His Cardinals hadn’t won a World Series since he was in preschool. And there was Jim Mielke, wedged into the front row of the Busch Stadium bleachers, his right leg dangling over the right-field wall. He watched Bruce Sutter fire the final strike from upon the glorious green stage. And right then, Mielke broke the fourth wall by jumping over the outfield wall.
“I remember the drop down being farther that I thought it would be,” said Mielke, 60, who was 20 in 1982. “It was chaos, people running in every direction. And I’ve always been a souvenir guy. I pretty much knew when I hit the field, I wanted to get something.”
So, he got the field.
“I ran toward first base and tried to see if I could get the turf up a little bit,” Mielke said of the postgame pandemonium following the Cardinals’ World Series win in Game 7. “I couldn’t, but a guy not far from me, he had a big knife! Like a six-inch blade. So he came over and made a big slice — and then we could tear it up real easy. … I left with a big ol’ piece. I had to roll it up.”
For 40 years, these fabric fables of AstroTurf-stripping have become part of St. Louis culture. Everybody seems to know somebody — or is somebody — who rushed the field after Game 7. And as the team celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1982 World Series this weekend, with many of the gray-haired champions back in town, the stories of the field-storming fans captured the connection of the community and the Cardinals.
“It was a euphoric feeling — you’re moving so quick, your feet don’t even touch the ground,” said Chad Everett, whose brother Ken still has some of the AstroTurf. “This was my first World Series. I was already a Cardinals fan, but this is the one that put the hook in your soul, you know? It’s like — we’ve got you for life now.”
Thousands of fans flooded the field on Oct. 20, 1982, after the Cardinals defeated the Brewers to win their first World Series since 1967. Meg Burnes Connolly was 14 as her older brothers jumped the outfield wall first. But she was nervous, so her brothers built something of a human ladder to help her down. Doug Doggendorf looked at his best friend Tom Barton and “we didn’t say a word” — they both knew what the other was thinking, and that was to run onto the field. Ed Wright watched the cascade of fans over the outfield wall and it immediately reminded him of the “vintage film” from 1964, as Cardinals fans celebrated another Game 7 at home. Wright hopped onto the field and procured both some turf and dirt.
“Then I remember — the dogs came out,” said Wright, 72. “They convinced me quickly to move away from that area. … But I had the treasures in my pocket.”
It was a zoo out there — and that included animals such as dogs and police horses. According to an article in the next day’s Post-Dispatch, written by a young reporter named Bill McClellan, there were 20 dogs, 12 horses and 150 police officers on the scene for what was estimated as an on-field crowd of 5,000.
One of the 5,000 was Brad Tabor. He and his friends got tickets from a fellow named “Weezy.” That night, Tabor had a bunch of Busch at Busch. Later in the game, he turned and a buddy wondered how things would play out if the Brewers were to win. A friend pointed out: “We’re too drunk to lose.”
And when the Cardinals won, Tabor ended up on the field, where “everybody is dancing and shouting. People are ripping up field. All of a sudden, here comes a white German shepherd with a handler.”
Dog bites man.
“He didn’t bite me ferociously — it was like he was in a training thing and he put his mouth around my arm and held it,” said Tabor, who escaped the grasp … until a little later, when the same dog got him again! Tabor, however, wasn’t arrested. He soon followed fans out the wagon gate.
As for the Cardinals themselves, they celebrated near the pitcher’s mound, but then “we got off the field as fast as we could,” said Keith Hernandez, the first baseman who visited St. Louis this weekend.
Some of the fans had brief brushes with the players. Chad Everett recalled slapping infielder Mike Ramsey on the back. Dennis Shaw got some chaw — a bag of chewing tobacco that belonged to the game’s winning pitcher, Joaquin Andujar. And one fan actually snatched outfielder Lonnie Smith’s hat … until the fan was punched in the face by a security guard named Randy Karraker, who would go on to become a well-known sports radio host in St. Louis.
“I hope the statute of limitations is up,” said a chuckling Karraker, who promptly returned the hat to the World Series champion.
Over the years, the turf and dirt have become heirlooms. Mielke gifted pieces of his turf to family and close friends. Wright mailed a piece of turf to W.P. Kinsella, whose touching book “Shoeless Joe” came out in 1982 (the book became the movie “Field of Dreams”). A year later, Wright attended a Kinsella book signing.
“Do you still have my turf?” he asked.
“Are you Ed Wright?” a stunned Kinsella said.
Doggendorf still holds on to a little bottle of second-base dirt that he and best friend Barton got that night. They first met as Lutheran South High School lab partners. They even stood in each other’s weddings. Barton died in 2004.
“We were just about as close as two friends could be,” Doggendorf said.
Leslie Gibson McCarthy didn’t get to go to Game 7. She watched on a television from college in Quincy, Illinois. She was raised on Cardinals baseball, listening to Jack Buck on KMOX with her father and grandfather. As a kid in Florissant, she and her brothers took their mother’s homemade popcorn and rode the Redbird Express bus to Busch Stadium for games.
“When Bruce Sutter struck out Gorman Thomas, it was, honestly, one of the top-10 greatest moments of my life,” Gibson McCarthy said of the 1982 final out. “I’ll never forget watching it.”
A couple days later, she received a letter in the mail. It was from Beth Zang, one of her closest friends, who attended college in St. Louis. She opened the envelope and found a note — but there was oddly a bunch of dirt in there, too.
It was from the infield at Busch Stadium.
