in st louis expressing disgust at the cardinals will get you shunned and possibly beat up if there are bros around. if you dont follow their games then you will be shut out of 90% of work talk during the season. i know SO MANY people whos entire personality is centered solely around lifelong cardinal worship.
i do like cracker jacks tho
how about the blues?
You have to actually be dedicated to like the Blues. There are definitely complete Blues fanatics like there are Cardinals fanatics, but it's few and far between in comparison with vast number of Cards fans.
Typical Cardinals fans, aka most St Louisans, only pay attention to the Blues when they're doing well, and as soon as shit goes south, their fair-weathered fandom dies. As a Blues fan, it's grating to hear people freaking out over the Blues doing great who typically don't give a shit 99.9% of the time, and you know in a few weeks they'll be back to the "fuck the blues they suck cause they aren't world champions like the CARDS bro" mentality. You will literally hear no one talk about the Blues for weeks or months, then when they have a streak, people perk up and remember we actually have a hockey team. Then right back to talking shit about them.
Aside from a few diehard fans, most Cards fans I know just seem to like it for no real reason other than it's socially preferred. It's just what people do here. Come home from their mundane job, crack open a Bud Light and turn on the game. If they lived anywhere else, they'd probably never pay attention to baseball. But their friends are into it and they're boring Midwest folk with nothing better to talk about, other than the varied weather. You just buy the tees and the jackets because everybody wears Cards apparel here, and everybody talks about the players and the games, and everybody shits on the Cubs. If you score Cubs vs Cards tickets, you're definitely the coolest person out of all your FB friends. It just seems like one of those mindless things people watch and talk about and get into. For most people at least.
Us Blues fans (all 4 of us) are pretty much like Cubs fans.

and Cards fans are pretty much like Blackhawks fans, or even worse, Red Wings fans.