Long Live Chief Wahoo!
The Cleveland Indians
OK, I admit it. I’m an Indians fan. I like to root for the underdog. It’s just something you get used to if you grow up in northeast Ohio. I’ve been fans of other teams, but when push comes to shove. my favorite team has always been the Indians. Well almost.
I guess I became a baseball fan in 1967. That was the year I first played Little League. The first team I can remember calling my favorite was the Boston Red Sox. They were pretty good that year, but that wasn’t why they became my favorite. I liked ‘em because they had a bunch of guys with really cool sounding names. Carl Yastrzemski, Rico Petrocelli, Jim Lonborg, and Tony Conigliaro. Not the best reason for liking a team, but hey, I was 8 and my infatuation lasted all of one summer.
By 1968 I was an Indians fan. Sudden Sam McDowell was my favorite player. They had guys like Max Alvis, Vern Fuller, Duke Sims, Sonny Siebert, and of course Luis Tiant. Sometime later that year, I also became an Orioles fan. I’m really not sure what attracted me to them, but I liked them and they were as much a favorite as the Indians throughout my childhood.
In the late 70s the Angels began collecting many of my favorite players, Doug DeCinces, Bobby Grich, Nolan Ryan, Rod Carew, Don Baylor, and others. They became my “other” favorite team until they finally supplanted the Orioles in the late 80s. That was around the time I lost interest in baseball for a while. I still checked the standing once in a while and even attended a game or two. But I wasn’t the zealot I had been.
It was the Indians that re-awakened my interest in 1994, though the strike that year almost killed it again. Since then it’s been the Indians and the Angels and I couldn’t give a damn about anyone else.
- TDOM
