All’s fair in love and the World Series

ST. LOUIS – “Mom, why do you have a Red Sox cap on your desk?”

The question, posed from my 16-year-old son Jack, was asked with a bit of a adolescent sneer, with the emphasis on Red Sox as if it were some foreign antigen invading his home.

Here’s why, Jack. Here’s a Cardinal fan’s — and your mother’s — Red Sox story in time for the World Series to return to St. Louis and in the hopes the Cardinals can keep the momentum going after the split in Boston.

It begins on a senior trip in 1981, 10 newly graduated girls from St. Louis’ Incarnate Word Academy packed into two rooms in a Daytona Beach, Fla., hotel. To this day I have a hard time believing our parents let us go, but it was a different era. This was long before MTV cameras and Girls Gone Wild. Girls Gone Mild, maybe, if you count skimping on sunscreen and a few Sloe Gin Fizzes, while our mothers were home saying nightly Hail Marys.

There was safety in numbers – in just two rooms. And so one night, either tired of fighting for mirror time or choking on hairspray, I left the room and ran right into a group of young men from New England – Red Sox fans.

After a few pleasantries, we talked baseball. Because I grew up reading The Sporting News and watching This Week in Baseball, I knew of Ted Williams, Carlton Fisk and Carl Yastrzemski. I knew that Bob Gibson beat the Sox three times in the 1967 World Series. I knew about the Curse of the Bambino.

Over the course of a baseball conversation in a hotel hallway, I held my own and one of them, a freshman at the University of Lowell in Lowell, Mass., held my eye. And so began a sweet vacation romance: walks on the beach and a shared love of baseball.

After that, letters, off and on for six years, through college and beyond. In that correspondence, dreams were shared along with confidences and career plans. As time went on, the letters would become sporadic on both sides until a postseason appearance of our favorite teams: A Cardinals World Series win in ’82, a Don Denkinger condolence card in ’85, a Bill Buckner-induced reconnect in ’86. The constant, as we both embarked on separate lives a half-continent apart, was baseball.

I think we both wondered what it would be like to meet again. And so in April of ’87, with an invitation to a game at Fenway Park — Fenway Park! — I made travel plans with friends for Boston. You know, women always travel in packs.

If there was any trepidation, it was over the minute we de-planed at Logan. He was the one standing at the gate with a Sox cap in one hand, a single rose in the other. For me.

He drove us to our downtown hotel and pointed us in the direction of Fanueil Hall and the Freedom Trail. We made plans to meet at the game two days later, April 11, 1987, Red Sox vs. Blue Jays in the second home game of Fenway Park’s 75^th anniversary season. The seats were on the first base side, the Green Monster and Citgo sign in full view. Roger Clemens was making his first start after a spring training holdout and the Boston faithful, still reeling from the previous postseason, were restless. Me? I was wearing my new Red Sox cap, and I was over the moon.

But this isn’t a Hollywood story and there wasn’t going to be a Fever Pitch ending on 4 Yawkey Way. Clemens got pummeled in the 4^th inning, got booed, then yanked, and the Sox lost 11-1. You could look it up. But the box score won’t tell you everything. It won’t tell you that at some point in that game, the six-year summer vacation romance between a Cardinals fan and a Red Sox fan came to an end. Blame it on chemistry, geography, or Clemens’ inability to find his fastball; it just wasn’t meant to be.

Heartbreaking? A bit, at the time. Yet it wasn’t a lost trip. Quite the contrary. In the spring of 1987, I went to a baseball game in Boston and found not lasting love, but the potential for it. And in six years of letters over the formative years of young adulthood, I learned the capacity for love – and I like to think he did as well. Sometimes, you need to venture down a few paths until you find out which one you’re meant to travel.

That spring of 1987, I was a little over a year from graduate journalism school at Northwestern University; 2½ years from a career as a sportswriter and a job at my beloved Sporting News, and less than four years from meeting the love of my life – a tall, funny, handsome Cardinals fan with whom I have two remarkable sons. It’s all turned out better than I could have imagined. That’s my Hollywood ending.

After that trip though, we lost contact. The letters are long gone, too, but I still have the cap.

When the Sox swept the Cardinals in the 2004 World Series and ended their 86-year championship drought, I thought about him and smiled and hoped somewhere he was celebrating with family and friends.

But that was then. Last weekend, I dug that cap out amidst boxes of baseball memorabilia in my basement and dusted it off. It’s sitting on my desk this week surrounded by years of Cardinals mementoes because of this:

The last time I wore it, the Sox got pummeled.

Leslie Gibson McCarthy is a former sportswriter who now works full-time in Public Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. She writes a weekly lifestyle column in the suburban South County Times, and a shorter version of this story appeared in the Oct. 25, 2013 edition. Her only regret in life is never having witnessed the Cardinals play in Sportsman’s Park, but she would have had to go before age 3 and as her mom told her once,”We didn’t know you’d turn out the way you did.”