Rooting against the Cardinals is usually pretty futile.
They're the one team that somehow, some way seems to do everything right. They won the World Series in 2011 after David Freese hit everything and Texas decided they didn't actually want to win. They then let Albert Pujols walk in free agency, but recovered easily from letting one of the best hitters ever walk in free agency and drafted future (and probably current) phenom Michael Wacha with the compensatory pick. That's just the last three years. At this point, St. Louis's constant and eerily consistent success seems to be just as inevitable as death and taxes.
The Cubs, on the other hand, are dreadful. I've said before that it took me a little while to settle on being a Chicago fan, and that happened to come after their great 2003 run. The only successful teams I've really ever rooted for were in '07 and '08, and I didn't really know what was going on.1 The Cubs I know fell apart because all their players were old and they didn't have a good farm system. The Cubs I know are basically the opposite of the Cardinals.
I came into the postseason having given up on rooting against St. Louis. I tried when they won in 2011, and I tried last year when they came back from being down 6-0 against the Nationals in the series clincher. This year, I just didn't have the willpower. I didn't care when they beat the Pirates in the Wild Card, and while I was rooting for Clayton Kershaw, I didn't really care when they beat the Dodgers in the NLCS. After they took game three, I figured another World Series would be inevitable and I would just avoid watching as much MLB Network in the offseason.
Then, when Boston's Koji Uehara picked off Kolten Wong2 to win game 4 and Jon Lester pitched his second gem of the series to win game 5, I got a little excited. The notion that the Cardinals were somehow flawed was an extremely gratifying feeling. Ultimately, Shane Victorino decided to eat some planets for dinner, John Lackey gritted his way through 6 2/3 innings of one-run ball, and the series was over.
I don't hate the Cardinals. The Cubs aren't good enough and I don't have the energy. For that one series though, I was finally happy to be rooting against them. The fact that they lost after catching an endless number of breaks over the course of the season somehow made them appear just like everybody else. It didn't matter that St. Louis was good enough to have the best record in the NL and made the World Series while the Cubs lost another 96 games and tied for the fourth worst record in the majors. For right now, the Cardinals are tied with the Cubs and the other 27 teams for second place, and that's just fine with me.
1. Not to mention the fact that they got swept out of the playoffs both years because of course they did. ↩
2. Another of the seemingly endless St. Louis cache of young, exciting talent. God they're annoying ↩
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