And Where We Had Thought To Be Alone

Joan Niesen on finding Adam Wainwright and home thousands of miles away from St. Louis

By Joan Niesen

My first month of college, I was paralyzed with homesickness for St. Louis. I lived in a sardine can of a room with a girl who watched Nip/Tuck on maximum volume until 4 o’clock every morning. I missed the smell of the wet grass in my parents’ front yard on hot September mornings and the itchy waistband of my plaid uniform skirt, rolled twice and safety-pinned closed. I craved Ted Drewes and toasted ravioli and the Cardinals.

There was a group of us at Georgetown, freshmen from St. Louis, and we all agreed to watch the playoffs together that fall, for however long the Cardinals lasted. If they made the playoffs at all. You’ll forgive our doubts. It was 2006, and I was only 18 — away from home for the first time and helplessly watching my favorite team endure a historically grotesque September collapse. Our watch party plans (and a reprieve from Nip/Tuck) were only guaranteed on the last day of the season, when the division was settled with the Cardinals (barely) on top.

I watched the games crowded in tiny D.C. dorm rooms, four to an extra-long twin, baseball caps flipped inside out, collars popped, too scared to smuggle in beers. Some of us were friends, many of us just acquaintances, brought together because we were St. Louis kids trapped here, halfway across the country, while our baseball team made an improbable run to the World Series. During commercial breaks, we talked about home — about which games we’d gone to over the summer, which proms we’d been invited to, how much we missed our cars, how we wished we could order Imo’s. I could trick myself, sometimes, into thinking these other kids were as dejected as I was, that they needed the Cardinals as much as I did.

This was not a team anyone should’ve counted on — sub-.500 records in August and September, barely capable of winning on the road. Yadier Molina might as well have been swinging a toothpick at the plate. Mark Mulder’s shoulder turned out to be riddled with asbestos. Jason Isringhausen pitched like he was an Astros sleeper cell. I didn’t have much else to count on, though. Classes were hard and parties were overwhelming and this surfer-dude boy who lived on the floor above me kept flirting, and I had no idea what to say back. All my emotional currency, I paid to the Cardinals, these unlikely how-are-they-still-winners.

Among it all was this rookie with the beginnings of a beard, promoted to closer right around the time my parents drove me east in my dad’s Ford Taurus. He seemed good enough, but the bar was low and Adam Wainwright was tall, so of course he cleared it without breaking a sweat.

I could write you the play-by-play of that fateful at-bat, the last one of the NLCS, Wainwright against Carlos Beltran, he of 41 regular-season homers and 116 RBIs — but if you’re here reading, I bet you can still see it when you close your eyes. The ballpark full of fans draped in blue and orange, scowling and hoping and twisting their hard-edged faces, cursing their sloppy Lawnguyland curses. And there in the middle of it all, the rookie threw his curveball and the slugger stared, his knees buckled, and that was that, game over.

In a dorm room packed with St. Louis kids, I screamed and cried and begged someone to press rewind on the TiVo, to play it back again and again. Same thing 12 days later: Wainwright, Brandon Inge, three strikes, one last out, and they’d won it all. Did we know already that the rookie would become a Cardinals legend? Did I know then that I’d never stop missing home, but it would fade to the faintest, dullest ache?

Sports used to be about places: ramshackle stadiums and the corner where the potbellied ticket scalper’s always hollering, that one seat in the upper deck where the same old lady sits every Thursday with her Walkman tuned to the play-by-play. Players used to stick around long enough that when they left, you felt like you might have to move too — and so they were part of the place, too. They bought houses and opened mediocre steakhouses and did commercials for car dealerships.

Now, not so much. And that’s not all bad. Curt Flood’s activism and its ongoing ripple effects may be the single greatest athletic feat of all time. More power for players (and less for owners) is good and fair and leads to that mobility, that flightiness. And so we accept it. We retire jerseys, throw them out, burn them if we’re really pissed.

But not Adam Wainwright’s. He never lost his South Georgia drawl, but he became a St. Louisan. He cured my homesickness, and he became part of my home. What’s more unbelievable: the arc of that curveball to Beltran, the air behind Inge’s whiff or 18 seasons in the same jersey? Homesick girls grew up and got jobs and got married. Babies learned to walk and read and left for college, and still he was pitching, still for our team. It’s a hard place to quit, St. Louis.

Joan Niesen is a recovering sportswriter who’s worked at Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, the Athletic and the Denver Post. These days, she’s writing mostly about food at a variety of outlets, including her newsletter, Grazing, which is also here on Substack. She grew up in St. Louis and lives in Washington, D.C