I Fear the Cardinals of St. Louis

Go Tigers! Not having had cable TV for years, I don’t get to watch World Series games much any more, and I doubt that I’ll get a chance to see any of this series, what with a busy week coming up, but nonetheless my thoughts & hopes are with Detroit. (Pretty grim start, losing badly to the Cardinals last night, but hey, they lost the first game of the Division Series to the hated Yankees, too, and that all turned out just fine.)

The Tigers-Cards matchup echoes the 1968 World Series, which the media has been quick to play up. So we’ll mark the cosmic recurrence with Barbara Manning’s tribute to pitcher Denny McLain, who won 31 games for the Tigers in that 1968 season but later disgraced himself. As the song goes, “He was the last man to win 30 games / Now he hangs his head in the Hall of Shame.”

• SF Seals, “The Ballad of Denny McLain”

Barbara Manning’s mid-1990s band was the San Francisco Seals, named of course after the farm team from which Joe DiMaggio came. This song is from the three-song Baseball Trilogy EP, which also included a crackerjack cover of “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” and a Manning original, “Dock Ellis,” about the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who threw a no-hitter while tripping on acid (info here). Baseball Trilogy is out of print, alas, but you can buy other Manning stuff here.