The reaction to my three-part Bad Franchises series was quite positive- surprisingly so. I didnt really bring the funny, as my man Charlie likes to say, but it seems most of yall liked it anyway, and for that Im grateful. In light of this pleasing development, Im reverting back to my original blueprint, and making it a four-part series. Also, I havent written anything else to date, and Ive got this bad boy just sitting on my desktop. Unlike the perfumed princes at ESPN, I have to carry a day job. Sigh.
So here it is, a special Addendum to the Bad Franchises series. And this ones personal, folks.
Cleveland Indians
Year of Origin: 1901 League Championships: 5 World Series Championships: 2 Last World Series Championship: 1948
From 1901 through the 1968 season, the Cleveland Indians were a mere lesser member of the American League pecking order- not the best team by far, but not the worst team by any means either. They had a bad habit of finishing second- the Tribe finished in the bridesmaid spot 12 times in their first sixty seasons, an average of two runner-up finishes per decade- but they finished in last place only once in that span, and that was way back in 1914. The Indians won just three pennants in sixty years, but that wasn’t too terrible, considering the Yankees’ near-monopoly on American League flags in those days.
In 1959 the Tribe got beat out for the pennant by the White Sox. They finished 89-65, in second place, five games out of first. Frank Lane traded Rocky Colavito for Harvey Kuenn in the spring of '60- the most hated deal in Cleveland sports history prior to the release of Bernie Kosar. The Tribe dropped to fourth place in 1960, and during the decade’s first nine years, they were the consummate mediocrity- never winning more than 87 games, never losing more than 87. The Indians finished in either fifth or sixth place six times in this span, in a ten-team league.
The American League re-aligned for the 1969 season, splitting into two divisions to accommodate the entry of the Royals and Seattle Pilots into the circuit. The Tribe was placed in the AL East. And that was when things really went south.
Starting in 1969, the Tribe finished last three times in five years. The expansion Blue Jays kept the Tribe out of the cellar for a while, but when Toronto improved, the Indians sank back to their accustomed position. In 1982 they shared last place with the Jays, and in '83 they had the basement all to themselves. The Tribe finished last five more times in ten years in the '80s and early '90s, giving them eight cellar-dwelling seasons since joining the American League East. Every East team- the Red Sox, Yankees, Orioles, Blue Jays, Tigers, and Brewers- won the division at least once. Except for the Indians. They never finished higher than fourth. And things got progressively worse as time went on. In a thirteen-year span covering the entire decade of the '80s, the Tribe finished as high as fifth just twice. The rest of the time it was either last place, or second-to-last. When the nightmare finally ended with the building of Jacobs Field and the renaissance of 1994, the club had gone 34 years since they finished less than 11 games out of first.
In the first seventy seasons of Indians baseball, the Tribe had lost more than a hundred games once, in 1914. In their next twenty- 1971 through '91- they breached the dubious mark five times:
1969- 62-99: 46-and-a-half games behind Baltimore (I'm counting this as a hundred-loss season because, a.) the ’69 Indians had a worse record than both AL expansion teams, which is downright shameful, and b.) the Tribe only played 161 games, having not made up a rainout with New York. At any rate, 62-99, though technically not a hundred-loss season, is still really, really bad. And they probably would have lost that game to the Yankees anyway, right?).
1971- 60-102: 43 games behind Baltimore. This was the team’s first 100-loss season in 57 years. It wouldn’t be their last.
1985- 60-102: 39-and-a-half games behind Toronto (dubbed "The Season That Shame Forgot" by Tribe beat writer Sheldon Ocker).
1987- 61-101: 37 games behind Detroit. SI picked the Indians to win the AL pennant that year: Cory Snyder and Joe Carter were the 'cover boys' of SI's '87 Baseball Preview. Oops. Cleveland started 1-10 and it never got better; the club's 5.28 team ERA was the worst in baseball since 1956. Would-be closer Ernie Camacho was broken psychologically by booing Tribe fans when he blew several ninth-inning leads at the beginning of the year. Trust me- he deserved it.
1991- 57-105: 34 games behind Toronto. The brass thought they had found a stud leadoff man in Alex Cole, so they moved the fences way out and anointed themselves a 'speed-and-pitching' team. What happened was; Cole ran the bases like Herb Washington and occasionally forgot how many outs there were in an inning; Chris James hit about 278 400-foot warning-track outs and had his career destroyed; ace closer Doug Jones started tipping his pitches and it became BP every time he was out there; and the team hit 79 home runs. They had the all the punch of Whitey Herzog’s Cardinals without the speed, defense, or pitching. Albert Belle hit more than a third of the team's home runs. He also drilled a ball into some fan's chest when the guy wouldn't stop calling him 'Joey' and got sent down to the minors in June for walking out a double-play ball. Boy, what a season. I think the World Champion Twins got half of their wins against the Indians. I think Shane Mack hit about .850 in those games. And those games at the Stadium... you'd be in the first-base boxes and you could hold conversations with fans on the third-base side. I'm not kidding. That place was a tomb, man.
(My older brother and sports mentor, who read the short-lived National Sports Daily religiously and whose boyhood idol was Mike Francesa, went to 21 games in '91, his personal season-best attendance mark. That was on purpose- he took pride in heading up to the Stadium to see the horrible Tribe so many times- it enhanced his fan status. You see 'em more, you suffer more, it makes you a better fan. Cleveland thing (shrug). I went to four games that year, and he held it against me: "Four? That's it? You call yourself a fan?" His personal record, BTW, was 7-14. I was 2-2; the same record I had in 1995, when the Tribe went 100-44. As the Sports Guy would say, I have no idea why you would care about any of this).
During much of the lean years, there was more chance that the Indians would move to another city than to the top of the division. From the late 1950s until the bond issue for the Gateway Project was approved in 1990, the area was dogged with rumors that the Tribe would pack their bags and fly away to greener pastures- to the Twin Cities in the '50s, to Seattle in the early '60s, to Dallas-Fort Worth in the late '60s, to East Rutherford in the early '80s (this was when Donald Trump was inquiring about owning the team); to Tampa-St. Petersburg in the 1980s. For a brief time, soused, impoverished frozen-food magnate and former Indians owner Vernon Stouffer had a working agreement with New Orleans that the Indians would play 25 to 30 home games in the Louisiana Superdome (the deal was nixed when Stouffer sold the team in 1973). When reviled Tribe president Peter Bavasi took 'Cleveland' off of the team's road uniforms in the late '80s, fans and local media suspected that the modification was done with a franchise relocation in mind. And they may have been right. In retrospect, it would have been tough to fault the Tribe’s ownership had they decided to whisk the team off to greener pastures. Starting in 1967, the team finished dead-ass last in the league in attendance eight times in twenty-five seasons.
(Stouffer basically doomed the Indians for a generation when he slashed the farm budget down to the bone and sold the team not to George Steinbrenner, who had an offer on the table, but to Nick Mileti, whose offer was bigger than the Boss’s on paper but in reality consisted of, in the words of longtime Indians GM Gabe Paul, “green stamps and promises”. In other words, Mileti was a bulls—t artist with no real money. Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, and had them back in championship form within three years. Under Mileti, the Tribe remained the most penniless organization in baseball throughout the Disco Era. Oh, well.)
The ingredients for success weren't there. The ownership was generally strapped. There wasn't money to properly finance the big-league club, and there wasn't money to finance the farm system. The team played its home games at cavernous Cleveland Municipal Stadium. I saw more than my share of Tribe games at the Stadium. It was, simply put, a travesty as a baseball venue. It was enormous- it seated 75,000 for baseball, which meant that when there was a crowd of 25 or 30,000- a rarity- the place still looked empty. The Stadium was open-ended, and the open end (the bleachers, or the “Dawg Pound” area) fronted on Lake Erie. It was always at least fifteen degrees colder inside the Stadium than in the rest of Cleveland. The bathrooms were a cesspool, an abomination. There were massive steel support beams holding up the grandstand roof. That made for a lot of obstructed-view seats. I can remember somehow ending up directly behind one of these beams at a game. I looked at a lot of steel, rivets, and chipped paint that day, but I saw precious little baseball. The Tribe probably lost anyway.
Oh, and lest I forget, here is a snippet of the kind of front-office dealings that made the Indians baseball’s worst team for three decades:
1972- Traded Graig Nettles to the Yankees for John Ellis, Jerry Kenney, Rusty Torres and Charlie Spikes.
1974- Traded Pedro Guerrero to the Dodgers for Bruce Ellingsen.
1974- Traded Chris Chambliss and Dick Tidrow to the Yankees for Fred Beene, Tom Buskey, Steve Kline, and Fritz “Wife-Swapper” Peterson. New York had maybe the best corner infielders in baseball in the late 1970s, and it was all thanks to the Tribe.
1976- Accidentally left Rico “Big Mon” Carty, their top RBI man in ‘76, on the unprotected list for the expansion draft, and had to trade John Lowenstein and Rick Cerone to Toronto to get him back.
1978- Lost Jim Bibby to free agency when the club failed to pay him a $10,000 roster bonus in a timely fashion. Bibby went to Pittsburgh, where he helped the Pirates win it all in 1979.
1978- Traded Dennis Eckersley to the Red Sox for Ted Cox, Mike Paxton, and Bo Diaz.
And again, this is just a snippet. To paraphrase Jim Kern, those Indians had a habit of trading one guy who could play, for four guys who couldn’t.
Ten-Cent Beer Night
Ten-Cent Beer Night was an attempt by the club to gin up attendance during the dark days of the early ‘70s. It worked- 25,134 fans, an unusually large crowd, descended upon Municipal Stadium for a game against the Rangers on the evening of June 4, 1974. Many came not to root on the Tribe, but to drink beer- lots, and lots, and lots of beer. Several times during the game, beer-bold fans invaded the field, including at least one streaker, who slid his bare ass into second base during play. Someone launched a jug of Thunderbird wine at Ranger first baseman and future Tribe manager Mike Hargrove (maybe he knew something nobody else did at the time). All hell broke loose in the ninth inning, when a group of ruffians jumped the fence and attacked Ranger right fielder Jeff Burroughs. When Texas manager Billy Martin, who knew a good drunken melee when he saw one, led his charges onto the field, armed with bats, to rescue Burroughs, it was on. A full-fledged riot ensued, during which someone uprooted a chair and smashed home plate umpire Nestor Chylak over the head with it. When order was finally restored, the Indians, who had rallied to tie the game and had men on first and third with two out in the ninth, were forced to forfeit.
(The Indians had three more Ten-Cent Beer Nights planned, and only called them off when ordered to by AL President Lee McPhail.)
Eventually things improved. John Hart joined the front office in 1989, and began swinging the deals that would make Cleveland a baseball powerhouse once again. In 1994 the club abandoned Municipal Stadium for Jacobs Field, and that season they had their best record in thirty-five years. The Tribe won six AL Central championships in seven years, and even made two appearances in the World Series in the 1990s. They lost to the Braves in six in 1995, and in ’97 became the first team in Fall Classic history to blow a ninth-inning lead in Game Seven. That’s the kind of thing that makes you long for the salad days of safe, pressure-free, seventh place.
From one Jesse to another Posted: 6/30/2005by: Jesse L. I didn't forget about the Olin-Crews-Ojeda accident at Little Lake Nellie... I just didn't want to go there. Although admittedly it wouldn't have been a bad idea to spotlight the bad luck the franchise had along those lines (Herb Score, Tony Horton, Olin and Crews, etc.).
Fath- nice comment. And you're right. As much of a hellhole as the Muni was, there really was something special about emerging from the tunnel and seeing that green field, especially since you couldn't see the field from the concourse, a la the Jake. It was like an unwrapping surprise, every time.
MEH- Of course I mentioned Alex Cole. How could I not, brother? And did he lead the league in triples in 1990? I thought he just had one good game, and that sold the club on him being, I don't know, the next Lou Brock or something.
Tom A.- You liked the Twinkies reference? Who knew? BTW, Shane Mack didn't actually hit .850 against the Tribe in '91- his real numbers were .333 with 4 homers (inc. a grand slam) and 14 RBI. Seemed like .850 though. Steve Freakin' Olin Posted: 6/29/2005by: Jesse Alexander You forgot about Steve Olin and Bobby Ojeda hitting that dock in spring training. Probably the only team in history to lose a releif pitcher to decapitation. Something to be said Posted: 6/29/2005by: Jim Fath for the shitty days at old Municipal. I remember my first game. I was 9 and the Indians played the Twins. (And lost) I remember walking up one of those ominous grandstand ramps and marveling at the mammoth size of the place. I dont think Ive ever set foot in a stadium that large since.
Memories of telling my dad Hey Mikey and I are going to go play in the bleachers in right field with the drum guy. Ok hed say. Cause he could keep an eye on us from pretty much anywhere as the place was totally empty. The yellow seats especially. I think it was in the 70s they added lodges to the underside of the upperdeck. This reduced the view in upper most seats in the lower grandstand area to the ankle of the catcher and umpire. TVs were installed so people could see the rest of the field. How awful would that be?
If I think for a moment I can still smell that place. The dirt, the beer, the urine, and the occasional smell of a hot dog. I remember seeing the bathtub urinals and asking my dad if it was a real bathtub and I could pee in ours at home. (NO and NO was his reply)
One night the summer camp I was in took us down to see a game. There were about 400 of us. Against the 13,000 at the game it seemed like a huge group. I can still remember all of us annoying the drunks in the stands clanging those old ass wooden seats down over and over again cheering on the tribe as they rallied late and actually won. It ended up being the last game I would see at the old stadium. I went through a dry spell in Middle School and didnt see a game again until 94. Still though I would stand my last night in municipal against any kids memory of the Yankees winning it all. You cant deny the joy of 400 kids all cheering their hearts out for the worst team in baseball and having them actual fucking win.
Fun Fact: A guy I went to high school with (Troy Studdly) climbed the foul poll in left field during the second last game at municipal when they played the Sox. I saw it Aaaaaaaah, now that's more like it. Posted: 6/29/2005by: Deadocmike As a recent transplant to Florida, I was missing my Tribe futility stories. EVen now, as they go on a (for the Indians) tear, my Indians memories will forever be of 1987 opening day at the Stadium with that very same Sports Illustrated in my hands and Mesa collapsing in the ninth against the Marlins. Ahhhh Haa Posted: 6/29/2005by: JAson I have been celebrating Cleveland losing for my entire life. When I was a little kid I used to bat just like Julio Franco. Not Julio from the Powerhouse Indians, but Juuuuuuuuuulio from the Toilet Indians. I agree with MEH about the "Buy a New Hat and Call Your Friends and Wave Fans" Get off your fucking phone and watch the game. Maybe you would pay attention to the game if you suffered through that bad old days you "Jump On the Bandwagon Sons a Bitches" . . . . Woah I am obviously taking this way to personal.
Conditioned to Expect the Worst Posted: 6/29/2005by: Byrd I can remember being in Municipal Stadium to see Kenny Loften steal home. It was one of the coolest live moments I've ever witnessed at a baseball game. He kept creeping off, more and more, to the point where it occurs to you, "I think he's gonna go!"
I also remember turning to my older brother and asking, "They're going to trade him, won't they?" Those seasons just before the Jake opened had a young Albert "They called me Joey at LSU" Bell, Charles Nagy, and Sandy Almomar, Jr. The future looked bright, but we were all convinced something would go horribly wrong. Fortunately, the late 90's provided some long awaited fun and enthusiasm. Great article. Nice! Posted: 6/29/2005by: Bob Brandt That was just about the finest writing on the topic I've ever seen Well done, Jesse! If you were to slap this essay together with the one on how Cleveland pissed off their turn-of-the-century tycoons (appeared in one of the free local rags last year), you'd get a pretty good grasp on why things are the way they are. One more thing Posted: 6/29/2005by: MEH I just have to give mad, mad props for the mention of Alex Cole. I mean, to build an entire ballpark around one mediocre leadoff hitter after he leads the league in triples once? BRILLIANT! That's Some Good Stuff, Jesse Posted: 6/29/2005by: Tom A And I get the feeling this was something of a catharsis for you (like venting about those dreadful Vi-Queens losses was for me on "Worst Loss").
Great info, as per usual. This was a chcukler, too - Beer Night remembrance is classic. Billy Martin indeed knew his way around a beer muscles event. (What a great idea to take bats out into the melee!) The part I like best, though, is that the Indians HAD TO BE TOLD by the league not to have the rest of the scheduled "Beer Nights."
Also, just thinking about Albert Bell makes me smile.
P.S. Appreciate the mention of the '91 Twinkies and Shano Mack (Daddy) -second-best "Rule 5" pick-up in the team's history (Johan Santana). Ahhhhhh... Posted: 6/29/2005by: MEH That's better, Jesse...something I can really relate to: a celebration of Cleveland losing. Gawd I remember cutting school to go to season openers down at The Toilet. And the late September nights when the Tribe would pull 7,000 to a 45 degree Stadium. And the toilets dripping on your head. I still think that in order to get the "Buy a New Hat and Call Your Friends and Wave" dugout seats at the Jake you should have to show some General Admission ticket stubs from Cleveland Muni to prove your bona fides. Another well-written, well-researched excellent piece.
