{"id":2495,"date":"2005-07-13T23:56:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-13T23:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=2495"},"modified":"2013-05-04T06:11:31","modified_gmt":"2013-05-04T11:11:31","slug":"nontraditional-columnist-tradition-is-inflexibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/07\/13\/nontraditional-columnist-tradition-is-inflexibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Nontraditional Columnist: Tradition is Inflexibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/i> on the move of the Cardinals from KMOX to KTRS in his column today<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This is no frivolous enterprise. There are plenty of legitimate, practical business reasons why the Cards are mulling a change. Yet in this parochial old baseball town that clings to routine like a pit bull gnawing on a bone, change is a strange and scary place. That is a quirky little characteristic of the Midwest, where the insular mood is to keep things just the way they always are.<\/p>\n

Tradition, the bedrock loyalists call it. Inflexibility, the mystified outsiders mock it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s reflect upon how baseball crosses generations. When I moved to St. Louis in the middle 1980s, I listened to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon calling two Cardinals World Series appearances. When I returned to Missouri after college, they were still in the broadcast booth. As a matter of fact, Jack Buck called games for the Cardinals for fifty years up until his recent death. Mike Shannon still calls games.<\/p>\n

However, in the last couple of years, the Cardinals (singular corporate entity) has provided a number of other guys in the broadcast booth. That “See! You! Later!” guy and Wayne “When Will A Real Market Call” Hagin.<\/p>\n

As the Cardinals has proven its flexibility by breaking its bonds to my youth, I’ve gone to fewer games. Now that the team will play in a new stadium that I don’t associate fondly with growing up and which will bear numerous names in its existence and the games will play on a new, lesser radio station, I’ll probably listen to fewer games, too.<\/p>\n

Because the Cardinals is not a hometown team any more; it is a corporate franchise owned and operated by a company based elsewhere with no respect–none–for St. Louis and tradition other than the tradition of taking money from St. Louisans for baseball.<\/p>\n

Of course, we insular Midwesterners wouldn’t expect the well-travelled<\/a> sports columnist to embrace tradition. He’s only here in the local paper because it offered the best check for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the move of the Cardinals from KMOX to KTRS in his column today: This is no frivolous enterprise. There are plenty of legitimate, practical business reasons why the Cards are mulling a change. Yet in this parochial old baseball town that clings to routine like a pit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12704,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions\/12704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}