How on earth could the fans of St. Louis not vote for Willie McGee as the center fielder of the St. Louis Cardinals all-time Busch Stadium team? With all due respect to current Cardinal Jim Edmonds (who got the nod), McGee should have been the choice.
During his stellar career, McGee was a National League Most Valuable Player, a two-time batting champion and a World Series hero and champion. Who could forget the two home runs in Milwaukee plus the wall-scaling catches that robbed the Brewers of two home runs? Edmonds has not been able to accomplish any of these feats while in St. Louis.
In addition, McGee is one of the most popular Cardinals of all time. We saw that first-hand with the lengthy ovation he received on Sunday at the final Busch Stadium ceremony. Cardinal Nation missed on that one.
The selections of Roger Maris in right field and Scott Rolen at third base over the likes of George Hendrick and Terry Pendleton were also questionable at best, especially the Maris vote in right field. Maris hit 15 home runs as a Cardinal while Hendrick hit 141 and helped the team win the 1982 World Championship.
While the voting was internet-driven, this is not the lone reason that McGee, Pendleton and Hendrick were snubbed. The Cardinals, like many Major League teams, do not attract black baseball fans to its park. Thus, any voting that goes on in a stadium or through a daily newspaper is skewed by the fact that few blacks participate. If the Cardinals had more black fans, the all-time Busch Stadium Team would have had more black players. Oh, and by the way, the thought of having six black players on the all-time team was way too much for die-hard racist Cardinals fans to stomach. So some good old-fashioned bigotry was involved as well.