Freese Frame: Denton's take on a magical night
John Denton
@JohnDenton555This story was excerpted from John Denton's Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
JUPITER, Fla. -- After being on the Cardinals beat for three-plus years, I finally got the pleasure of interviewing World Series hero, Spring Training guest instructor and giver of goosebumps to fans all over Cardinals Country, David Freese, this Thursday.
As fate would have it, it was also the three-year anniversary of the death of my father, Danny Denton, a man who loved Cardinals baseball more than his beautiful fishing boat and his immaculate garden, but just slightly less than his granddaughter, Abigail. He passed away two weeks after his sportswriter son with more than 20 years of covering the NBA switched to the St. Louis beat for MLB.com. Even though a big part of me is still gutted by his loss, I like to think he left this earth a happy man.
Just how Freese and ¡°Daddy¡± were intertwined caused my eyes to grow misty and the lump in my throat to swell bigger than a baseball. Fortunately, at the end of our interview, Freese indulged me for a couple of minutes to share my dad¡¯s story of the 2011 night when the hometown hero made St. Louis shake, Busch Stadium bounce and Cards fans cry.
A few months shy of 14 years later, Freese is still flooded by fans recounting their memories from that glorious 2011 World Series Game 6.
¡°The stories I hear about how that moment affected them or changed their relationships with their parents or their kids, it¡¯s neverending,¡± said Freese, who is a veteran mentor at Cards camp in Spring Training. ¡°That¡¯s so cool for me, hearing those stories. I don¡¯t know that there¡¯s a better place to do what we did than in St. Louis.¡±
My grandfather and father were lifelong St. Louis fans, so I saw hundreds of baseball games as a fan at Busch Stadium II and Busch III in my lifetime. I have a ¡°Picture Day¡± photo of Joe Torre -- muttonchop sideburns and all -- holding me as a baby. Roughly 90 percent of my childhood vacations were to St. Louis, I can recount Jack Buck¡¯s ¡°Go Crazy¡± call of Ozzie Smith¡¯s 1985 homer on demand and I have posed in front of The Gateway Arch approximately 9,855 times.
Oct. 27, 2011, was unlike any other night in the baseball fandom of Danny Denton. Through a friend with deep MLB ties, I scored two tickets to Game 6 of the 2011 World Series between the Cardinals and Rangers. I flew from Florida to Tennessee, and then drove from Memphis to St. Louis with my father. The night wasn¡¯t just another shared baseball moment; it exceeded my wildest dreams. Even now, it is the gift that keeps on giving.
Our Busch Stadium seats were 12 rows off the Rangers¡¯ dugout and in perfect alignment with third base -- the position played by Freese and the spot where he famously belly-flopped into the bag after tripling off the wall in the bottom of the ninth ¡ with two outs ¡ and two strikes ¡ and the Cardinals trailing by two. When his drive to right field briefly disappeared behind Texas star Nelson Cruz, we thought it had been caught and that the game was over.
¡°Me too,¡± Freese interjected.
As it turns out, the ball hit the base of the wall and caromed toward the infield, allowing the tying runs to score. A joyous Freese not only slid head-first into third, but he also popped up on his knees and stared into the crowd. It was as if he was looking right at my dad and I, and at all the fans around us who were flinging coats, hats and Budweiser beers into the air.
At that moment, my father said something to me that I can still vividly hear today: ¡°I¡¯ll be long gone, but if you live another 100 years, you¡¯ll never see another baseball game like this.¡± He would later joke that I separated his shoulder by smacking him on the arm during Freese¡¯s epic triple, when Lance Berkman tied the game again in the 10th and when Freese won it in the 11th with a walk-off homer. My dad and I embraced then, and again later that night when we heard Joe Buck¡¯s legendary nod to his father with his ¡°We will see you tomorrow night¡± call -- just as Jack had done in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
Of course, the Cards went on to win their 11th World Series crown one night later -- as my father and I were seated in the top row of Busch Stadium¡¯s upper deck -- but it felt somewhat anticlimactic after all the madness that had transpired in the "David Freese Game.¡± To this day, I wouldn¡¯t trade anything for the enduring memories from Oct. 27, 2011, with Freese authoring baseball history and a father and son sharing an epic baseball moment.
¡°See? Those are exactly the kinds of stories I love hearing about,¡± Freese said.