Volume 3, Issue 99: Glenn Brummer

"Brummer's stealing home! He is ... safe! And the Cardinals win!"

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Last week, the St. Louis Cardinals canceled their annual Cardinals Caravan event. The reason for the cancellation was the MLB lockout, Omicron, or both; team president Bill DeWitt said the Caravan, along with the Winter Warm-Up, was canceled because “unfortunately the current circumstances are keeping us from the event as usual." This was the second consecutive year the Caravan was canceled. Last year the reason was definitely Covid.

The Cardinals Caravan is one of those things that probably seem very silly to someone not from the Midwest. Basically, every January when there is not a global pandemic, a gaggle of former and current Cardinals players pack into a series of vans and drive to small towns throughout Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, where they sit in auditoriums, high school gyms and bingo halls and answer questions from hundreds of freezing farmers. The 2020 event, the last one they held, featured Rick Ankiel and Tyler O’Neill in Paducah, Kentucky, Jack Flaherty and Bo Hart in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Jordan Hicks and Tom Pagnozzi in Rolla, Missouri. The idea of the Caravan is not only to build interest during the winter for the upcoming baseball season; it’s to solidify the Cardinals’ hold over the rural Midwest, to ensure that the hold the team has had over several states for many decades now stays bonded and secure. It’s retail politics. It’s kissing babies.

You will note, in Caravan Five there, a January 19, 2020 stop in Mattoon, Illinois. One of those farm visits is my beloved hometown of Mattoon, where I got to visit last week, the one place in the world, to this day, where I feel I can finally catch my breath. Mattoon is struggling right now, with industry, with politics, with Covid (especially with Covid), but it is still my home, the place I’m always looking off to in the distance. I just spent a whole weekend back there and find myself still both wistful and invigorated by it. You can never get enough reminders of who you are.

And on January 19, 2020, Harrison Bader, Alex Reyes, Jake Woodford, Kodi Whitley, Jason Motte and Bengie Molina (who never actually played for the Cardinals but does do the team’s Spanish-language radio broadcasts) packed into the Lake Land College Field House at noon on a Sunday to meet a bunch of Central Illinois baseball fans willing to pay 10 bucks to see them. (That includes lunch.)

The Covid-19 cancellations of the last two years were the first times the Cardinals Caravan hasn’t visited Mattoon in more than 40 years. I know it has been more than 40 years because when I was a kid, I never missed it. The one time I met Darrell Porter was at the Cardinals Caravan. I met Pedro Guerrero at one, and Dane Iorg, and Todd Zeile, and Steve Braun. In 1985, I met Illinois quarterback Jack Trudeau, who came along on the trip because he wanted to meet Cardinals players too. In 1983, right after the Cardinals had won the World Series, I got to talk to the great Willie McGee; I asked him what it was like to catch that ball over the fence in the World Series. (He said it was really hard.) My parents have that picture of me and McGee (and the one of me and Trudeau) on the wall of their house, still, out in their new place in Georgia. I’ve joked before that Willie McGee was the first Black person I ever met, but I’m honestly not quite sure it’s a joke. I even met Glenn Brummer, a former Mattoon resident who is responsible for the most famous steal of home in Cardinals history.

I can name every single one of those players I met, still, today. John Stuper. Dave LaPoint. Curt Ford. Jim Lindeman. Jeff Lahti. Baseball players, as you can probably tell from that picture of Glenn Brummer up there, are not exactly golden gods, but to a kid in Central Illinois, they might as well have been. I loved the Cardinals Caravan so much that I kept a countdown of days until the next one in one of my school notebooks. The Caravan didn’t just get me through the winter; it got me through growing up. To meet an athlete—to see them, in the flesh, in the same room as me, breathing the same air—made the world feel smaller, and it made me feel bigger. It made me feel connected. It made me feel like I was real.

Today—this afternoon, actually—the Georgia Bulldogs football team, which, you may have read, won the National Championship on Monday for the first time in 41 years, is having a parade. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected, on a parade route that goes right by my children’s school and is surely going to end with some drunk students on my lawn.

My oldest son is the exact age I was in that picture with Glenn Brummer above. (He’s better looking than I was.) I remember every second of my interaction with Brummer; I asked him about his steal of home, about whether or not he liked Mattoon, whether he thought the Illini would make the Final Four that year. (They wouldn’t.) Then someone shuffled me off and replaced me with another kid. Today, William, like thousands of other kids, are going to see their heroes in the flesh, be on the same street, breathe in the same air. They’re going to make memories that they’ll remember the rest of their lives, or at least, I can attest, 36 years later. This is something that will stick with them.

One of the strangest, and scariest, parts about being a parent, I’ve found, is when I realize that I can vividly remember experiences I had when I was the age of my child. One of my most formative memories was watching my fifth-grade teacher swat the ever-loving-shit out of a classmate. This is an image that still, to this day, comes up in dreams; it feels like it just happened. But William will be in the fifth grade next year. I met Willie McGee when I was my younger son’s age; I met Glenn Brummer when I was the older one’s. The stuff that’s happening now, it’s all sticking, it’s all what they will carry with them when they are adults, when they are parents, when they are grandparents, when I am gone. This can be terrifying: Who knows which stray moment of weakness, which mistake I’ll make, will be the one they are still thinking about when they’re 50?

But it can be thrilling too. Our favorite athletes are not golden gods, it turns out. But they can serve as markers of who we are, who we were, what we’ve seen, what we carry with us. I don’t know what’s going to happen at the Georgia championship parade today. But I know he’ll never forget it. The job is to make as many of those lasting memories as positive as you can. Today’s gonna be a good one. Today’s gonna stick.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Getting Covid Is Different Now, Medium. Well, if you’re vaccinated, obviously.

2. The Supreme Court Couldn’t Slow Down College Football, New York. The general audience piece about the Georgia football title.

3. The Face-Melting Joy of Winning a Championship, Medium. And then the fandom version.

4. Your Friday Five For January 10-14, Medium. As always, the “this week is over” piece.

PODCASTS

The Long Game With LZ and Leitch, previewing the NFL playoffs with a big draft between LZ and me, and talking Novak Djokovic, that dope.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we had a brief wrapup of the title game, with a big wrapup coming next week.

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week, but you need to listen to Dorkfest if you haven’t yet. We are also taping our first show of the new year tomorrow.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Metaphysical World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Movies,” Hilton Als, The New Yorker. Grierson has been espousing the virtues of Weerasethakul’s movies for years. This is an incredible peek inside a pretty brilliant mind.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Impossible Germany,” Wilco. After last week’s newsletter, I realized I didn’t have this on the playlist yet. So now I do.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Seriously, everyone in this town has had a big-ass goofy grin on their face for a week.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will