The Cardinals face the Dodgers in the NLCS tonight, which, if you’re not into baseball, means they’re playing for a chance to be in the World Series. I’m not really into baseball, but I grew up in a baseball family, specifically one in St. Louis, which identifies itself as a drinking town with a baseball problem.

As baseball problems go, St. Louis’ could certainly be worse than, say, Chicago’s, as the Cubs are more famous for never winning a World Series than they are at…well, pretty much anything else, and that includes being the team who employed Gary Busey in “Rookie of the Year.” The St. Louis Cardinals are an historic team, a winning team, but to me, the things that makes them a great team isn’t truly either of those things. To me, the Cardinals are great because:

1. ) For a long time, they weren’t a winning team but their fans still loved them, which is more than can be said of fans of teams like the Yankees or the Dodgers, both of whom have booed their own team and walked out in the middle of the game because…I don’t know, they want to beat traffic?

2.) My grandfather was the most loyal Cardinals fan I know, and the soundtrack to a very big portion of my childhood involves him sitting at the kitchen table with a whiskey-and-Coke, chain-smoking cigarettes and listening to Jack Buck call the game.

3.) It’s nice to like a team, to care about them, to feel like you’re a part of a city that gets shit talked a lot (bylotsofpeopleincludingmesometimes) and has very little except pride to go on.

And this is a problem to no one except for this one idiot who wrote a piece for Deadspin, because it’s apparently insufferable that Cardinals fans love their team, love that they love their team, and somehow manage to not be assholes to other teams or fans of other teams.

Seriously, this is the gist of the entire piece. Well, I suppose a greater gist would be that Deadspin wants to generate traffic, because for no other reason on Earth would sports fans in an economically downtrodden Midwestern city really give a fuck about anything else they publish. But mostly, the point the writer makes is that Cardinals fans use their niceness as a sort of currency in baseball, and that this somehow overshadows the game itself, and it’s allegedly all an act, because according to the writer, Cardinals fans are just like “selfish, arrogant, profane and miserable” Yankees fans, and are faking their goodwill when they are actually “poorly disguised Yankees fans in ugly Christmas sweaters carrying a Jell-O mold to your neighbor’s door.”

Oh.

Really?

Because of all the Cardinals fans I know – and I know a lot – not a single one of them considers not throwing garbage at a member of a visiting team to be an accomplishment. Not one of them thinks about how righteous they are for not rioting when their team loses. And none of them throws Internet hissy fits about how it’s unfair that a team from a “shithole” city in the equally laughable Midwest actually wins once in awhile, and how absurd it is that anyone would enjoy this.

Truly, how stupid is that? Cardinals fans, how dare you?!

The thing is, I don’t care about baseball. I had no idea the Cardinals were anywhere near the playoffs until two weeks ago. I don’t even live in St. Louis anymore. But I do take issue with dumbasses who use adult Internet connections to throw shitty baby tantrums, and this writer is clearly their king. No other lord and ruler of fucktarded comment thread goons could possibly rise to the height of this moron, no other sour grapes crybaby could possibly be irritated over something so benign.

I mean, of all of the things to be angry about, and this idiot chooses his topic in the same way that that asshole kid from middle school used to heave the ball over the playground fence when he was losing just so no one else would get a chance to play. That asshole kid is now a sexually frustrated man with at least one fedora and a whole rant about the friendzone, by the way, one who gets .008 cents a word (if that) from Deadspin every couple of months to rant about shit like this.

Forget the Cardinals. This guy is the real champion.

EDIT: Mike tells me that the Cubs actually won back-to-back World Series titles, “thirty years before Hitler invaded Poland.” So there you go. The Cubs did win twice. And then the world got Hitler. COINCIDENCE?