Amazing '80s Baseball Crowd Shots

I’ve been coping with baseball withdrawal by digging up old games on YouTube and elsewhere. I enjoyed watching my beloved Cardinals soundly beat the hated Cubs on a scorching 4th of July in 1982, especially because that was the year I became a fan, and the Cards went on to win the World Series. But more than the game, I was absolutely blown away by the crowd shots. One sequence was such a thing of beauty that I captured it in video:

These befeathered, mustachioed bleacher creatures could have been anybody walking down the street or hanging out in the park when I was a kid in south St. Louis. The guys are shirtless. The girls wear tube tops. Everybody’s shorts are too short. You can practically smell the potent gameday cocktail of pot and Budweiser. And look at how thin people are, probably because they all smoked 40 Kools a day.

Another weird thing: almost nobody is wearing red, the nearly-mandatory attire for Cardinals games today. In 1982, teams were just starting to figure out how much money you could make pushing merch.

I grabbed a few more screenshots, every one powerfully redolent of the sticky summers of my childhood. If and when I ever get to go to Busch Stadium again to see the Cards play, I’m going topless.