CLEVELAND — The man with the chestnut-colored beard, navy shirt and gray necklace walked off the elevator and onto the service level of Progressive Field, where he met resistance from a security guard.
That man’s image is plastered onto brick wall murals in the tunnel that connects the home clubhouse and dugout. With Cleveland stitched across his chest for nine seasons, he collected 1,120 base hits. But on an early September weekend, Jason Kipnis had left behind his media credential. As he returned to the radio booth to retrieve his pass, Kipnis’s thoughts turned again to one near-home run from almost seven years ago, a moment that could have changed Cleveland sports history forever — but didn’t.
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“If it was fair, you would know who I was,” he thought.
Kipnis represented Cleveland in a pair of All-Star games. He ranks in the top 25 in team history in hits, runs, home runs and stolen bases. If he could go back in time and change the flight path of that one particular baseball, though, he wouldn’t need extra documentation to gain access to the locker room he once called home.
Few outsiders are better equipped to understand the plight of the Cleveland baseball fan than Kipnis. October 11 marks the 75th anniversary of the club’s last championship, the longest spell in the league and one of the most tortuous, yet under-the-radar hexes in sports history, when considering the decades of despair and the spirit-crippling close calls.
In the last 20 years, the Red Sox, White Sox and Cubs have all exorcised demons, dispelling long-standing, conversation-dominating droughts. Cleveland’s supporters continue to wait their turn, shouldering the pain in the shadows of baseball’s big markets.
Every day, Cleveland buries some devotee who despondently uttered at one point or another, “Just win one before I die.”
Kipnis was raised in the Chicago suburbs, a half-hour north of Wrigley Field, where he lived down the street from Steve Bartman. He monitored the police cars camped outside of Bartman’s house after the guy in the black crewneck and green turtleneck and cheap headphones in Seat 113 became Chicago’s greatest villain during Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS. Kipnis’ uncle delivered one of Ryne Sandberg’s children. Kipnis listened to Harry Caray, tuned in for every Sammy Sosa at-bat in the late ‘90s and pinched himself when he played defense behind Kerry Wood during an Indians spring training game a decade after Wood struck out 20 in a rookie-season masterpiece.
As the Cubs secured a World Series berth in 2016, their first in 71 years, Kipnis teared up, unsure of how to navigate the flood of emotions of his childhood team — the one with the high-profile curse — serving as the last line of defense between his Indians and a desperately sought-after championship.
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That autumn, Kipnis had the chance to convert backyard fantasy into World Series reality, but with a twist. When he blasted a three-run homer in Game 4, the hollering from his friends and family was drowned out by a seething Chicago crowd, a scene he never could have fathomed.
In Game 7, though, he held the fate of baseball’s two longest droughts in his hands. In the bottom of the ninth, with the game tied, a fatiguing Aroldis Chapman uncorked slider after slider. Kipnis knew he couldn’t dismiss Chapman’s heat, even if the southpaw was on fumes.
So when he connected on a slider, despite a split-second of intrigue from his vantage point in the batter’s box, Kipnis knew he was out in front. The TV camera angle and the initial “oooh” from the Cleveland crowd deceived Indians fans watching from their living room couch or from an overcrowded bar.
Kipnis followed the ball’s trajectory. He saw it tail toward foul territory and plunge long before it would have reached the right-field fence. If he were to be immortalized in Cleveland sports history beside LeBron James and Otto Graham and Lou Boudreau, and in larger baseball lore beside Bill Mazeroski, Joe Carter and Kirk Gibson — if he were to earn the right to strut around Progressive Field without a credential — it wouldn’t be on that pitch.
“I would have been half-naked by the time that ball hit the outfield wall, doing cartwheels,” Kipnis says.
Instead, the Indians fell short in extra innings, an agonizingly familiar outcome for a fan base starved for a November parade. The Cubs’ drought, a suffocating national baseball topic, ceased at 108 years. They formed a dogpile on the soggy grass at Progressive Field, where they bequeathed the burden to those in the opposite dugout.
Cleveland’s spell now sits at 75 years.
“It’s been a long time,” said Carlos Baerga, second baseman for the runner-up 1995 Indians. “I don’t think people talk about it. They should talk about it.”
There’s an old joke about miserable nights at Municipal Stadium, the cavernous venue that stood on the shores of Lake Erie. You’d call the Indians’ ticket office early in the day to ask for the first-pitch time that evening, and an employee, desperate to fill an empty seat or two, would reply: “What time can you get here?”
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The decrepit dungeon hosted four decades of bad, irrelevant baseball between a World Series appearance in 1954 and the Indians’ exodus to Jacobs Field in 1994. The Cubs may have been synonymous with losing, but when Hollywood screenwriters penned “Major League” they didn’t choose a story about the north-siders defying their owner and sparking a pennant chase. The fictional script reflected a dose of Cleveland’s depressing, everyday reality.
In the NFL, the Arizona Cardinals technically own the longest title drought, dating back to 1947. But they won that championship, 20 years before the first Super Bowl, as the Chicago Cardinals.
In the NBA, the Sacramento Kings have suffered the longest, their last title coming in 1951 as the Rochester Royals. The droughts for the Hawks, Suns, Clippers, Knicks and Pacers also date back at least a half-century.
In the NHL, the Stanley Cup has eluded the Toronto Maple Leafs since 1967. The Buffalo Sabres and Vancouver Canucks, who joined the league in 1970, have never won the title.
In MLB, half the league’s 30 teams have won a title since the turn of the century. The Rangers, Brewers, Padres and Mariners, who all joined the league between 1961-77, have never won a World Series.
| Team | Years | Span |
|---|---|---|
1908-2016 | 108 | |
1917-2005 | 88 | |
1918-2004 | 86 | |
1903-1980 | 77 | |
1948-present | 75 |
The Guardians’ drought is the longest active stretch in professional sports for a franchise that has remained in one city.
Kipnis: “’48, right? I’m not doing the math.”
Guardians GM Mike Chernoff: “Seventy-five years? Are we on 75?”
Brian Sweeney, former Guardians pitching coach: “It’s Cleveland. Was it 1947? ’48? When I was here, I never even thought about it. It was, ‘How do we get to the World Series? But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh s–t.’”
At the same time, there’s no sense of a great tragedy unfolding over a century’s time, as there was with the Cubs, or with a curse traced to the trade of perhaps baseball’s greatest player to the franchise’s ultimate rival, as there was with the Red Sox. If Cleveland’s drought isn’t the longest baseball has ever had, it might be the quietest.
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Kole Calhoun, who joined the Guardians in August, figured the franchise won a title during its ‘90s glory days. He guessed the Rangers held the dubious distinction once the Cubs vanquished their curse. Many of the Guardians’ players — they’ve had the youngest roster in baseball the last two years — have no idea they’re representing the team most desperate for a title, or that the most recent triumph occurred around the time their grandparents were born.
Just how long ago was 1948? Here’s an actual dispatch from the last baseball championship parade in downtown Cleveland.
Broadcaster Van Patrick: “Here’s Bob Lemon, the guy who won two of the ballgames. Bob, come over here, will ya? Fella who got two World Series victories. Congratulations to you. You didn’t shave this morning!”
Lemon: “Well, I didn’t have time, man.”
Patrick: “Congratulations to you, Bob.”
There are two types of suffering, and Cleveland has mastered both. There were the dreadful, forlorn years at the old building, the seasons that left a dull pain, the ones that chased away fans from the stadium and resulted in the franchise coming within a handful of residents’ votes from relocating to Tampa or Denver in the early ‘90s. And there’s the sharp, stabbing sensation that accompanies thoughts of 1995 or 1997 or 2007 or 2016 or 2017, haunting flashbacks to generous strike zones and José Mesa and Joel Skinner and an ill-timed rain delay and to moments that transformed relative nobodies such as Troy O’Leary and Craig Counsell and David Ross and Greg Bird and Didi Gregorius into the city’s sworn enemies.
“There’s a lot of good history, and some demoralizing history, too,” said 57-year-old Sandy Alomar Jr., a player-turned-coach who has spent nearly half his life in the organization.
(Audio from Cleveland’s parade in 1948 / Courtesy of the team)
Terry Francona’s ties to the organization trace back to his father’s six seasons in Cleveland from 1959-64. As a toddler, Francona tagged along to the ballpark with his father. As a veteran big-leaguer, Francona spent a productive season in Cleveland in 1988. As the winningest manager in franchise history, Francona guided the club for 11 years.
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But there’s no storybook ending here, either. And it’s not the 2016 shortcoming that sticks with Francona.
“The easy answer is 2016. I wish we had won, bad,” Francona says. “But 2017 still eats at me. If I start thinking about 2017, I get mad. I can’t help it. We’re up 2-0 (in the ALDS) and we didn’t put our best foot forward and I thought that team was built to win and we didn’t. That will always eat at me.”
Jeremy Goldberg was sitting on the third-base line at Fulton County Stadium when Marquis Grissom squeezed the 27th out for Atlanta in 1995. He watched his grandfather, a Braves fan, celebrate a long-awaited triumph as Albert Belle, Cleveland’s hulking cleanup hitter, traipsed to the dugout from the on-deck circle after the 1-0 defeat in Game 6.
Goldberg was standing in the aisle at Pro Player Stadium, itching to head for the exit, when the Marlins loaded the bases against Charles Nagy in the bottom of the 11th in Game 7 in 1997. He couldn’t bear to witness Edgar Renteria’s walk-off single that snuck past Nagy’s outstretched glove. He refuses to listen to Queen’s “We Are The Champions” after hearing it on a loop in the stadium parking lot. It still irks him how fans started The Wave in the crowd that night, and how they prioritized watching Florida State-Virginia on the concourse TVs during Game 6.
“These guys don’t even get it,” he says, “let alone get the pain of a midwestern city that’s had a team since 1901. I didn’t think I would ever recover from ’97.”
Goldberg was sitting in the lower bowl at Progressive Field, behind Eddie Vedder, when Bill Murray snatched a handful of popcorn from his bucket during Game 7 in 2016, before Murray’s Cubs completed their comeback from down 3-1 in the series.
“Extra innings, Game 7. Twice,” Goldberg says. “It’s hard to even say out loud.”
“Sorry, I blocked that out of my memory,” Chernoff says about 2016. “I don’t even know what you’re referring to.”
Had the Indians emerged victorious on that unseasonably warm evening in early November, Rajai Davis might have a statue on E. 9th Street.
“Mmm …” Davis says, shaking his head while pondering his likeness greeting fans entering the center-field gates. “It was 16 years of preparation for one moment to shine. My mindset was, ‘I’m gonna win this battle. He’s Goliath. I’m David. I have my bat. He has the ball.’”
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Davis choked up on his bat as he fouled off one Chapman fastball after another. Then, he yanked one to left field, and the ballpark shook as the baseball disappeared onto the home run porch. But the high stemming from the most dramatic singular moment in the last 75 years of the franchise lasted less than an hour.
Davis’ 8-year-old son still regularly watches the video of his father’s game-tying, eighth-inning blast, but to some, Goldberg included, it’s more a footnote in a loss than a historic baseball feat.
“It’s a labor of love,” Goldberg said. “I don’t think there are a lot of people out there who have seen them lose three World Series in person. That’s not a club I’m proud to be in. The Marlins and Cubs losses, I think about a lot. I’ll never, ever get over them until, if and when we win. I’m turning 50 this year. Who knows? There are no promises.”
In September, with the Guardians teetering on the edge of playoff race elimination, Alomar and fellow coach Victor Rodriguez peered up at the pennants painted onto the wall in the upper deck in Cleveland and recounted the club’s close calls. Alomar was Cleveland’s catcher in ’95 and ’97 and has been a member of the coaching staff for the last 15 seasons, a rare link between the two eras, the sole soul to suffer through it all.
Friends will tell him MLB Network is re-airing Game 7 from 1997 or 2016, and he’ll supply his usual refrain.
Let me know when the outcome changes and I’ll watch it.
Alomar admits he found himself daydreaming about the eventual celebration when the Indians seized a 3-1 series lead on the Cubs.
“People around the world said it was (the Cubs’) turn,” he says. “Then our (drought) was brought up. But nobody hears about it anymore.”
Alomar surmises it’s because the team has avoided being a league doormat for much of the last 30 years, even though the ultimate prize remains elusive.
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“We’ve had so many winning seasons that they don’t put it together,” he says. “But it’s about a World Series championship, not just being a winning team. One of the reasons I hang around here is to try to do something special for this franchise, the city, the people.
“I really would love to see something happen before I head home.”
Jimmy Keis always told his kids he didn’t want to wear any Cleveland gear with a player’s name on the back. He was devoted to the team, not the individuals who filtered onto and off of the roster over the course of his 63 years of attending games.
Keis watched his first Indians game in 1960, at the age of 9. He dreamed of being a sportscaster. His work buddies at the steel mill nicknamed him “Hawk” after Ken Harrelson. As a teenager, Keis saved money from his paper route to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to ride to Municipal Stadium.
He attended every home opener from 1969-2023, a string of 54 in a row, aside from the 2020 opener, attended by only cardboard cutouts. He took his kids to games in Detroit, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Toronto. He befriended ushers and fans and ticket reps. He witnessed Len Barker’s perfect game in 1981 and World Series contests in 1995 and 1997. He had season tickets for more than 30 years.
When he and his daughter drove home from the Cleveland Clinic after visiting his ailing wife, they passed Progressive Field on I-90 and he would wax poetic about what he dubbed “heaven on Earth,” an Eden where he could ditch his troubles for a few hours. After his wife passed, he pleaded with his children not to bury him in a suit. When he died in May, they dressed him in a Guardians polo with a red C logo and requested anyone attending his funeral to wear sports attire.
Keis was born 19 months after Lou Boudreau steered the Indians to the franchise’s most recent championship. The guy who paid extra for paper tickets that he kept in a plastic case so they wouldn’t bend or tear, who stapled his stubs and his completed scorecard to the game program for his collection — he never witnessed a title for himself.
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“Seventy-five years. Seventy-five,” Goldberg says. “I don’t want to be reminded of the details, because it’s too painful. But I want people to know the plight of the 75 years, so when we do win, people can appreciate it that much more.”
(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: David E. Klutho, Jeff Haynes, Chuck Solomon, Justin Merriman / Getty Images, Sports Illustrated, AFP)
