Stan, baseball, and my dad.

So last night I was lying on the couch getting ready to watch the Iowa basketball game, thinking they had a shot to win, it being Chris Street Memorial Night as well. I grabbed my phone to check twitter one last time. There were a couple tweets, and I looked at the first one, then the second. Slowly, it hit me what they were telling me.

"Mom? Dad? Stan died." I didn't have to give a last name. There is only one Stan that counts. My mom said "oh, my" and went to text my sister with the news. My dad immediatly began asking me who on twitter was saying it-I asume he was hoping it wasn't true. I explained that Jenifer Langosh, the Cardinals beat writer for MLB, and Derrek Gould, the St Louis Post Dispatch head Cardinal writer had both tweeted that team had just announced it.

Still my dad started flipping between ESPN and MLB network until he saw the scroll he was looking for "Breaking News, St Louis Cardinals Legend Stan Musial passes away today at the age of 92." In the space of ten minutes, the world had changed forever.

My dad is was and always will be a Cards fan. He raised my sister and me Cards fans-my sister is currently dating a Cubs fan, but she's working on converting him as there is no way she'd ever root for any other team, much less the Cubs.

My dad's love story with the Cardinals began in 1964, he was 7. His uncle, who is only a few years older than him, was rooting for the Yankees in the World Series that year, so dad decided he was going to root for the other team-The St Louis Cardinals. And during that world series he fell madly in love with Bob Gibson, and that was that, dad was a Cardinal fan.

When instead of having boys he ended up with two girls, he still raised us to be Cardinal fans. I can score a game, I sometimes count retired numbers when I can't sleep. 

And when you are a Cardinal fan there is one lesson you can't help but learn. That lesson is simple math. Stan Musial > everyone else. No matter what a Yankee tells you about DiMaggio or a Sox fan about Williams, there is only one Perfect Warrior, one Perfect Knight. And no matter what happens, even now-There is, was, and always will be only one Man.