I’m back in Cleveland, the city where I was born.
It’s the city where, more than 60 years ago, my father tried to teach me the game he loved most, tossing underhand pitch after underhand pitch in the shabby play area behind the equally shabby duplex where we lived while I, an uncoordinated 3-year-old, flailed away trying to make contact with the ball.
It’s also the city where I saw my first baseball game.
My dad took me when I was 4. Thus began my love and loyalty for what were then the Cleveland Indians and now are the Cleveland Guardians.
I’m with my son this time.
We’re here to see the Guardians play the Chicago White Sox in an American League playoff game.
As my father did with me, I took my son to his first major league baseball game here. He was 6 then, a little boy overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the ballpark. He clung to my hand as we walked to our seats as if he thought the earth might open up and swallow him.
Now, he’s a grown man in his middle 20s, a strapping fellow nearly three inches taller than I am who moves with the grace and assurance of an accomplished athlete. He played this game and played it well for years.
We’ve seen a lot of Cleveland baseball games over the years.
Perhaps the most memorable was the first game of the 2016 World Series between Cleveland and the Chicago Cubs—two, until then, perennial major league baseball also-rans.
Those two squads, though, produced one of the greatest fall classics of all time. They battled for the full seven games before the Cubs came out on top in extra innings of the last game. Over the course of the seven games, the two teams scored exactly the same number of runs.
But Chicago claimed the title that year and Cleveland finished the season with a loss.
That’s the way it’s been for my entire life.
My team closes the year either out of the running or with a loss.
But that’s not the only reason to love the game or a team.
For years, when my son was younger, my father and I took him to Cleveland to see several games over Labor Day weekend. One year, Dad decided he wanted to visit the old neighborhood where he first tried to teach me how to play baseball.
We went back to the shabby duplex.
As soon as I parked the car, Dad, then in his 80s, grabbed a glove and said, “Let’s throw some.”
So, in the place where all those years ago he tried to teach young me how to play, my father, my son and I played pitch and catch on a quiet Sunday morning.
As the ball moved around our little triangle in the place where I had been a boy, I thought, “This is a moment I’ll remember when I approach my end.”
Dad died a little more than three years ago.
About a week after that, my son, my daughter and I were in Cleveland. We decided to see a baseball game. Both of my children spent much of the game thinking and talking about their departed grandfather and his love of baseball.
Now, both my daughter and my son live on the East Coast—in Boston and New York, respectively.
When the Guardians come to either city, they often will see the game—and if they’re visiting each other when Cleveland plays in one of their cities, they go together.
This hasn’t been an easy year for the Guardians.
Blessed with superb pitching, they’ve often struggled to manufacture runs. They play hard and they’re fun to watch, but they don’t have the firepower to compete with truly complete teams.
On this night, they come up short, 4-3, and place themselves in a seemingly insurmountable hole. Down two games to zero, it seems inevitable that their season will end with a loss once again.
Afterward, I talk with my son and, by phone, with my daughter about the game and the satisfactions and frustrations of loving the Indians and Guardians.
And I think about how a passion that started with their grandfather continues to this day.
Baseball exists to break one’s heart.
Sometimes in a good way.
