Don't Take the World Serious

Party like it’s 1948

FROM the standpoint of The Lose, there are two dream World Series matchups. One would be the Washington Nationals against the Seattle Mariners, because it would be the first time both clubs had reached the Fall Classic. And the other? The Chicago Cubs vs. the Cleveland Indians – two franchises who’ve contributed greatly to the definition of modern failure in American sports. And now that the Indians have done away with the Blue Jays in the ALCS, and the Cubs taken care of the Dodgers in the NLCS, that second matchup has now come to fruition.

Be still my foolish heart.

I have a strange reason for my rooting interest in this World Series, one not based in any sort of reality at all, but entirely based upon a work of fiction – a work of fiction by me. In this novel that I published back in 2014, the main character is from Cleveland and he’s a big Indians fan. There is a scene in the book that takes place during a game between the Indians and the A’s on Aug. 16, 2013 at the Oakland Coliseum. The book was written intending for it to be happening in real time during the summer and fall of 2013, and a major event had occurred in the story on Aug. 15, and going to the Indians game the day after was the perfect way to launch the next phase of the plot. Later on in the story, I also folded in a Cavs game and a football game between Michigan and the Akron Zips, whom I had no idea would playing when I started writing this story about a guy from Cleveland who went to Akron and who has a sister who went to Michigan. (So, of course, they needed to wager on that game.) Three chapters of the book take place in Cleveland, and in keeping with my real time plot line, I made sure that, when he is sitting in a bar and his brother is watching a Browns preview show on the TV that I got the upcoming opponent correct, which was the Chiefs.

And, of course, I have written about Cleveland on this blog before.

So yeah, I am down with Cleveland. I am so down with Cleveland that the idea of Cleveland winning a championship softened considerably the blow of the Golden State Warriors losing the NBA Finals this past summer. But it also bears pointing out that, in this fictional world of mine which stars a loyal Cleveland Indians fan, that particular fan also has made a conscious choice not to wear anything with a Chief Wahoo logo on it. His particularly peculiar ethnicity is something of a running gag throughout the novel – no one really knows his true ethnicity, and he delights in the fact that no one can ever figure out where the hell he came from – and someone whose ethnicity is impossible to define also doesn’t like the club’s defining of an ethnicity using an awful caricature. And it pisses me off, because this is a franchise whose contributions to breaking the color barrier in baseball haven’t really gotten enough play: the Dodgers broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson in 1947, but the Indians took that barrier and stomped all over it once and for all by winning a World Series the following season with Larry Doby in the outfield and Satchel Paige in the bullpen, and as often happens in sports, shifts in thinking often change when it becomes you can no longer compete and no longer win – perhaps it’s not the right reason for change, but the end result is nonetheless correct. So the Indians winning a World Series in 1948 with black players on the team – in what also happened to be the first World Series televised by a national network – was actually a huge deal, but then the franchise blunts this legacy almost entirely by continuing to trot out this ghastly logo. Get rid of that damn thing already.

So now we’ve got the Indians in the World Series in a year where everything seems to be going Cleveland’s way, but of course it can’t all work out because this is Cleveland we’re talking about, after all. Tuesday was going to be a festive day in Cleveland already, since it’s opening day of the NBA season and the Cavs get their rings and get to hoist a championship banner into the rafter of The Q, but instead of getting to focus all of the attention on that, now you also have Game 1 of the World Series going on at the same time, so that attention naturally gets divided, and all the while you also have the Cleveland Browns limping towards an 0-16 season, having already used 6 QBs while going about confirming its status as the worst franchise in all of North American professional sports. It can never be too good in Cleveland. There is always a caveat.

And about those Cubs, who’ve now reached the World Series for the first time since 1945 and haven’t won the damn thing in 108 years. I’ve always had something of a disdain for the Cubs, who are a uniquely North American sporting phenomenon in that the franchise has spent much of those 108 years actively marketing and monetizing failure. No team fails as successfully as the Cubs do. Historically, attendance has increased in seasons when the team’s performance has plummeted. The entire narrative of the franchise has been that of a team that is “cursed,” with Bartman and the billy goat and all of that other nonsense, when in reality, they were generally terrible for most of those 108 years and ownership was perfectly happy with that. From a business standpoint, it makes twisted sense: if the team is wildly profitable regardless of on-field results, then why bother to invest in the product?

And there has always been this collective sense of masochism among the Cubs faithful. It was explained to me by a native Chicagoan, in the aftermath of the White Sox winning the World Series, that a lot of Cubs fans she knew had started out being Sox fans because the Sox were generally good, but had switched allegiances to the Cubs when they got older and more affluent and moved uptown. The chance to go to Wrigley for a game was an opportunity to channel their inner Rimbaud and revel in their angst while also trying to pick up chicks, as the atmosphere was something akin to a frat party booze cruise. Winning or losing didn’t seem to actually matter. In fact, winning could often be seen to be getting in the way. Were this Europe, of course, the Cubs would’ve been relegated decades ago and would be trawling about the lower leagues in irrelevance; instead, the Cubs are a multi-billion dollar bonanza.

In ripping the Cubs, of course, I must admit that I was really impressed by the reaction of the Cubs fans to their team reaching the World Series for the first time since 1945. There was a pervasive and remarkable sense of awe about it, an enormous sense of relief. Having been here in San Francisco for the end of a couple of enormous droughts – the Giants winning a World Series for the first time in 56 years, and the Warriors for the first time in 40 – that sense of relief was palpable and pervasive in both cases, a feeling that’s hard to describe and almost certainly impossible to replicate. It really does feel like a collective reward for a community having stuck it out for so long.

Long-suffering fans, of course, tend to develop appropriately good senses of humor about it all, and so you have to make it a point to mock them whenever possible. I once penned lyrics for a song called Cleveland mocking the Indians and set to the tune of Paul Simon’s Graceland. A particularly absurd tug-of-war developed, meanwhile, during the famous McGwire vs. Sosa home run chase, since we had some Cubs fans in the newsroom of The Santa Fe New Mexican, which is where I was working at the time, and we would rotate assignments nightly and you could rest assured that any time the Chicagoan was working the sports desk you’d have a giant photo of Sammy Sosa in the newspaper the next day – which actually got somewhat irritating and was soon widely ridiculed by the other staffers, one of whom was from St. Louis and always made a point of saying “the 9-time World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals” in the presence of the Cubs fans. Whenever I was on the sports desk, I’d try to get Ken Griffey Jr. in the paper – if you remember, he was in that home run chase for a large part of the season as well – and we finally reached the point of annoyance with these Cubs fans where the ultimate in newsroom chicanery came into play, which is to mock someone in-house by printing out a fake page: one with a huge picture of Swingin’ Sammy Sosa swingin’ for the fences with the headline SOSA: ‘I SPIT ON BABE RUTH’S GRAVE.’ If you scrolled through old copies from those days of mine at The New Mexican, you might find more than a few photo captions written in the form of haikus …

It’s somewhat unfortunate, of course, that one fan base’s collective lifelong angst is going to be relieved at the expense of another’s. The proper resolution for this series, it would seem, would be for the series to be tied 3-3 and have Game 7 called off because of the early onset of winter in Cleveland, making the baseball impossible due to heavy ice and snow settling in for months. If you think that scenario is utterly ridiculous, consider that Game 4 of the 1988 Stanley Cup finals between the Edmonton Oilers and Boston Bruins was never completed. Or maybe Game 7 will just never end. They’ll play for days on end, and Andrew Miller will throw 53 innings of scoreless relief and strike 155 batters out in the process. The late author Bill Kinsella (who was a friend to many of us in the scrabble community) has a marvelous novel entitled The Iowa Baseball Confederacy about a game involving the Chicago Cubs in the early 20th century that lasts for more than 2,000 innings. When you fail as frequently as these two teams, it just lends itself to letting the imagination run wild. Oh, and speaking again of fiction and the imagination, everyone should go back rewatch the film Major League, which has become a vital cog in the Cleveland faithful’s identity over time and which, interestingly, was given a 1-man tribute in 2014, on the 25th anniversary of its release, by David Ross, who will be catching in this series for … the Cubs … it just gets better and better ...

And, of course, the fans of whichever side wins will no longer be cute and charming and quaint. They’ll instantly become annoying and irritating and “the worst.” We kill our idols in sports, of course, and as soon as the downtrodden become powerful, they become the enemy. I’ve seen this first-hand here in San Francisco. I’ve seen this one a few times online: “Giants fans are THE WORST.” Yeah, right, like you gave two shits about Giants fans prior to 2010. Warriors hate is even more wonderful. One of my favorite tweeters routinely rounds up and retweets an assortment of scathing critiques of the Warriors and their fans, which is totally awesome, since you would have never heard that spoken during the 40 years prior to the Warriors winning an NBA title, during which time the franchise was something of a dumpster fire. Becoming a scourge because your team is successful is, on balance, a nice problem to have.

I’m going to root for the Indians, but not that fervently. In truth, I don’t really care that much who wins the World Series, and in a lot of ways, I’m not really sure that it matters. In the end, I think that baseball, as a whole, wins out in this particular World Series, because this series is very much a celebration of the loyalty of longstanding fandom. The role of the fans is very easy to downplay in the big business of sports, particularly as the revenue emphasis has shifted away from gate receipts and towards TV money, but if the fans didn’t exist, then ultimately neither would the games themselves. The players themselves have no connections whatsoever to Billy Goat curses or to Joe Table blowing the save in Game 7 against the Marlins. To the players, all of that stuff is ancient history, and it has nothing to do with them. Players come and go over time, but the fans are constant and, as such, the historical narrative of the franchise is a constant as well. This is gonna be fun. Sports are fun, they bring people together and are joyful and are best when not taken too seriously. The sun will, in fact, rise over Chicago or Cleveland the day after the World Series is over, and at that point, you can start building up the optimism again. There’s always next year, of course, and pitchers and catchers will be reporting for spring training sooner than you realize.