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It’s March 30th.

In exactly five days, the Cardinals will play their first game of 2012 and effectively begin defending their reign as baseball’s top dog. To prepare you (and ourselves) for the seasonal array of hooligans, brutes and overly intoxicated meat heads, we’re rummaging through our collection of fan photos and presenting one a day until Opening Day.

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Last season, Cardinals fans saw some hefty numbers on the backs of their home team’s uniforms.  It’s nature of the beast, we suppose.  The Cardinals were struck with injuries throughout the entirety of 2011 and the season saw an emergence of talent from within the organization.  That behavior typically lends itself to high jersey numbers.

Naturally, we wondered how high our personal jersey collection reaches.  Above So Taguchi’s #99?  Of course.  But, how high?  We scoured our esteemed collection of fan pictures to discover the highest (and lowest) numbers we’ve caught on camera.

THE HIGHEST JERSEY NUMBER:

Sure, there were some high numbers on the Cardinals roster last season…but we can do better than the numbers/players that appeared on one of Tony La Russa’s lineup cards.

For a big number, we resort to a big person.

This may effect our street-cred, but we have no idea what this jersey means.  The “Old School” makes sense when paired with the powder blue Cardinals threads, but “589″?  It’s definitely not a St. Louis area code.  In fact, it’s no area code in the United States.

We’re trying hard to refrain from a weight joke here, but we’re running out of options.

THE LOWEST JERSEY NUMBER:

We have plenty of #1 Cardinals jerseys in our collection: Ozzie Smith and Gary Templeton on the serious side…and “HO” and “DAD“, on the not-so-serious side.  We’ve also gone sub-one with our infamous LA RUSSA .093 jersey.

But we can do better.

Zero.  Double zero, in fact.

We’re not sure what “GHOST MAN” means or why he would choose #00.  “GOCRAZYFOLKS” is obviously a reference to Jack Buck, but again, we’re unsure why #00 is the number of choice.

Anyone have a jersey that is lower than 0?  Is that even possible?  A negative jersey number would be a first, even for our distinguished collection of fan photos.