Put a Sox in it, Cubs fans

Cleveland home of true agony

Oh, boohoo, Cubs fans. The World Series hasn’t even started yet and I’m already sick of your whining and caterwauling about the centuryold (and then some) quest for baseball’s holy grail.

I’m sick of your ivy. I’m sick of your billy goat. And I’m sick of reading it’s time to “forgive” poor Steve Bartman and invite him to Wrigley Field to throw out a first pitch.

I know what you’re thinking: Hypocrisy! The Red Sox, after all, had gone 86 years without winning a World Series. But then came the miracle of 2004, thus ending the “curse” and closing the books on decades of futility for “tortured” Red Sox fans.

Nice gimmick, sure, but it wasn’t a curse. It was racism, cronyism and alcoholism that kept the Red Sox hurtling between mediocrity and calamity.

Between 1918 and 2004, many Bostonians couldn’t find Fenway Park on a map. In 1953, the year the Boston Braves left for Milwaukee, reducing the Hub to a oneteam town, attendance for Red Sox games actually went down. As recently as 1966, attendance at Fenway Park was 811,172, good for eighth in the 10-team American League.

And there’s this: From 1957 until the 2004 baseball season, Boston’s other bigleague sports teams combined for 20 championships — 16 for the Celtics, two for the Bruins, two for the Patriots. Red Sox fans don’t live in a vacuum, which means they were in no way “tortured.” They simply had a baseball team that in most years was either untalented or mismanaged.

But say this about the Red Sox: In many seasons they’d string you along all summer and then deliver your disappointment. Not so with the Cubs, who in many seasons could be counted on to deliver the bad baseball right from the opening bell. Until they chloroformed the clumsy Dodgers the other night in the NLCS, they hadn’t even won a pennant since 1945, and they’ve only advanced as far as the NLCS five times since divisional play began in 1969.

And just as Red Sox fans do not live in a vacuum, nor do Cubs fans. Since 1986, Chicago has celebrated a Super Bowl victory by the Bears (we needn’t go into the specifics, right?), three Stanley Cup victories by the Blackhawks and six NBA titles by the Bulls. (For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll leave out the White Sox’ 2005 World Series championship, an event no true Cubs fan would have celebrated.)

So spare me the sad stories about “tortured” Cubs fans. It’s a great story line that the Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908, but it’s just that — a story line. It’s a stat. I never heard of a single case in which someone jumped off a bridge after Leo Durocher’s ’ 69 Cubs coughed up the National League East to the Miracle Mets. I never read about some poor sap losing his mind following Bartman’s hands-on participation in the 2003 NLCS.

This isn’t to say you can’t, or shouldn’t, root for the Cubs when they take on the Cleveland Indians in Game 1 of the World Series tonight. As has been chronicled a hundred times already, there’s plenty of meat there for Boston fans: Theo Epstein … Jon Lester … David Ross … and so on.

Boston fans can just as easily root for the Indians, given that their manager, Terry Francona, skippered the Red Sox to two World Series championships. The Indians also have Mike Napoli, Andrew Miller, Coco Crisp and bench coach Brad Mills, but come on: Terry Francona is reason enough to root for the Indians.

Me?

I’m not rooting for the Cubs.

I’m not rooting for the Indians. I’m rooting for Cleveland. Here’s an entire city that since 1964 had been absent a championship in anything until hometown hero LeBron James led the Cavaliers to an NBA title this past spring. There had been some close calls by Cleveland’s sports teams in previous years, but mostly it was just a lot of bad, piled on top of a lot of bad, piled on top of yet more bad.

The city of Cleveland has also had economic woes. But it’s always struck me as a sturdy town with good, hard-working, people who love their sports. Whenever attendance is down at Indians home games it’s because times are tough, not because people stopped caring. People in Cleveland care. You can see it in their faces.

From cab drivers to the National Park Service tour guide at the James Garfield homestead who, on the day I was there, approached his job with such enthusiasm that he might have been one of our 20th president’s family members. I’ve never met anyone in Cleveland who didn’t give 100 percent.

The one problem with rooting for “Cleveland” is that it puts me in conflict with the late, great Lennie Merullo, an East Boston native who was the last living member of the Cubs’ 1945 World Series entrant when he passed away last year at 98.

Lennie was as kind and decent a man as I ever met, gifted with a warm, soothing smile, a positive outlook on life and a handshake so strong, even in his 90s, that you always had it in the back of your head he could break your fingers were he in the mood.

But a Cubs victory in the World Series won’t change my opinion of Lennie. He was a swell guy, Cubs or no Cubs.

We do you miss you, Lennie, but Cleveland Rocks in this year’s World Series.