World Series: St. Louis Media Praises Giants Fans, Detroit Columnist Bemoans "Wimpy" Gourmets

Your ballpark amenities confuse and frighten me. I'm just a caveman.

In the latest iteration of a tired tradition, a newspaper from the country's heartland has dispatched a writer playing the part of "Unfrozen Caveman Sports Columnist" to San Francisco. Once arrived on our decadent shores, he's labeled our fans as a bunch of gourmet-munching softies, used coded language to decry us as "against the laws of nature," and, by implication, claimed that we have veered from the right and true path of how they do it where he's from.

Two years ago, that part was played by Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow, who hit San Francisco where it hurts when he wrote "I figured that by now someone here would have decided that baseball chalk isn't Earth-kind or that the game is overtly sexist or gender-role confining..." Apparently we need more of that kind of thinking, because here's Detroit Free Press scribe Jeff Seidel predicting a Tigers victory, because, "How the heck can you lose to a team where the fans can go to a game and stuff a teddy bear and then buy a cute little outfit? Can you imagine that in Detroit?"

With all due respect, it's not often the term "Can you imagine that in Detroit?" is used to describe something undesirable.

The descriptions of a largely imaginary and stereotypical San Francisco and its fans, meanwhile, stand in stark contrast to the maniacal ruffians admiringly described by St. Louis Cardinals media -- and even some players.

The folks on The Morning After radio show recounted a harrowing experience of giddy Giants fans nearly waylaying the Cardinals team bus. Says FOX Sports Midwest's Jim "the Cat" Hayes:

"For two blocks they were pounding on the side of the bus. There was a police escort, I didn't really look outside for fear of something breaking through the window. They were pounding on the bus for a couple of blocks."

Meanwhile, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Joe Strauss tweeted this:

When asked about the into-it crowd at AT&T Park, one Cards player recently said: "Maybe the best fans in baseball should take note."

This doesn't seem to jibe with the "wimpy" denizens of "the exotic food court that happens to have a baseball field," Seidel writes of, where "few San Francisco fans would ever lower themselves to eating a beer and a brat. Or even a coney."

Seidel chides the notion of drinking wine at the ballpark, even though a cursory glance at the concessions offered at Detroit's Comerica Park reveals that it includes wine, as well as daiquiris, and Asian and Mexican food -- plenty more than beer 'n' brats. There's also veggie dogs to be had. It's a strange argument to claim that Detroit is doing things right because their varied and gourmet food options are less varied and gourmet than San Francisco's.

There's only so much nitpicking a column like Seidel's can take. Suffice to say that if his ideal baseball experience involves belligerent fans eating bad food while sitting in a symmetrical stadium located within a vast industrial slum during foul weather -- well, he'd have loved Candlestick Park.   

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