• U.S.

IT MIGHT BE AN INDIAN SUMMER

4 minute read
Steve Wulf/Cleveland

THE LAST TIME I SAW Cleveland, her park was worn and gray. The press box in Cleveland Stadium was shrouded in cobwebs. The Indians on the field that season–1985–were on their way to losing 102 games. A solitary fanatic in the last row of the distant bleachers was banging a drum slowly to wake up either the offense or the ghosts of the past. George Vukovich stood where Rocky Colavito once stood. The 5,000 people rattling around the 74,208-seat Temple of Doom looked as if they wanted to wipe the stupid grin off the face of Chief Wahoo, the mascot whose very name was a cruel joke both to Native Americans and to Cleveland fans. There was talk of moving the franchise somewhere else, somewhere nice.

So it was something of a shock to see a capacity crowd of 41,948 stream into brand-new Jacobs Field last Wednesday evening to root, root, root for the best team in baseball, the Cleveland Indians. The press box was crowded; Manny Ramirez stood where George Vukovich once stood; and people were grinning like, well, Chief Wahoo. The fanatic with the drum, a computer programmer named John Adams, was still banging away in the back row of the bleachers, but he couldn’t be heard through all the crowd noise. “Cleveland,” said Indians pitcher Dennis Martinez, “is the baseball place to be.”

A few years ago, such a statement would have got Martinez committed. In the bad old days, which swept across the past five decades, the Mistake by the Lake was host to geriatric front-office people, eccentric players and the entire entomological kingdom–one pitcher swallowed a moth while delivering the ball to the plate. Indians pitcher Bud Black, who made a brief sojourn in Cleveland in the ’80s, says, “At the old ball park, it was always overcast, even on a sunny day.”

There are many reasons for the Indians’ turnaround: an infusion of capital from brothers Richard and David Jacobs, who bought the club at the end of the 1986 season; the leadership of Mike Hargrove, the manager who steadied the team after a tragic boating accident in the spring of ’93 killed two pitchers and injured another; the savvy of general manager John Hart, who traded for Kenny Lofton, Jose Mesa, Carlos Baerga and Omar Vizquel, among others; and, of course, the new ball park, which is slightly derivative of Baltimore’s Camden Yards but not at all derivative of depressing Cleveland Stadium. “What do I miss about the old ball park?” asks Hargrove. “Nothing.”

Then there are those who think the Indians are just imitating art–a rather generous term for the 1989 movie Major League. Playing on the preposterous notion that the Indians win the pennant, the flick features such characters as Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes), Wild Thing (Charlie Sheen) and Pedro Serrano (Dennis Haysbert), a Caribbean slugger who worships an idol called Jobu. Well, center fielder Lofton has lived up to the Willie Mays part, with 77 stolen bases, 77 runs batted in and a .345 batting average in 162 games over the past two seasons. Reliever Mesa has taken on the role of Wild Thing, with 17 saves this year in as many opportunities. And while there is no match for Serrano, there is an actual Jobu. A Mr. Potato Head-like figure with grass growing out of his head, he watches batting practice from a post near the dugout.

What Jobu sees is truly extraordinary: four of the Top 10 batting averages in the American League (Ramirez, Baerga, Lofton and Jim Thome), two certain Hall of Famers (Eddie Murray and Dave Winfield), and a guy so good they just named a candy bar after him–the Albert Belle Bar. If the pitching holds up, the Indians-who had a 6-1/2-game lead on the Kansas City Royals in the A.L. Central as of Friday-should finish first for the first time since 1954.

Not long ago, Cleveland was such a lonely place that, as John Hart put it, “you half-expected to see tumbleweeds.” But now the people are patronizing downtown restaurants, buying everything that has the chief’s visage on it and calling radio hosts for advice on what to do on the nights the Indians aren’t playing. “I always knew this day would come,” says Herb Score, who has been a pitcher or broadcaster for the Indians since 1955. “I was kind of hoping it would come a little sooner though.”

The revival of this much maligned city says a lot about the redemptive powers of the national pastime. Too bad, though, that most of the rest of baseball has become Cleveland.

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