Ten in a row gets it done

It only took the longest winning streak to close the season in Cleveland's history to make the playoffs --- but that's just what they've done.

Pardon me while I wear a very pleased smile over the next few days. On Wednesday, the Indians host the winner of a tie-breaker Monday between Tampa Bay and Texas.

The winner of that game gets to play Boston in the divisional playoffs. The Red Sox merely put up the best record in the American League.

But I'll only fret about that if the Indians win Wednesday. Considering the Tribe lost at least 93 games in 3 of the past 4 seasons, to win 92 this year and make the playoffs is quite an accomplishment. And to do it with their top pitcher on the disabled list and their closer having a late-season meltdown is remarkable indeed.

So I'm going to wear my Chief Wahoo tie to work this week and smile.

"A swing and a drive....."

It's late September, meaning baseball season is down to its dying embers.

Against remarkable odds, my Cleveland Indians are still alive for the playoffs with only a half-dozen games left. In fact, they hold one of the two wild card spots.

But their hot-and-cold closer has just given up two home runs in the top of the 9th to blow the lead --- and, it seems, the game. That, in turn, would erase the tenuous hold on that playoff spot for the Indians.

Before you know it, there are two outs in the bottom of the 9th for the Indians. Hope is fading. And then this happens.

No matter what the temperature........

.........as far as I'm concerned, spring arrives with the words "Play ball!"

Which means spring arrives Friday, with the opening of baseball season. Only a fool would think my beloved Cleveland Indians will compete for anything beyond avoiding the basement in the A.L. Central this season, but I still love baseball. The Tribe has a number of young players who are showing signs of blossoming, but it'll be a year or two before they contend for the division title.

I expect the Royals to surge past them next year if all of KC's young talent emerges as anticipated. It could flip the division upside down.

My picks for the World Series? Philadelphia and Boston, with the Red Sox taking it all. I hope I'm wrong, though.

"Do you love me or hate me?"

I got my husband opening day tickets for his birthday. He said I don't know if that means you love or hate me.

- Words written by the wife of a Cleveland Indians fan earlier this year

As a fellow Tribe fan, I completely understand his reaction. That the Indians will be bad this year is a given. When you trade Cy Young Award winners in back-to-back seasons, when the "ace" of your pitching staff hasn't thrown a major league pitch in 18 months and half of the projected rotation features a collection of "junk" in its pitch arsenal that would make Fred Sanford ache with envy, "bad" is a foregone conclusion.

The only real question I and several of my fellow Tribe fans have is whether they'll lose more than 100 games. For those who don't follow baseball, 100 losses in a 162-game season is the benchmark for "epically bad."

Edsel bad. "Ishtar" bad. "Cannonball Run 3" bad. Detroit Lions bad.

Anyway, you get the point.

A couple of friends want to go see the Indians play this season - be it in Kansas City or even Cleveland. I find myself wondering if it's wise to spend real money to watch such bad baseball (the Royals could be even worse than Cleveland this year - just as they have been for the past several years).

Talk to me in a few months, and I may well change my mind.

But that husband's reaction to opening-day tickets? I get it. I really do.

Me and Bob Feller

I watched an interview of legendary Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller on the MLB Network the other night. Feller is in the Hall of Fame, won nearly 250 games during a career that went from the mid-'30s to the mid-'50s, and would have had even more impressive statistics had he not lost four years to World War II, when he served on a battleship in the Navy.

He's over 90 now, still remarkably sharp, and talked about how he grew to love baseball as a kid in a small Iowa farm town. He read The Sporting News every week, listened to ball games on the radio, and read whatever newspapers he could get his hands on.

And it hit me: Bob Feller and I had a remarkably similar way of following baseball as a child, even though we grew up a half-century apart.

The papers we received at the Finger farm had few or no box scores, so I subscribed to The Sporting News. That magazine was a "luxury" I gave myself with money I earned from the humble wages we earned working on the farm. Along with the magazine, I would buy the baseball guides and player registers from The Sporting News. I absorbed those box scores as if there was going to be a test on them some day, reading accounts of games that might as well have been played on Mars.

Sure, we had a television, but games were on the air once a week - on Saturday afternoons. That was the same as not being on the TV at all. Saturday afternoons were always filled with work somewhere on the farm, no matter what time of year it was. The radio was my primary source for "live" baseball: The Royals on KVGB out of Great Bend, the Twins on KSTP in the Twin Cities on clear summer nights, or the Rangers in Texas on WBAP in Fort Worth.

Mind you, I was a fan of the Indians even then (blame Sudden Sam McDowell, not Bob Feller), so as I tuned in whatever game I could get on a scratchy AM radio, I had one ear listening for the Tribe score. Most of the time, they seemed to lose. But it's funny how the next day you'd find yourself hoping they'd nab a win somehow. Youth is remarkably resilient that way...and if you're lucky, you never lose that.

It would have been great to see Rapid Robert Feller pitch in his heyday. His fastball was clocked at nearly 108 in the 1940s. That's faster than Nolan Ryan, widely considered the hardest thrower of his era. I dare say it's faster than any pitcher in history.

I guess I'll have to ask my friends on the online Indians fan chat group who have seen a few more summers than I have what it was like to see Feller pitch. It'll be fun to hear their stories.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

This is my furlough week from the paper, a fancy way of saying I get an extra week of vacation this year. I just won't get paid for it. It's happening to most of us in this profession this year....a fact of life in these economic times.

I'm going to head to Kansas City for a few days to take in a couple of baseball games - my Cleveland Indians against the Royals. I wasn't too excited about the prospect for quite a while, considering the Tribe is a raging disappointment this season and is scuffling to stay out of the cellar of the A.L. Central.

But then I thought about my first trip to a major league baseball game - the Royals vs. the Yankees back in the early '70s. I didn't care what the teams' records were....I was going to a major league baseball game!

It seemed wrong to take a blah attitude to something that I once considered bigger than life (especially since Steve, my twin, has tickets for one game and a friend invited me to another game with free tickets). So I'm going to head up there, enjoy the experience, and not take it for granted.

Besides, it'll be nice to see the renovated stadium. It was shiny, new and spectacular when I first saw it as a kid --- and I hear it's like that again.

A coda to my steroids post

My favorite baseball team is the Cleveland Indians, as anyone who knows me well could tell you. Yeah, I know...it doesn't seem to make sense that a farm kid from central Kansas would root for a Rust Belt team several states away.

But when I was a young boy, they had a lefthanded fireballer named Sudden Sam McDowell, and I was a lefty who liked to throw hard, so I dubbed myself Sudden Stan. Since he pitched for the Cleveland Indians, they became my team.

From such things loyalties are born. I won't go into what it's been like rooting for a team that hasn't won a World Series in 60 years and hadn't even made it to the Fall Classic in more than 40 (from 1954 to 1995), except to say for a long time .500 seasons were considered a good season, and that when they clinched the Central Division in Baltimore in 1995 I wept unashamedly.

We lost the World Series in 6 games in 1995 and came within a half-inning of winning it all in 1997; then got within one game of the World Series again 10 years later. As this season looms, the Tribe seems poised to threaten for post-season play once again.

But the shadow of steroids lurks near one of the team's key cogs: Travis Hafner. He was one of baseball's most feared power hitters for much of this decade before injuries wrecked the tale end of his 2007 season and all of his 2008 campaign. That downturn in health has coincided with much tougher steroid policies, and folks are wondering (and whispering about) whether it's a coincidence at all.

Hafner has denied steroid use....but so have several athletes who later 'fessed up to getting cozy with a needle. Me? For some silly reason, I believe him. Maybe it's that Midwestern small-town background of his and the culture of straight talk that's bred in such places.

But the bottom line is, all the declarations of innocence mean nothing. And he knows it. He'll have to let his bat do the talking. If he performs like he did up until late in the 2007, those whispers will vanish. If he's a shadow of his former self, no words will convince the doubters.

That's life in the post-steroids era.