My husband and I are both baseball fans--Steve moreso than I am, but as with so many pop culture things that stick with a person from youth, he connected with one World Series team in particular at an important time in his life. When he talks about those players and that team, he is sharing with me the histories and traditions of his people. It's beautiful and emotional because he has that connection with those memories.
And while Steve was still very much a Cleveland baseball fan during the mid-nineties, in the hey-day of Cleveland ball, those '95-'97 teams were the ones that I connected with (even though, sadly, they never actually won a World Series at the time). I remember the first time I shocked him with a baseball nugget of trivia when I told him that I would always believe there's an alternate universe somewhere that the strike-shortened season of 1994 actually ended with Cleveland winning the World Series. That was my team--Kenny Lofton, Albert Belle, Carlos "by land, by sea" Ba-er-ga!
But what brought those '90s baseball seasons into even sharper relief was my dad showing me how momentous those times were.
My dad wasn't born in the US, but as a kid growing up here, he started following Cleveland baseball "about '63 or '64". In over 30 years of being a fan, he'd barely seen a team with a winning record, much less a playoff contender. When my brother and I were small, my parents would pack us up in the car with a cooler filled with hotdogs, and we would have a picnic at old Municipal Stadium with 50 other folks spread out over 80,000 seats, and maybe somewhere in there a ballgame would break out. People would flip the wooden seats in the cavernous upper deck to spell out words like "Go Tribe". Our family and any friends with us would take up a whole row or two just for ourselves, because no one else was sitting nearby. When John Adams beat the drum, it ECHOED, and everyone would grab the seat of the nearest empty chair and slam it up and down with the drumming.
And maaaaan, giveaways back then. Not these bobbleheads that sorta-maybe look like the player if you squint enough. We went to one afternoon game where they gave away bats--real, regulation, full-sized, Louisville Slugger, wooden baseball bats. They were painted bright red, and had the team logo and sponsorships painted on them in white, and you can bet we played with them in the backyard for years. I think my dad still may have them in the garage somewhere, relics of the before-times, when winning baseball in Cleveland was still a dream.
In '95, the first time the team made it to the playoffs in a generation, my dad saved the newspapers, recorded the clinch celebrations on VHS, bought "Central Division Champion" t-shirts and treated them like Sunday best. It wasn't just a winning team. It was the first winning team in a generation.
The World Series in '95 was tough. The World Series in '97 was tougher. And since then, we've had a number of winning, even good, almost magical teams. '07 nearly broke my dad, when Cleveland lost to the Red Sox and he swore, "I'm never watching sports again!" Of course, he did.
Then we had 2016 and the rain delay game seven heartbreak. Then 2017 and The Streak, but it wasn't enough to get us through.
Now it's October 2024, and I'm getting ready to watch (or more likely not watch) a World Series that remained out of reach from the Guardians again. When I do that somersault math, I realize that I'm the same age my dad was for those mid-nineties teams. I feel a tiny bit of that cynicism creeping in, the cynicism where my dad seems to be permanently planted now whenever we talk baseball. But despite all his lifetime of watching losing teams, or watching winning teams that couldn't quite win that last game, I can still hear the hope there. It's a hope that didn't want to fully admit that all of us thought this was the year we could win the big trophy, a hope that good things can still happen, and that we'll get to see them happen soon.
Maybe I'm only talking about baseball now. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I want to see the Guardians win for me, but maybe I also want them to win, just a little bit more, for my dad. Maybe I want us all to believe that there's still hope, there's always hope. Not just for baseball.
