The Pecan Park Eagle

“I don’t really share this tree limb with any cardinal that looks a lot like me. If you land here and you want to stay, you got to be grey. – I can handle that one – all day.”

Early one morning, back in May 2003, I was getting ready to drive from Houston to St. Louis for the annual St. Louis Browns Alumni Reunion Party when I stepped out in the backyard to check things out one more time before I took off.

The strangest thing then happened.

A fiery red cardinal landed in the yard on the limb of our big elm tree. I stopped in my tracks to just admire him. I love cardinals, but that’s when things turned spooky. Another red male cardinal landed on the same limb, but facing the first, from a distance of no more than eight to ten inches.

I wanted to yell, “Wait! Can you guys hold that pose while I run inside and get my camera?”

Didn’t happen. When two male cardinals really land in a tree limb face-off, it’s no St. Louis baseball photo-op. It’s a territorial thing, as it was this time, with two flyaways, and one cardinal chasing the other. But it sure would have made for a great photographic keepsake to go with the one I maintain in my mind.

The incident reminds me of the time in early 1953 when the rumor floated in Houston that those other red birds, the St. Louis Cardinals of the baseball world, were thinking about moving here as the solution to their problems at home. If you remember, 1953 was the year when everything came to a head in St. Louis as a two-club major league town. The Browns and Cardinals were both losing games and gate and, to make it worse, Cardinals owner Fred Saigh was facing federal penitentiary time for income tax evasion. A move or sale to Houston or Houston interests seemed like a plausible option. The local AA Houston Buffs were even starting to out-draw the Browns too whenever the former fielded a winning team.

Houston turned out to be a “bait and switch” threat to the City of St. Louis that settled out with brewer August Busch purchasing the Cardinals to keep them at home and, later that year, Browns owner Bill Veeck selling his club to Baltimore interests for a 1954 move and morph transition into the Orioles.

What If … the 1953 rumors about Houston had proven true and the NL club had then opened the 1954 season as the Houston Cardinals and had succeeded locally as such through the 2012 season!

Like all things in the “fork in the road option in life” that wasn’t taken, we can only know a few things, for sure, about the impact of choosing an alternate reality, and these are the countable items that suddenly have a cap because of the change. Best example: The St. Louis Cardinals’ collection of World Series titles would have capped at nine pennants and six World Series titles, with the latter as follows in bold type: 1926, 1928, 1930, 1931, 1934, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1946.

The move also would have cost St. Louis the five additional World Series titles they have picked up since 1954. Would the Houston Cardinals fared as well from 1954 through 2012? There’s no way to know.

We also don’t know how long HOF Great Stan Musial would have played, but, given his 1963 actual last season, he possibly could have played ten years for Houston.

We could do this all day and be well on our way to forever.

HOF Great Bob Gibson didn’t actually sign with the Cardinals until 1957. Would he even have been around to sign with the 1957 Houston Cardinals? Who knows? Maybe Bob would have pursued a career in the NBA. He was “pretty good” at that sport too. (With our Houston luck, Gibson might have signed with the Yankees.)

There would have been no Houston Colt .45’s. No Astros. No 2005 Astros-White Sox World Series. And, hey? Would there even have been an “Astrodome”? It’s not likely, not by that name, anyway. There could have been a domed stadium built for baseball, somewhere, but t’s highly improbable “they” would have called it “The Astrodome.”

Would there have been a Judge Roy Hofheinz in the future of the Houston Cardinals? We’ll never know, but former Buffs owner Marty Marion and his friends might have had the best ownership shot at purchasing the “Houston Cardinals” from the Saigh interests.

It’s probable there never would have been a John McMullen, Drayton McLane, or Jim Crane in the ownership lineage because those things hang on such perishable factors over brief moments in time, but, who knows?

That also means it’s unlikely that the Houston Cardinals would be moving to the American League in 2013 and, with a little help from serendipity, maybe there never would have been a Baseball Commissioner named Bud Selig!