And That’s a Winner!

Chet goes to the World Series and takes pictures of everything but the game…

Last Monday, my youngest brother Lance, who lives near St. Louis, called and said he had two tickets to the World Series on Wednesday night. Of course, if you followed the Series, you know that we sat and watched the rain for two hours, before the game was finally called. It was re-scheduled for Friday… and we were there!

Not only was this my first World Series, it was my first visit to the new Busch Stadium. Beautiful! What a great sight looking out over left field at the skyline and the Arch.
 
It was a sea of red!

I’m not a rabid baseball fan, but I enjoy it. I like to listen to the games on the radio while driving or doing something more than sitting down and watching the game on TV. For one thing, Mike Shannon always cracks me up — “ol’ Abner’s done it again!” — and I really miss Jack Buck. When the Cards won, they played Buck’s “And that’s a winner” and also “Go crazy folks! Go Crazy!” over the stadium sound system and the crowd roared!

Most of these pictures are of the crowd, and the atmosphere at the stadium… You can see much better game action photos on the sports pages, taken by photographers down on the field. I didn’t even take any of the big cameras or lenses, I just wanted to enjoy the game, and simply took one of our smaller cameras to get some impressions of the experience.

As you can imagine, the noise was deafening, and it went on and on!

They say St. Louis fans are the best in baseball. We didn’t see anyone out of line. Lance and I had to high-five a whole line of complete strangers as we left, but we didn’t see one overturned car or burning building! Just lots of happy fans. These guys were there, but they had nothing to do!

These are time-exposure images of the streets outside the stadium. Be sure to notice the lights in the AT&T building.