"Skip work for opening day" is item number one on St. Louis Magazine's "101 Things Every St. Louisan Must Do". I didn't need much convincing for this one.
Opening Day is quite the event in St. Louis, and people go downtown to celebrate even if they don't have tickets to the game. Unfortunately it was pretty rainy on this particular day, so a lot of the extra stuff (concerts and so forth) that happens outside the stadium was muted.
I was worried about sitting in the rain for an entire baseball game, so I wore this doofy disposable poncho. It pretty much did its job.
There was some interesting pageantry before the game. First all of the shiny trophy hardware was brought out. I was initially confused because the Cardinals have won the World Series 11 times but there were only 4 trophies carried out. This is because the Commissioner's Trophy wasn't even a thing until 1967. Before then the winning team got a handful of wooden nickels. Fun fact!
Next a bunch of the greats from Cardinals' Christmas past were trotted out, each riding their own car around the field. The only two I recognized were Ozzie Smith and Tony La Russa. Ozzie got his own little highlight reel played on the jumbotron. I felt bad for the other players and for myself. It would have been awesome if they had all gotten their own little video. Then at least I would get to know who the heck all of them are, and I would get to see some awesome old timey Cards footage.
The field was wet so the little worker ants ran around and spread out dry dirt. Because the field was wet the Budweiser clydesdales didn't do their little parade around the field. I thought that was lame.
Luckily for us we are poor and had really bad seats. So bad, in fact, that were were under the awning that sits on top of the stadium. That kept the rain off of our heads quite nicely. Our tickets were really expensive and awful, so I struck back against the man by smuggling in booze. Take that man!
Ultimately I thought it was fun but not worth the crazy price we paid to attend. I'm glad I did it once!
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