By: Joan Niesen
IT STARTED a few minutes after 11 p.m. on a wet July night in St. Louis. After a rain delay. After three extra innings of baseball. After a dismal second half of June that made even the most blindly faithful fans question whether these Cardinals were actually contenders.
It started with five pitches and a strikeout looking for Jeff Weaver, the brand-new St. Louis pitcher who’d just arrived in an afterthought of a trade with the Los Angeles Angels. He was in the batter’s box, to be clear. Weaver debuted as a warm body, a space-filler in the back of the lineup on a night that seemed as if it would never end.
I was there in the stands, 18 years old and wrapped in a plastic poncho through the rain and the tie and the waiting for something to happen. By the time Weaver stepped into the on-deck circle, I’d moved down from the nosebleeds to the section closest to the Cardinals’ dugout. It was the middle of the night, practically, and the ushers had abdicated. The only fans left were those of us crazy enough to believe that one game of 162 might matter.
Weaver got an ovation, whatever the sparse crowd could muster. He was up and down in an instant, and then there was more baseball — another half inning, then another. The real reason I remember that night so clearly came off Albert Pujols’s bat at 11:31 p.m.: a long home run to left field, a slow trot to first, a win worth waiting around for.
IT ENDED not even four months later, with another strikeout — this one swinging, this one with Weaver on the mound. It was the bottom of the eighth inning of Game 5 of the 2006 World Series, the clincher, which Weaver had started and was somehow still pitching. Fans waved “DREAM WEAVER” signs in the stands at Busch Stadium and chanted his name — chanted Jeff Weaver’s name! — and Carlos Guillén swung and missed on a ball just slightly outside.
Weaver made a fist with his cold, tired pitching hand and brought it to his mouth as he walked across the infield. An inning later, the Cardinals were world champions. Three months after that, he signed a deal with the Seattle Mariners.
SO WHY JEFF WEAVER? For the 2006 Cardinals, it was a low-risk question to have to answer. He came cheap. The Angels had designated him for assignment in June, after his little brother booted him from the rotation. The Cardinals needed a spark, and if they couldn’t find — or couldn’t afford — any top-tier help, then why not turn to a pitcher who’d tumbled from the top tier? At least he’d been there once.
Weaver was the Detroit Tigers’ first-round pick in 1998. He was their Opening Day starter in 2001 and 2002. In the 2003 offseason, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch polled readers asking which pitcher they’d like the team to sign: Weaver, Paul Byrd, Scott Erickson, Ismael Valdez, Chris Carpenter or none of the above. A full 49 percent of respondents wanted Weaver. (Just three percent chose Carpenter. Walt Jocketty’s job was safe.)
So he’d once been wanted, at least. And that was enough for those Cardinals, who’d dropped 10 of 11 games as June bled into July. The Houston Astros and Cincinnati Reds were biting at their heels, and then things mostly got worse, not better. Over the final 60 games of the regular season, the Cardinals racked up a record of 25-35, and they had just a half-game lead over Houston going into the final weekend of play. Weaver pitched his way to a 5.18 ERA, which was better than what he’d done with the Angels, but not much.
“ONCE WE GOT IN,” Weaver said, “it was like a new life.” That was 10 years later, when he was wedged between Jim Edmonds and Dan McLaughlin in the Fox Sports Midwest booth during a game. In those 10 years, the Cardinals had won another World Series while dancing on a razor’s edge and made the postseason six times. They’d become known for an almost sinister improbability — Cardinals Devil Magic, some called it — and Weaver had become just one of many out-of-nowhere names to make a difference. It was easy to forget how unexpected 2006 had been, how before that decade of magic, it had been easy to think rationally about this team. And rationally, Jeff Weaver in the playoffs made not one bit of sense.
That fall, he threw five innings of scoreless baseball against the Padres in the second game of the divisional round, which sent the Cardinals home from San Diego with a 2-0 series lead. He lost Game 1 of the NLCS despite allowing the New York Mets just two runs, and then he won Game 5. In Game 2 of the World Series, the Tigers got three runs off Weaver in a loss, and then there was Game 5, the clincher, and those eight innings of four-hit, two-run ball.
We remember what happened in the ninth, when the rookie closer and the baby-faced catcher embraced between the mound and home plate. We forget, unfairly, about Jeff Weaver.
“There was so much of a nucleus of that team over the years, and then you get a guy like this, who [was] kind of a little bit unheard of, even though he had a great career,” Edmonds said that day on the broadcast. “Without him, we don’t win.”
ONE GAME DID MATTER, it turned out. Remember July? Stee-rike three, back to the dugout, blond-haired whoever you are. I stuck around because back then, I’d lived so little life that every moment mattered a good deal more than they seem to now. I stuck around, blissfully unaware of how ugly the end of the season would get. Had the Cardinals lost that game as the clock ticked toward midnight, they’d have finished the final Sunday of the season just a half-game ahead of the Astros. They’d have been forced to play the following day, to make up a rainout against the San Francisco Giants, with a playoff berth on the line.
A baseball season is a complex chain reaction. One game result flips, and what happens to the rest? Zoom in: A different player pinch hits, and what becomes of Pujols’s home run? If a cast-off pitcher doesn’t slink back from the batter’s box that July night, what happens to the rest of our memories?
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
By: Joan Niesen
IT STARTED a few minutes after 11 p.m. on a wet July night in St. Louis. After a rain delay. After three extra innings of baseball. After a dismal second half of June that made even the most blindly faithful fans question whether these Cardinals were actually contenders.
It started with five pitches and a strikeout looking for Jeff Weaver, the brand-new St. Louis pitcher who’d just arrived in an afterthought of a trade with the Los Angeles Angels. He was in the batter’s box, to be clear. Weaver debuted as a warm body, a space-filler in the back of the lineup on a night that seemed as if it would never end.
I was there in the stands, 18 years old and wrapped in a plastic poncho through the rain and the tie and the waiting for something to happen. By the time Weaver stepped into the on-deck circle, I’d moved down from the nosebleeds to the section closest to the Cardinals’ dugout. It was the middle of the night, practically, and the ushers had abdicated. The only fans left were those of us crazy enough to believe that one game of 162 might matter.
Weaver got an ovation, whatever the sparse crowd could muster. He was up and down in an instant, and then there was more baseball — another half inning, then another. The real reason I remember that night so clearly came off Albert Pujols’s bat at 11:31 p.m.: a long home run to left field, a slow trot to first, a win worth waiting around for.
IT ENDED not even four months later, with another strikeout — this one swinging, this one with Weaver on the mound. It was the bottom of the eighth inning of Game 5 of the 2006 World Series, the clincher, which Weaver had started and was somehow still pitching. Fans waved “DREAM WEAVER” signs in the stands at Busch Stadium and chanted his name — chanted Jeff Weaver’s name! — and Carlos Guillén swung and missed on a ball just slightly outside.
Weaver made a fist with his cold, tired pitching hand and brought it to his mouth as he walked across the infield. An inning later, the Cardinals were world champions. Three months after that, he signed a deal with the Seattle Mariners.
SO WHY JEFF WEAVER? For the 2006 Cardinals, it was a low-risk question to have to answer. He came cheap. The Angels had designated him for assignment in June, after his little brother booted him from the rotation. The Cardinals needed a spark, and if they couldn’t find — or couldn’t afford — any top-tier help, then why not turn to a pitcher who’d tumbled from the top tier? At least he’d been there once.
Weaver was the Detroit Tigers’ first-round pick in 1998. He was their Opening Day starter in 2001 and 2002. In the 2003 offseason, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch polled readers asking which pitcher they’d like the team to sign: Weaver, Paul Byrd, Scott Erickson, Ismael Valdez, Chris Carpenter or none of the above. A full 49 percent of respondents wanted Weaver. (Just three percent chose Carpenter. Walt Jocketty’s job was safe.)
So he’d once been wanted, at least. And that was enough for those Cardinals, who’d dropped 10 of 11 games as June bled into July. The Houston Astros and Cincinnati Reds were biting at their heels, and then things mostly got worse, not better. Over the final 60 games of the regular season, the Cardinals racked up a record of 25-35, and they had just a half-game lead over Houston going into the final weekend of play. Weaver pitched his way to a 5.18 ERA, which was better than what he’d done with the Angels, but not much.
“ONCE WE GOT IN,” Weaver said, “it was like a new life.” That was 10 years later, when he was wedged between Jim Edmonds and Dan McLaughlin in the Fox Sports Midwest booth during a game. In those 10 years, the Cardinals had won another World Series while dancing on a razor’s edge and made the postseason six times. They’d become known for an almost sinister improbability — Cardinals Devil Magic, some called it — and Weaver had become just one of many out-of-nowhere names to make a difference. It was easy to forget how unexpected 2006 had been, how before that decade of magic, it had been easy to think rationally about this team. And rationally, Jeff Weaver in the playoffs made not one bit of sense.
That fall, he threw five innings of scoreless baseball against the Padres in the second game of the divisional round, which sent the Cardinals home from San Diego with a 2-0 series lead. He lost Game 1 of the NLCS despite allowing the New York Mets just two runs, and then he won Game 5. In Game 2 of the World Series, the Tigers got three runs off Weaver in a loss, and then there was Game 5, the clincher, and those eight innings of four-hit, two-run ball.
We remember what happened in the ninth, when the rookie closer and the baby-faced catcher embraced between the mound and home plate. We forget, unfairly, about Jeff Weaver.
“There was so much of a nucleus of that team over the years, and then you get a guy like this, who [was] kind of a little bit unheard of, even though he had a great career,” Edmonds said that day on the broadcast. “Without him, we don’t win.”
ONE GAME DID MATTER, it turned out. Remember July? Stee-rike three, back to the dugout, blond-haired whoever you are. I stuck around because back then, I’d lived so little life that every moment mattered a good deal more than they seem to now. I stuck around, blissfully unaware of how ugly the end of the season would get. Had the Cardinals lost that game as the clock ticked toward midnight, they’d have finished the final Sunday of the season just a half-game ahead of the Astros. They’d have been forced to play the following day, to make up a rainout against the San Francisco Giants, with a playoff berth on the line.
A baseball season is a complex chain reaction. One game result flips, and what happens to the rest? Zoom in: A different player pinch hits, and what becomes of Pujols’s home run? If a cast-off pitcher doesn’t slink back from the batter’s box that July night, what happens to the rest of our memories?
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.