If you are reading this, chances are your favorite team in baseball is the St. Louis Cardinals. (If not, appreciate the click but you might not find this all that interesting.) As you probably know, the Cardinals are celebrating their 125th anniversary this year as a member of the National League. Over that span of time, there have some incredible moments, frozen spots in time that are indelibly Cardinal. When you think about this team, you think about those moments. Ozzie Smith’s homer in 1985 against the Dodgers. Bob Gibson’s 17 strikeouts in the World Series. Tom Lawless’s bat flip. And a couple from a local boy turned third baseman. Which moment, though, is the best of them all? Which is the most quintessentially Cardinals moment out there?
Starting in a couple of weeks, we’re going to take some time to find out.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll remember that earlier in the spring I asked for some of these moments, then asked for some help ranking them. Now with all that work done (and thanks to all that chipped in), we’re ready to reveal the bracket. 64 different snapshots of Cardinal history, ready to be debated, judged, and voted on.
To do this, I’ve enlisted the help of a few other sites, with each of us taking one quadrant of the bracket. On Mondays, you’ll find the Branch Rickey region here at C70 At The Bat. We’ll go over the matchup and have a spot for you to vote on which is your preference. Tuesdays, you’ll head over to The Intrepid STL for the Bing Devine region. Wednesdays will see Redbird Rants and the Walt Jocketty region while Thursdays will see Cardsblog and the John Mozeliak region going at it.
Before we release the bracket, here’s the schedule:
Weeks beginning July 10, 17, 24, and 31: Two first-round matchups per site
Weeks beginning August 7, 14, 21, and 28: Second round matchups
Week beginning September 4: Regional semi-finals (both on same day per site)
Week beginning September 11: Regional finals
Week beginning September 18: Tournament semi-finals
Week beginning September 25: Tournament finals
Which means that, as the 125th regular season comes to a close, we’ll crown the Greatest Cardinal Moment at the same time. (I want to give a hat tip to the Viva El Birdos user Tyler’s Opinion, who independently started one of these over at VEB which I was not aware of when we started the planning for this.)
All right, so here’s the bracket. Now, a word before you start looking at this and wonder what the heck the above schedule means when you can go vote on the whole bracket right now: trying to find a great bracket program for this wasn’t easy for me. I really like this one and I was hoping we could use it to vote one round at a time, but it was not to be. So use the below to make your picks, to set the line as it were, so we can see if there are upsets coming. We’ll be doing podcasts and other things relating to this project so I hope you’ll enjoy it and have a chance to reconnect with some Cardinal history!
