The Braves? No.

There’s only one team that can end this horrendous reign of terror. And it’s the one team that historically has shown no ability to consistently do anything but lose.

Oh, my god, it’s the Cubs.

We’re all doomed.

Or are we?

Theo’s spent his first three years with the Cubs trying to stockpile the kind of talent that will not just rival the Cardinals, but do this to them with regularity:

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The best parts of that video are after the second homer, when Jim Deshaies tells Jorge there are no higher leagues, and the end when Len talks about the murmur in the crowd from Cardinals fans and says smugly, ‘You better get used to him.’

I don’t blame Cardinals fans for not looking worried yet about any perceived threat from the Cubs:

I mean, look how happy they are. And they don’t have any reason to not be, yet. The Cubs haven’t proven to be capable of consistently doing anything right since the end of the 1930’s.

But they HAVE to now. They are mankind’s only hope. This isn’t just about baseball any longer. The Cardinals and their fans are a threat to our very way of life. They are a delusional band of crackers who honestly think it means more because they win without spending the most money. They wrap themselves in phony Midwestern piousness. I’m from the Midwest, I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m not particularly pious. My friends aren’t. I like to drink and swear and screw and watch baseball. Sometimes all at once. I have no idea who these other people are. I suspect they’re this:

So I’ll deal with another fall when playoff baseball games are played that I don’t watch. But I’m not putting up with this shit much longer.

And the good thing is. I don’t think I’m going to have to.

Am I, Kris?