Fandom, Failure, and Despair: An Introspective Look at Professional Baseball in Cleveland

Long ago, when mankind was young and wit was fresh, if someone in an audience called out, "Say something funny," Mort Sahl, the comic, would say: "John Foster Dulles." Today's last-gasp, laugh-getter for desperate comics is some reference to Cleveland. George Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball There is something disconcerting yet strangely cathartic that occurs when two fans of northeastern Ohio sport converge. On the one hand, these moments offer a time to reminisce, a moment to stroll through the garret of one's innocence, reliving youthful passions with another who speaks of sport in a similar dialect. And yet, amidst the joie de vivre of the moment, and perhaps in a way best understood only by anthropologists and circus clowns, there emerges a curious yet inevitable mix of gloom and desolation. There is a desperate feeling of never having tasted the forbidden fruit, of never having reveled in the ecstasy of raising one's index finger in triumph alongside the realization that the hopes and aspirations one once held were all part of an elaborate scheme that, to paraphrase those philosophical misfits at The National Lampoon, shows unequivocally that, whether one can hear it or not, the universe really can laugh behind one's back! (1) More than anything else, despair is what defines Cleveland; its franchises; and its legions of adoring, hard-bitten, and long-suffering fans. It is a place of such remarkable athletic frustration and unforeseen misfortune that, in spite of its historical record of futility, has somehow managed to slip beneath the radar amid the cacophony of curses; headphone-wearing eccentrics; and countless tales of poor old Billy Buckner, Ralph Branca, and Fred Merkle. In this regard Cleveland sport suffers on two fronts: its own repetitive ineptitude and its remarkable lack of national recognition. Within the invisible barricade that marks the Greater Cleveland area (a region that includes those who have taken part in its long and storied diaspora, its hell-bent-for-losing leitmotif, and its bleak owning up to the words, "I am a Cleveland fan") is a cloud cover that cannot be brushed aside on the clearest of days. In every way, Cleveland--a town that marks the passing of the seasons through a rabid and insatiable thirst for a champion--really is fate's fool, bearing witness to an unending parade of moments that simply slipped by in the course of the most bizarre set of circumstances imaginable. The antipathy that Clevelanders have always felt toward anyone who hails from south of Akron, east of Erie, or west of Toledo is palpable and can be flat-out intimidating some days, but it is only a fraction of the sort of antipathy they reserve for one another. Cleveland is and has been a town so remarkably stratified along so many distinct lines (not the least of which is the ongoing eastside-westside antagonism), that to this day Cleveland artists continue to revel in its simplicity, or at least its backwardness. This is exemplified in Joe Walsh's "Ordinary Average Guy" or Drew Carey's remarkably prescient hard-drinking, low-achieving, high-threshold-for-pain ne'er-do-well. (2) Indeed, if there is any part of the Cleveland narrative that does enjoy national recognition, it is probably that odd reactive pose brought to public spaces by Robin Williams's Adrian Cronaur in Good Morning, Vietnam!, who responds to a soldier's disclosure that he hails from Cleveland with the off-the-cuff slight, "Obviously Vietnam's not that much of a change for you, then!" (3) There are also the more ubiquitous put-downs such as Randy Newman's lament ("Burn on, big river, burn on") and countless Tonight Show monologues that made Clevelanders flinch when they heard that Dennis Kucinich was making a presidential run in 2004, and not necessarily because they didn't like his politics. (4) On the contrary, most never made it that far. What they recall instead is the convergence of the moribund '70s and his administration's attempts to sell off whatever assets the city had amid the chaotic indignity of Chapter 11, staggering unemployment, and other quite bizarre happenstance. …