ENDING DROUGHT COULD HAVE FALLOUT
Title-winning Cubs or Indians would be seen in new light
There’s a question that longsuffering Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians fans should ask themselves if they haven’t already.
Is it coincidental that the World Series and Halloween share the same space on the calendar?
Perhaps that explains everything. The curses, the mysterious events, the otherworldly collapses and the downright scariness of the season. There has to be some reason. Why not blame Halloween?
Here we go again, and again, and again. If the Cubs don’t win their National League Championship Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers, they will have squandered their best chance at a trip to the World Series since the last time they were there, which was 1945.
Cleveland is in much better shape, winning Wednesday evening to defeat the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series for an opportunity to go for its first World Series title since 1948. The Indians actually have been to the World Series three times since then, most recently in 1997, so their drought is far less haunting than the Cubs’.
What’s more, it was just four months ago that the NBA’s Cavaliers won the city’s first title in any major professional sport since 1964, so Cleveland now is actually used to winning, a phrase that still takes some getting used to, especially for those of us who grew up in northern Ohio during the “Mistake by the Lake” days.
There is such joy and relief when a city or a team ends a drought that we often fail to realize the identity crisis it can create. Simply put, when a championship is finally won, an identity is most definitely lost. Sympathy from decades of heartache is replaced almost overnight by antipathy, even animosity.
Cleveland, you’re no longer the sad sack we knew and loved. You’re just like everyone else now.
That’s just fine with Indians manager Terry Francona, who is well-versed in Cleveland sports futility going back to the early 1960s, when his father, Tito, was an All-Star for the Indians.
“For the city, I was thrilled when the Cavs won,” he told reporters recently. “It was hard not to get caught up in all of that. … But I don’t think it’s fair to the players to go back 60, 70 years. We try to not even go back much past yesterday. We’re trying to stay in the moment, because that’s the best way to go about doing good things.”
Good luck selling that message in Chicago, where schoolchildren grow up learning more about 1908 than 1492.
As the daughter of Chicagoans, I was one of those children. The year I started following the Cubs was 1969. On Aug. 16, they were nine games up in the division. On Oct. 2, when the season ended, they were eight games behind the New York Mets.
There was no better preparation for the rest of my Cubswatching life than that.
Like most of the rest of the sports world, I would love to see the Cubs break through and get to the World Series. Isn’t enough enough?
But we all would have to admit that were the Cubs to win the National League pennant, or the World Series, they wouldn’t be the team we all know and feel sorry for, would they?
They would be more like the Boston Red Sox. Locals would still love them, while the rest of us would move on to another lost cause.
Hello, Texas Rangers and Washington Nationals.