Dion Waiters opens up about death of his brother, Zique
March 29, 2016ESPN says Indians’ rotation might be the best in baseball
March 29, 2016Happy Tuesday WFNY!
This is the last While We’re Waiting I will write for this site before the start of the Cleveland Indians’ 2016 campaign. For baseball lovers, this time of year is special. I remember being younger, back when baseball was still important to me, and opening day felt like a holiday.
I treated it as such, too. I have used personal time at work to leave early to watch the first game of the season. In college, I know I skipped classes at least once to watch opening day1. I loved everything about that day. Not just for baseball, of course, but for everything it signified as well, including all the cliches such as the changing weather, the freshness of spring air, new starts, spring cleaning, American tradition, apple pie, all of that.
When we started WFNY back in 2008, I was still very much a baseball fan. I even wrote a piece or two on the Indians back in the day. Yet today, as I sit here writing this, I am very much not a baseball fan. I didn’t watch a single non-Indians baseball game last year. That includes the postseason. I caught parts of games here and there, I suppose, but I certainly didn’t go out of my way to watch baseball.
I don’t want to completely rehash all this. I’ve written plenty in previous While We’re Waitings about my falling out with the sport. But I do think about it quite a bit. I ponder how it happened. And why it happened. And if it can ever be reversed. It’s funny how these things happen. I don’t feel like there was a time in the middle where I consciously recognized that I was falling out of love with baseball. It was more like I woke up one day and suddenly realized that I simply didn’t care about the sport anymore.
I can look back and recognize some of things that turned me off to the sport, but I cannot sit here and tell you exactly why it happened. If I could, I think it would be easier to reverse it. In my mind, I think I miss caring about the sport and watching the Indians every night. But I also have to be honest with myself. It’s not hard to follow sports. If I really missed being a baseball fan and truly wanted to get back into it, I easily could. It’s not like there are these enormous barriers to entry. I simply just have to watch games and read any amount of the abundance of baseball coverage that is out there.
But I know I’m not going to do any of that. It’s just not a priority to me anymore. I’m not going to lie and say I’m going to make an effort to be a better baseball fan this year. But that doesn’t mean I’m not genuinely more excited about this season than I have been in the last couple. There are things in baseball that have grabbed my attention. I loved Bryce Harper’s comments about the game of baseball today. I find Joe Maddon’s Chicago Cubs team to be quite intriguing, and Kris Bryant has all the potential to be the next megastar in the sport. And there is still the sublime greatness of hitters like Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout.
And then there is the team we all care about the most, the Cleveland Indians. Watching this pitching staff should make for an entertaining summer. Still rooting for guys like Jason Kipnis, Yan Gomes, Michael Brantley, and Carlos Santana should be its usual mix of fun and frustration. And, of course, watching Francisco Lindor’s youthful exuberance and growing talent is something I’m not going to take for granted.
I’ve really enjoyed WFNY’s preview coverage of the Indians. If you can oblige me, I’d like to cherry pick some of my favorite articles here.
- I share Scott Sargent’s fascination with Trevor Bauer. While I may not be near as big a Bauer fan as Scott is, I do agree with him that the Indians are much more interesting with Bauer around than they are without him.
- As someone who lives in Columbus, I love having the Clippers here. It’s awesome getting to watch some of these guys develop here before making an impact on my favorite big league club. Jason Kipnis was definitely a local favorite as he was called up in 2010 and tore up the postseason for the Clippers. But perhaps my favorite Clippers player ever to watch was Carlos Santana. Michael Bode’s piece on rooting for Santana definitely hit home for me.
- My favorite writing tends to be pieces that mix sports and pop culture, two of my passions in life. So naturally, I really enjoyed Bode’s Cleveland Indians/Oceans Eleven mashup.
- Similarly, while we’re blurring the lines of sports and pop culture, I have to give some love to Andrew Clayman’s phenomenal post about making a “History of the Cleveland Indians” DVD. The level of detail he went into and the creative line of thinking in it are just excellent. Somehow, someone needs to make this DVD (or, really, Blu-Ray … although, in reality, it just needs to be on Netflix) a reality2.
- And finally, because I don’t follow the sport as closely as I once did, I really leaned on pieces like Josh Poloha’s AL Central Preview and Bode’s 25-man roster speculation to bring me up to speed on the landscape.
I view any concept of a return to baseball as a long process, but it needs baby steps if it’s ever going to happen. The first step for me has to begin locally with the Indians, and I’m so desperate to truly fall in love with an Indians team again. This roster has the personalities and performance quality that I genuinely want to root for. If ever there was a time I hoped a team could capture a moment and truly have the pieces fall in place for it to reach its potential, it would be this team. I hope they can avoid a slow start like last year, and I hope this will be a summer filled with intrigue over this team.
I don’t know if I’ll ever truly go back to baseball, but I refuse to give up on the Indians. I just need a spark to grab my attention again. I want this team, this year, to be that spark.
*****
Coming Soon
The Cleveland Cavaliers are down to their last nine games of the season. Then finally, FINALLY, we can move past the nonsense of this season and get to the point. Everything is coming down to this postseason and how the team performs in these playoffs truly feels like it will dictate so much about the future direction of the team.
For now, though, you can go behind the scenes with this excellent All Access look at the Cavaliers and get hyped for the playoffs.
Soon. So very, very soon.
*****
That’s all I have for you guys this week. Next week we will have actual baseball to talk about and we will be one step closer to the NBA playoffs. But that’s the future. For now, I just hope everyone enjoys the rest of their week at WFNY.
- Don’t do that, kids. You’re going to be paying for that education for a long time, so you might as well go to every class. [↩]
- Author’s note: In reality, I really wish I would have really used the words really and reality more often in that last sentence, really. I really messed that up, in reality. [↩]
55 Comments
Yeah, that’s insane.
have you seen the kids these days…the arms on these guys!
It really is. It’s up there with hockey fights.
Can you imagine if another billion dollar company, like Apple, was all – “Yeah, it’s cool. This is how our employees address grievances. They punch each other in the face or try to cripple each other by throwing stuff at their heads. Yup, we just sit back and watch. I mean, how else you going to police this stuff, right? Lets be honest: when you send an angry email to accounting in all caps, you know what the response is going. You know the rules. And if he don’t, you’re going to learn them pretty fast.”
Some kind of eastern European dessert? Sort of a Hungarian baklava?
mmmmmmmm…baklava