I sat down to watch tonight’s World Series game with my laptop fully intending to get WHYGAVS fired up again. There are two ideas for posts that have been kicking around in my head for a while (they involve payrolls and shifts, which shouldn’t be surprising) and I was determined to hammer one of them into something for the site tomorrow. Instead, the first thing that I saw waiting for me on Twitter was the news that the Cardinals’ young outfielder Oscar Taveras died in a car accident with his girlfriend Edilia Arvelo in the Dominican Republic today. I just kind of sat on my couch, staring at the computer screen for a while, unable to really even watch the World Series game that was on in front of me.
One of my absolute favorite parts of the Pirates returning to prominence is the burgeoning rivalry between the Pirates and Cardinals. Before 2013, the Pirates’ were everyone’s doormat. The long and sad Pirates/Brewers recent history created a sort of one-sided rivalry in the heads of us Pirate fans and probably in the players themselves, but I’m not sure that it ever existed for the Brewers. Rivalries are only one-sided when you suck. The last two years, though, the Pirates and Cardinals have played a lot of meaningful baseball games. The Cardinals have won a lot of them, to be sure, and while I’m not happy with that, the rivalry is part of what makes the Pirates feel like a real baseball team again for me.
Because of this and because the Cardinals are the gold standard in the NL Central, I’ve had an eye on Taveras for a while. On the one hand, the Cardinals’ pipeline of talent seems so endless that you want to roll your eyes every time another great player pulls on Cardinal red, but on the other, the idea of Taveras and McCutchen and Marte and Polanco duking it out for the NL Central over the next handful of years was a really exciting thought to me. Rivalries need great players, and it seemed like a sure thing that Taveras was going to be a key piece in this new Pirates/Cardinals rivalry for years to come. Now, there’s just an empty hole that stretches out into the future in the place in my head where I’d had him penciled in for years to come.
Of course, this is all sort of misses the larger point here. That terrible sense of emptiness that hit me tonight when thinking about the Cardinals without Taveras is absolutely nothing compared to what his teammates, family, friends, and the family and friends of his girlfriend are all feeling tonight. Life is fragile and sometimes incomprehensible; my condolences to the Cardinals, their fans, and most importantly, to the Taveras and Arvelo families.
