'FergusonOctober' and baseball come together, keep their distance
ST. LOUIS – Mid-day here, a young man, white, trudged up Washington Avenue away from Busch Stadium. He appeared somewhat unstable, muttering something under his breath and wearing clothes he might've worn for a few days.
"Know your enemies!" he shouted suddenly.
The street was empty but for a few souls walking the opposite direction. The Cardinals wouldn't play until the evening. Lunch hour had passed. Given a pair of what's been described as "running gun battles" in the streets here in recent days, along with the running protests of the August police shooting in nearby Ferguson and the discontent over yet another police shooting nearer still, the place has been a little jumpy.
"FergusonOctober" is the name of the movement. At the park near Busch Stadium and across the street from Shannon's restaurant, protestors on Saturday afternoon assembled in the name of Michael Brown, the young man killed in Ferguson two months ago. The local paper carried a schedule of events for the weekend rallies, concluding Monday with what it called, "Unspecified civil disobedience: a 'series of actions' in Ferguson and St. Louis."
Amidst the real life – the real courage and the real heartbreak, the real heroes and villains – the Cardinals hosted the San Francisco Giants in the first game of the National League championship series. Game 2 would be Sunday night.
And on a quiet block in an unsure city, he yelled it again, "Know your enemies!", and his words rattled against the old gray buildings, echoing against the temporary quiet. It must've sounded good to him, authoritative, something he'd heard earlier on his walk, perhaps, maybe in the park across from Shannon's from the business end of a bullhorn, because the words kept finding a place with him.
Ten minutes before Game 1, at the corner of 8th and Clark, there would be no disobedience, civil or otherwise. There'd be lines for Nathan's hot dogs and a man playing his trumpet for dollar bills, another drumming overturned Tupperware for his share. Fifteen or so policemen stood at the front entrance of Busch Stadium, a few casting an occasional glance at the two gentlemen across the street holding signs, one reading, "Wives Are to Obey Their Husbands," the other, "If You Love This World You Hate God." Nobody gave them much mind. The man on the Ballpark Village outdoor stage did lead a loud chant, the people joining, "Yadi! Yadi! Yadi!" They drank their Bud Lights.
People are unhappy here, it's true. Baseball wouldn't solve that, any more than it might cause it. Earlier Saturday, more than a thousand folks marched in downtown St. Louis, singing, "We are Mike Brown." They chanted things like, "No justice, no peace." They mourned Brown and they mourned Vonderrit Myers Jr., killed Wednesday by an officer in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis.
In a separate world, they lined a field for baseball.
Five days before, during the division series here, the people going to a ballgame and the people who needed to be heard merged outside the ballpark. It was not pretty and it was not productive, and the lines generally were drawn racially, and it perhaps put St. Louis in its proper place in that moment in a difficult time.
Nobody wanted to be there, except, perhaps, for the man with the Ferguson cop's name scrawled across his back. And yet, there they were. And there we are.
Where baseball fits, exactly, in this city at this hour is fluid. Distraction? Not to some. Unifier? Hard to say. Didn't look like it this week. Unimportant? Probably, to plenty.
"We've got a lot of hurt that's happened in the past all over our country," Cardinals manager Mike Matheny said, "and baseball seems to be part of that healing process. And we have some hurt in our community right now and hopefully this playoff baseball, and baseball in general, can help that healing process here as well."
The perimeter of Busch Stadium on Saturday night was peaceful, as of game time. Couples posed in front of the Enos Slaughter statue. Buddies waited in beer lines. An older man, his granddaughter's hand in his, hustled along the sidewalk before slowing to ask her, "How're those little legs doing?"
"Fine," the little girl said, eager to see what was inside the huge brick building ahead of her.
The man grinned and they continued ahead, into the crowds, into the ballgame, where, if nothing else, they'd know their friends.
