St. Louis Cardinals: Please stop being the behavior police!

Here’s a New Year’s Resolution for the St. Louis Cardinals: don’t make such a fuss when an opponent shows off. Focus on yourselves.

The St. Louis Cardinals are viewed by many outsiders as a grumpy old buzzard of a ballclub that looks down its beak at the young punks who strut their stuff and “don’t respect the game.” The Redbirds have been the Miss Manners of baseball for too long. It’s time to stop scolding. It’s time to stop hollering, “Get off my lawn!” It’s time to get over it.

“The Cardinal Way isn’t playing the right way, it’s making a big (bleeping) deal out of playing the right way,” Chris Thompson of Deadspin declared in 2017. Playing heads-up, no-nonsense, “Cardinal” baseball is one thing, but insisting that opponents perform with proper decorum is going too far. The game has changed.

Lots of players, particularly Latino players, play the game with panache. There’s no need to molt with rage when the Braves’ Ronald Acuña Jr. watches a 455-foot home run in the NLDS and does a dance around third base. That’s how some players roll. Don’t sweat it.

After the Acuña Jr. homer, Carlos Martinez complained, “I wanted him to respect the game and respect me as a veteran player.” Bill Baer of NBCsports.com wrote in October that the Cardinals have run the phrase “play the game the right way” “into the ground so hard it could only be used ironically.” Sam Fortier of the Washington Post wrote that the Redbirds “have already established themselves as this postseason’s anti-showboat task force.”

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That wasn’t the Cards’ first indignant October. In 2013, some St. Louis fans and one scribe, Bob Nightengale of USA Today, cried foul when the Dodgers’ Adrian Gonzalez flipped his bat and wiggled his fingers by his ears in an apparent Mickey Mouse imitation after hitting an NLCS homer. Nightengale’s column, headlined “Cards tired of Dodgers’ Disneyland antics,” also blasted Yasiel Puig for arguing a called third strike and refusing to leave the batter’s box.

Nightengale wrote that the more somber Cardinals were feeling “the responsibility of upholding tradition” for “old-time baseball.”

The Cards aren’t the only ones decrying the decay of baseball etiquette. In March of 2016, Hall of Famer Goose Gossage went off on Toronto’s José Bautista, whom he called “a (bleeping) disgrace to the game” for flipping his bat after a home run in the 2015 ALDS. Gossage, calling himself an “old-school guy,” later explained, “I was passed the torch about a certain way to act. Flipping the bat isn’t part of that.”

Gossage’s screed, which included an assault on metrics-obsessed “nerds” for turning baseball into a “joke,” belongs with the “Old Ballplayers Never Die” inclusions in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.

Example one: In 1916, ex-player Bill Joyce said, “Baseball today is not what it should be… It makes me weep to think of the men of the old days who played the game and the boys of today. It’s positively a shame, and they are getting big money for it, too.” Example two: In 1937, ex-Giants pitcher Hooks Wiltse said, “The boys don’t take the game as seriously as we used to. I remember in my day we ate, slept and lived baseball. Swing music and the automobile have changed the temperament of youth.”

Historians call these “declension narratives,” and we’ve all heard them, often from parents or grandparents. It’s the insistence that “nothing is as good as it used to be;” that people were tougher, braver and altogether better in the old days; that the modern world is heaving with shysters and punks and shoddy merchandise.

If you want to broadcast the message that baseball today is swirling in the toilet because some players flip their bats, go ahead. But it will make you a cliché and it will ignore baseball history. Does anyone think that Ronald Acuña Jr or José Bautista invented on-field showmanship? Do they think the game was always played with the solemnity of a Catholic Mass?

There have always been baseball showboats. In 1906, the Tigers’ Germany Schaefer hit a game-winning home run and slid into every base. Casey Stengel the player twice came to the plate, doffed his cap, and released a sparrow. Babe Ruth pointed to the outfield, possibly “calling his shot,” before hitting a 1932 World Series home run. Satchel Paige once intentionally walked the bases loaded in barnstorming game, told his fielders to sit down, and then struck out the side. Mark Fidrych talked to the baseball before throwing a pitch.

The Cards’ own Al Hrabosky stomped behind the mound, turning his back to the batter in a show of psyching himself up. Bryan Zarpentine in theversed.com wrote that “opposing batters despised such histrionics from the Mad Hungarian.”

Were any of these figures “playing the game the right way?”

In 2016, Bryce Harper told ESPN The Magazine, “If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound, I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun.”

You may disagree about what makes baseball “fun,” but it certainly puts a damper on the joy-meter when an offended pitcher fires a fastball at a celebrator’s ribs. “Baseball players are the most macho, remorseless, vengeful people I’ve ever met,” Tim Kurkjian wrote in a 2013 espn.com story. Some might relish the sight of aggrieved athletes trying to hurt each other, but such antics don’t scream, “Oh, how delightful!”

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The Cardinals need to banish their no-fun-allowed scowls and appreciate the approach of the late José Lima. The flamboyant Dominican hurler once said, “Baseball is a short career, and I’m going to enjoy every single day. Everybody should. If you don’t like what I do, take me deep. You can dance around every base if you want. I don’t mind.”

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