The Hardened, Yet Green Fields of the Indians Fan’s Mind

… with deep love and tribute to A. Bartlett Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind”

It breaks your heart. It’s designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, but for the last 62 years it has withered in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings with squalor and despair, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the Fall alone – only to be comforted by the idea that the Cleveland Frowns stand to take the Tribe’s place. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of pain and anguish coursing through your veins, and just then when the days are all twilight, when you can barely take the pain anymore, it thankfully stops. Today, at midnight of April 5, ending Easter Sunday, a day of filled with sun and hope, it starts, yet we know it will end quickly and the summer will soon be gone.

Somehow, the spring crept up on us this time. Maybe it was due to the Olympics which inserted an extra week of sports that allowed us Indians fans a week of reprieve as we watched Shaun White sail through the air in a blaze of red, white, and blue. Or it could have been the crazy upset-ridden March Madness which left our brackets in Cleveland-like wreckage. Whatever the reason, it seems to me that I have invested less and less in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps me fat, slow, and lazy. I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, where the Indians would at least be in contention and picked by the gurus at Sports Illustrated to finish at the top, only disappoint at the end, but this year we are picked to finish dead last. Nothing grand, but some things, a hope of relevant competition in the AL Central, and yet that work is just time wasted. The real activity is done in the AL East – the almighty, dollar-hungry, power division that controls most of baseball. There, in that elite corner, an old poet called Inevitability faithfully dwells.

And here on April 5, for Cleveland fans, where it figuratively rains all day, Dame Inevitability never loses. She was in Yankee Stadium last year with as the Bombers danced upon Yankee Stadium with arms outstretched. We traded our blue and white for Philly red to cheer on Charlie Manuel and Cliff Lee. Dame Inevitability, sensing our presence, delivered her justice swiftly after six games. The goddess looks at the hardened, yet quasi-traitorous Cleveland fans, and couldn’t help but smirk.

Today, Cleveland is on its heels, half sobbing, half laughing in hysteria, again, picked to finish dead last in the AL Central. The summer will not pass fast enough this year. Sighing, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1997, the seventh game of the World Series, they day after my 22^nd birthday, perhaps the greatest baseball game that could have been played in Indians history, when Jaret Wright, loose and easy, had pitched 6 1/3 on 3 days rest. Tony Fernandez hits a single that brings Jim Thome and Marquis Grissom home, and with it all hope began to spring forth. Not only was it to erase 49 years of baseball pain – they were on the precipice of vindicating a city for all of its sins. It was 2-1, two outs, bottom of the ninth, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm of your neck forever. Now Edgar Renteria, a product of the Marlins farm system, hits a soft shot over Charlie Nagy. Nagy’s glove just glancing a ball which brings Craig Counsel home and feeds the jaws of defeat – all those sins continue to rest on the shoulders of the Tribe, and grow heavier in the years to come.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game – not because in Florida or New York they could win because Cleveland lost, or that we couldn’t finish the Red Sox in the ALCS 10 years later. In all of this, there is a certain justice, and reminder to Indians fans of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it had promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.