Cleveland Indians: A good season or a great season in 2017?

Cleveland Indians fans witnessed some great baseball in 2017, but different fans may look back upon the season in much different ways.

Cleveland Indians fans came into the season with World Series expectations.

ESPN’s Sam Miller recently ranked all 30 MLB teams based on their season goals.

His central premise was sound:

"While it’s true 29 of 30 major league teams failed to win the World Series this year, it’s not true 29 teams had unsuccessful seasons. If that were true, almost everybody — teams, players, fans — would be unhappy almost all the time. This wouldn’t be fun. We’d all stop doing this."

Where I take issue with Miller’s analysis is his conclusion regarding the Indians (which came in at No. 7 on the list, if you’re curious). In short, Miller argues that the 2017 Indians had a “good” rather than a “great” season.

This got me wondering: Is this how most Indians fans will remember the 2017 Indians season?

If so, allow me to make the following counter-argument: The 2017 Indians had a G-R-E-A-T season.

I went into spring training thinking this could be one of the handful of truly great Cleveland Indians teams in history. By July 19, with the Indians sitting at 48-45, struggling to fend off the Minnesota Twins, I began feeling more like I was watching Major League 2.

But then, on August 24, the Indians broke the glass case over a big red button that said “DO NOT PUSH!” and went all Nuclear-Atomic-Super-Shredder on the rest of the American League.

If you had placed a $5 bet on the Indians winning the first game of the 22-game streak and got someone to double or nothing you until it was over, you’d have been up $10,485,760!

220 families got free windows this summer, and an insurance company paid for all of it!

When I first heard the spot on the radio, free windows if the Indians win 15 games in a row, I literally laughed out loud at it, the idea was so preposterous. 15 games in a row the very year after they rattled off 14? That was about as likely as the third inning grand slam giveaway.

Then, in late July, they won nine games in a row and lost. Fun while it lasted, I thought, but there goes that. The Indians had other thoughts and later more than doubled that nine-game streak.

When the 22-game streak started, it was August 24. Summer was still in full swing. I had a deep dark tan and it was Summer Shandy drinking season. By the time it was over, on September 15, we’d blown past Labor Day, summer was more or less over, and I was pasty again with a glass of rye whiskey in hand. I was a completely different person.

And, oh yeah, after finally losing a game, they responded by rattling off another five wins in a row against two teams competing for a Wild Card spot.

In short, for a long, long stretch of the 2017 season, the Cleveland Indians played like one of the best baseball teams to ever take the field.

And at this point, you’re probably thinking: “Yeah, but they didn’t win the World Series. Who are the Browns playing on Sunday?”

I get it. For the first few days following the ALDS loss, I thought the same thing myself.

But then I realized something: The way we think about baseball especially in a sports-tortured city like Cleveland, is completely backward.

Everyone knows the story of Sisyphus, forced to roll a large rock up a hill for all eternity. Every time, when he was just about to reach the top, the rock would roll back down and he’d have to start all over again. This myth was not originally written as a metaphor to explain how Clevelanders relate to their sports teams, but it serves that purpose nicely.

Battered by years of ineptitude and failure, we forgot somewhere along the line that sports can and should actually be fun—fun as they’re actually happening, not just as a means to some hoped-for end.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped viewing sports as a reliable source of entertainment to be enjoyed throughout the year and started viewing it as a grueling task to be endured on the off-chance that this would be the year it would all end in a world championship.

But this is foolish, a chasing of the wind. As Miley Cyrus says,

"I can almost see it That dream I am dreaming But there’s a voice inside my head saying You’ll never reach it"

This is so “us!” But hear me out, Cleveland! Listen to what Miley has to say next:

"There’s always gonna be another mountain I’m always gonna wanna make it move Always gonna be an uphill battle Sometimes I’m gonna have to loseAin’t about how fast I get there Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side It’s the climb"

We didn’t used to feel this way. In fact, Clevelanders still love the old 90s teams, even though they never won a World Series.

The World Series is always the goal, I get it. The players themselves will tell you that. In fact, the players did tell you that during and after the streak. And believe me, I want nothing more from sports than to see just one World Series Championship banner raised before I die.

But the main reason I follow the Cleveland Indians each year from March to (hopefully late) October can’t possibly be on the off-chance that this is the year they finally win it all.

Look, everyone knows the MLB postseason is a crapshoot pressure cooker of ultimate cosmic doom for all but one talented, deserving, but also lucky team.

There’s no formula for surviving it. Like in life, sometimes an airplane part just falls from the sky and lands on your head. Sometimes, it comes down to superior talent, but even more often, not. It certainly doesn’t come down to effort.

As far as I can tell, the best chance for your team to win the World Series is for it to make the playoffs eight consecutive years, and preferably more. Oh, and have a dominant bullpen (and not make seven errors in two games).

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Baseball is crazy, unpredictable. In fact, by most standards, it’s absolutely insane. Everyone says this so often that sometimes I think we forget that it’s actually true. There are more possible moves in a game of chess than atoms in the known universe.

Well, if that’s true, then you could probably fill Progressive Field with chess boards and still not even begin to approach how many variables there are that go into determining the outcome of a single baseball game, let alone a series, let alone a season.

But we’re human. We want explanations for the inexplicable. In the old days, when the natural world did not conform to our wishes, we would throw someone into a volcano. These days, we have post game conferences with the losing team’s manager.

It all begs the question:

Why do we even watch baseball? Why do we torture ourselves with this infernal, baffling game?

The answer cannot possibly be because we hope our team will win the World Series that year. That just doesn’t make any sense at all. There are 162 games in the regular season alone. If a team is to win it all, it would have to play a minimum of 11 more games and probably quite a few more.

The Major League Baseball season is long—comically, tragically, insanely long. If we’re plowing through all that solely in the hope that the Indians make the playoffs, win in the ALDS, win in the ALCS, and win the World Series—and if any of this sequence of events does not occur we will be disappointed and feel cheated—then we’re doing it wrong. There are many, many, many better uses for our time.

And this brings us to the beauty of that insanely, tragically, comically long season: Baseball is always there when we need it. It’s on your headphones when you’re mowing the lawn in the summer. It’s on the radio when you’re having a bonfire in the backyard. It’s on at the bar on some random Tuesday night in June when Ramirez is coming up with a runner on first and he hasn’t hit a double in three at-bats which means he’s due.

I’m not saying the team can be a rusty bucket of horse manure as long as the players are having fun, because they were doing much more than having fun, (though they were doing that, too.) From late July to early October, they were achieving a level of excellence that we are unlikely to see on a baseball field in Cleveland again as long as we live.

Throughout the dog days of summer of 2017, if you wanted to see excellence—real, live, in the flesh excellence, the very top people in their fields performing at the very height of their powers—you had three choices: drive out to Blossom and listen to a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra under the stars, sneak into an operating room at the Cleveland Clinic while an open-heart surgery is underway, or head on down to the corner of Carnegie and Ontario—but you’d better have gotten down there quick, or the Indians were likely to have been up 5-0 by the time you sat down.

So don’t tell me maybe next year. We just experienced two “this years” worth of baseball. And this team is probably going to be a lot of fun to watch again in 2018, and I already can’t wait.

Next: Top 10 wins from 2017

How insane is that?

Cleveland Indians fans witnessed some great baseball in 2017, but different fans may look back upon the season in much different ways.

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