In 2004 St Louis fans were very gracious to Red Sox fans and late in Game 4 the Cardinals opened the gates to the stadium to let Red Sox fans in to party. They were gracious again in 2013.
The only city they hate is Chicago and it has nothing to do with sports. The Chicago sewer system was designed not to put waste into Lake Michigan but use the Mississippi River instead.
How Chicago Reversed Its River: An Animated History | The Chicago Tour with Geoffrey Baer
When Sanitary District trustees and laborers broke open the last dam holding back the Chicago River, Sanitary District President William Boldenweck, who lost both of his parents to a cholera epidemic decades before, cried “Let ‘er go,” according to the
Chicago Daily News, calling his remark “the nearest approach to formality of the entire occasion.”
A few days later, according to the
Chicago Record, “Water that was actually blue in color and had blocks of ice of a transparent green hue floating in it…caused people who crossed bridges over the Chicago River…to stop and stare in amazement.”
St. Louis filed an injunction against the reversal on January 17. Their case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which decided in Chicago’s favor. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the Mississippi was, indeed, foul – but the putrid waters couldn’t be blamed entirely on Chicago, since several other cities much closer to St. Louis were also discharging their waste into the river.
Meanwhile, wrote Holmes, municipalities closer to Chicago were actually benefiting from the infusion of the fresh lake water into their rivers.
Holmes might have been a great jurist, but he was apparently not much of a scientist. As Libby Hill wrote in her book,
The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History, two biologists from the Illinois Natural History Survey documented conditions in the summer of 1911 along the Illinois River in Morris, Illinois, approximately 60 miles southwest of Chicago. There, they found, “The water…was grayish and sloppy, with foul, privy odors distinguishable in hot weather…Putrescent masses of soft, graying, or blackish, slimy matter, loosely held together by threads of fungi… were floating down the stream.”