5.8.01 CLEVELAND INDIANS vs KANSAS CITY ROYALS
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Don’t get me wrong, I really like Cleveland. It’s a great city, with a beautiful downtown, some swell museums, a wonderful public market, friendly neighborhood bars, the best-dressed professional football team ever, and a bitingly ironic Claes Oldenburg sculpture sitting in front of city hall. All of which predisposes me to like a baseball team from Cleveland, and all of which makes it that much sadder to me that the Cleveland Indians are so completely, inexcusably lame.
We’ll start, predictably, with the logo. I can hear the groans now. Whiny, PC, hypocritical, liberal white-guilt bullshit, right? I’m sorry. It is astonishing to me that so many people see fit to wear this grotesquerie atop their heads and across their breasts, or that a publicly funded facility would afford it the kind of prominence usually reserved for the most revered symbols of patriotism and commerce. What exactly about Chief Wahoo is not offensive to you, people? Try this: instead of red skin and a feather, picture him with brown skin and an afro. Still not offended? Imagine a German baseball team who call themselves, say, the Frankfurt Jews. On their caps is a grinning cartoon rabbi. “We’re celebrating their heritage!” insist the people of Frankfurt. Can somebody please explain to me how this is any different?
But enough of that. On to the ballpark. Bejeweled with all sorts of postmodern flourishes and architectural niceties, Jacobs Field is a truly lovely corporate campus. A sleek, all-glass, three-story office building wraps around a sunlit central plaza where associates can interface casually, in a manner perfectly suited to today’s informal business climate. A top-flight food court and dining facilities are available for entertaining clients or just enjoying a break from meetings and teleconferences, with beautiful, glassed-in balconies overlooking the atrium, offering the next best thing to a true al fresco dining experience. I could go on.
Unfortunately, the misguided people of Cleveland have been led to believe that this is actually a ballpark. Suffering from the kind of collective delusion that causes hundreds of thousands of Hindus to think they are witnessing milk miraculously issuing from some religious icon while willfully ignoring the fact that there are people in plain view pouring milk on said object, Indians fans come out to the Jake night after night, convinced that they are enjoying one of the finest ballparks in all of baseball. Indeed, so infectious is their enthusiasm that they’ve managed to sell the illusion to nearly all of baseball-following America.
Don’t believe it. It is not real. The Jake is awful. The ridiculously oversized scoreboard is just obnoxious. There are these mysterious glass panes that protrude at regular intervals from the upper deck railing, their intended function, at least to my feeble mind, unfathomable, their net effect being that every tenth or so upper deck spectator is forced to view key portions of the playing field through a distorting prism (I moved, thanks). The only thing more annoying than the idiot beer guy who announces his presence every thirty seconds by shouting, “Beer guy!” is the idiot out in the center field bleachers who, any time the Indians have a runner in scoring position, starts beating a drum. “Ah boo boo boo, Ah boo boo boo…” Me hate-um guy with drum. The infield dirt is the color of a 1987 Ford Taurus. You remember, that color that’s kind of gray, kind of brown, kind of mauve, but not really any of them? It’s made worse by stadium lighting that, unlike any ballpark lighting I’ve ever seen, casts a sickly pinkish glow on everything. Look at the photo: Those are the same Kodak proprietary color correction algorithms responsible for every other photo on this site, folks. That’s what it really looks like. Yeech.
The Royals, who I still like even though they dealt Johnny Damon and have pretty much gone back to sucking this year, got off to a quick start against Indians starter Dave Burba with a four-run first. Cleveland got three back in the bottom of the frame, though, and after Burba gave up singles to Carlos Beltran and Rey Sanchez to start off the second, he pitched his way out of the no-outs, runners-at-first-and-third jam by retiring Mike Sweeney, Jermaine Dye and Joe Randa—the latter two with strikeouts—in order, and that was about the last anyone heard of Kansas City.
The Indians tied it up in the bottom of the second, and home runs in the seventh by Omar Vizquel—his first since last August—and Jim Thome—career homer number 237, which moved him ahead of Manny Ramirez on the Indians’ all-time list, and don’t think the crowd wasn’t pleased to hear that bit of trivia—put Cleveland ahead for good.
FINAL SCORE: INDIANS 8, ROYALS 4
FOOD CONSUMED: The mushiest, most flavorless hot dog I’ve had all year, some peanuts, a beer.