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is for a baseball team!  Some guys pine for a lonely beach in the South Pacific, but Joyce's man longs for this baseball stadium. |
In spring, a young man's
fancy turns to...yikes!
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
It happens every spring. Love and loyalty burst into full bloom. Love suddenly shows itself in all those couples walking hand in hand. Where were they last winter? And loyalty flowers again for baseball fans, as their favorite teams batter up hopes for the best season yet.
Spring is the "next year" that fans talk about after a season that ended badly the previous fall.
For the truly die-hard baseball fan--like my husband Bill--love and loyalty joined hands somewhere in childhood for a lifelong affair with a favorite team. Like romance, this attachment often defies understanding--mine, anyway. I am not a baseball fan. But since this is the spring of our 40 years of marriage, I've decided to trace Bill's relationship with the team he has loved far longer than me. Then perhaps I'll finally smile in tolerance, if not anticipation, when he stops me in mid-sentence to turn up the radio because "the Indians are in the bottom of the 9th" or because they're just about to. . .
Bill fell in love with the Cleveland Indians when he was in the Seventh Grade and has stayed with them over 50 years. Never mind that Cleveland was more than a thousand miles away from his home in Colorado. Never mind that when he grew up he would move to the San Francisco Bay Area with two major league teams of its own. Once he gave his heart to Cleveland, it remained there forever. Bill is a loyal person.
The courtship began in the Fifth Grade when his teacher assigned a state to each of her 48 students for a social studies research report. It was 1948; there were just enough states for each student to get a different one. Bill got Ohio. The Buckeye State and just about everywhere else in the country must have seemed like a million miles away to the kids who grew up in the isolated town of Grand Junction--population 14,000 at the time. The place was walled in by sandstone cliffs on two sides with the vast Utah desert stretching away to the west and the Rocky Mountains rising in the east some 90 miles away.
Bill wrote the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. He received information on the cities of Cincinnati, Akron, Toledo, Columbus and, of course, Cleveland. Each of these places had a mellifluous or staccato name that should have appealed to Bill's fine-tuned aural sense, developed by his family's love of music. But the name that caught his fancy was Cleveland. Two syllables that roll off the tongue. A rise and then a fall.
After his project he found himself pricking his ears whenever he heard that Cleveland's team would be featured on Mutual Radio's "Game of the Day." He and his older brother, Jerry, would put a radio in the porch window and turn it up loudly so they could hear the Indians while they hacked at weeds in the yard. Bill's growing interest was spreading out to his family.
Cleveland was in its glory days in the late '40's and early '50's. Bill tells me that Bob Feller, Early Winn, Mike Garcia, and Bob Lemon were all pitching in those years. The Tribe won the World Series against the Boston Braves in 1948. Larry Doby and Satchel Paige distinguished The Tribe by becoming the first African American players to play for the entire American League.
The city of Cleveland was no joke either. Its factories steamed with post war prosperity and its river hadn't caught fire yet.
More than a year after doing his class report on Ohio, Bill read Feller's autobiography, "Strikeout Story." The Indians had to be special to have such an incredible pitcher. It dawned on Bill that this was "it." The Indians would be his team forever.
It was easy to take to
baseball in Grand Junction. Although there were no major league
teams in the western states at the time, the town's own teams
stoked local interest. The high school produced several state
championship teams and the junior college also did well in its
league. Best of all the town had a good semi-pro team, the Grand
Junction Eagles, which produced a player or two who went on to
the majors.
Bill's entire family watched the Eagles play.
Bill first saw the Cleveland
Indians when he was 13. It was March 31, 1951. They were the
second best team in the American League and Feller was still
pitching. At the opening of each season the Indians and the New
York Giants would barnstorm their way home from training camp
in Arizona, playing exhibition games along the way. They always
played a couple of games in Denver, only 300 miles from Grand
Junction.
Six months before the game that year Bill started begging for
tickets. His parents finally said "yes." When the time
came, his entire family of six piled into their '38 Chevy and
started off on the all-day trek across the Rockies.
About 70 miles out of town
snow began to fly. The family kept going. The higher they got
up Loveland Pass the heavier the snow fell. Turn around? Never!
Crossing a 12,000 foot mountain pass in a blizzard was no problem
to Bill and a tribute to his dad for keeping a promise. Bill
was making his first-ever trip to Denver but the Big City had
no interest for him. The only sight he wanted to see was his
Indians at play.
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The sun came out the next
day--game day. Snow was shoveled into piles inside the outfield
fence. An outfielder rolled into the snow bank while chasing
a ball and came up with something round and white. Legend says
it was a snowball. The two Bobs--Feller and Lemon--pitched and
Willie Mays, in his rookie year, played center field for the
Giants.
Bill had died and gone to heaven. But his dad dragged everyone
home before the second game was over the next day. The weather
looked bad again and they had seen enough as far as he was concerned.
Bill didn't agree but had no choice.
In the summer of 1954, his parents bought the boys a portable radio (with batteries that weighed a ton) so they could listen to their games anywhere--from the front yard to the mountains where the family loved to camp. On the Fourth of July the Kiefers packed their pickup truck for a camping trip in The Rockies near Telluride. Bill and both his brothers jumped into the back and hoisted their radio along so they could hear Cleveland play the Chicago White Sox. As the truck bumped along the dirt mountain pass, it was the bottom of the 8th and the other team had no hits. Suddenly the reception began to break up. Desperation struck. Bill pounded on the cab for his dad to stop. And he did. The best spot to bring back the game was in the middle of the road, so that's where Bill set the radio down. He and his brothers lay down and kept their ears to the set until the final out. The no-hitter remained intact until the last inning. The final score: Indians 2--Chicago 1. Fortunately the road had no other traffic.
When Bill mentions the highs and lows in his life, he includes 1954 as a high point because the Indians entered the World Series with best record in the American League--111 victories--eight games ahead of the hated Yankees. The low occurred a week later when they lost four straight to the New York Giants and thus lost the Series.
Times began to change for the Indians and for Bill. Still sorrowful, he describes how the Tribe dove into a slump that lasted close to 40 years. It happened on May 7, 1957. Two years earlier the team brought up a new pitcher--Herb Score--who set a league rookie record of 245 strikeouts. Fans looked to him as the man to eventually replace the two Bobs, who were now in their mid-30's.
Bill describes what happened
next as if he were there. Gil McDougald of the hated Yankees
came up to bat. He hit a line drive--right into Score's eye.
Blood gushed everywhere. Score was carted off in an ambulance
and Feller finished pitching the game. But Score was never the
same and neither was the team. General Manager Frank Lane then
made some dubious trades, including Rocky Colavito.
"The curse of Colavito," Bill says, "put what
looked like a permanent cloud over The Tribe as they sank to
the lower regions of the League. If the cloud were permanent,
they would still be in the cellar."
Even Hollywood had a laugh with the 1989 movie "Major League."
Cleveland itself became a national joke as the crumbling capital of the Rust Belt which polluted its Cuyahoga River enough for it to catch fire. As for Bill, he went off to Denver for college and then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.
And he married me, a non-sports fan.
In college I attended football games for social reasons and, later on, my son's soccer games and track meets for reasons of parenthood and pride. I enjoy the fast action of soccer and basketball. When our children were young we took the family to football games at nearby Stanford University where we both work. I was really there for the side show--the wacky band, the Dollies, and the antics of the student section. When I got tired of watching, I'd pull out a bag of walnuts to shell for Christmas cookies. Bill pretended he wasn't with me. The other fans dodged flying nut shells.
But I could never bring myself to attend a baseball game with him. Too slow. Too boring. I took no steps to accommodate the love of his life as his parents had done. Bill swallowed this disappointment and found transplants from Cleveland to join him in rooting for the Indians whenever they came to the Bay Area to play the Oakland A's. Whenever he mentioned wanting to see a home game, I'd suggest he take our son. Why would I want to take a trip to Cleveland, a place with no redeeming features? But Bill is not one to take the bull by the horns. If I didn't plan the trip and include both of us, he wouldn't go.
One day he told my beautiful friend Marge on one of their runs in the hills together, "I wish Joyce would go with me to see a game in Cleveland just because she loves me."
Clearly, I knew it was time to go.
The Indians were doing well again. In 1994 they moved their home games from Municipal Stadium ("The Mistake by the Lake") to the state-of-the-art Jacobs Field ("The Jake"). They made it to the World Series in 1995 and '97. Their city revitalized its downtown and built the Rock and Roll Museum. People stopped laughing at anything with the name Cleveland in it.
It wasn't easy to get tickets.
The new Jake was sold out for 450 consecutive games. We had to
wait a couple of seasons. Finally last summer we bought tickets
for a home game with the Toronto Blue Jays on Sept. 26. I planned
that we would fly to Indianapolis, drive to Cleveland for the
game and--to add value to the trip--return to
Indiana to visit Bill's numerous cousins there.
Then 9/11 happened. Air travel went into a tailspin. But our minds were made up. Not even the fear of more terrorism would keep Bill from meeting his beloved Indians on their home turf. We flew in a near-empty plane.
As we crossed the bridge
over the Cuyahoga River, Jacobs Field loomed before us. Bill
stared as if he'd seen the Eiffel Tower for the first time. I
had found a hotel for us right across the street from The Jake.
That night in our room we listened to the crowds roar. Anticipation.
Foreplay, if you will. Our tickets were for the game the following
night.
The next day an icy wind blew off Lake Erie and the sky bore thick clouds. That afternoon we took a tour of Jacobs Field. Bill got to sit in the press box and in the dugout. He got to see the elaborate equipment now used to train his Indians. We noticed that a huge white tarp covered the infield. When we left it started to sprinkle.
That night we ate at a
cafe close to the stadium. The other patrons wore Indians jackets.
Bill's eyes glowed. The moment he'd waited for all his life was
about to happen. Then we walked over to The Jake and had someone
take our picture in front of a statue of Bob Feller. Rivulets
of water dripped off his glove. The sprinkles were getting serious.
Inside the stadium the white tarp was still in place.
Finally game time came and went and almost everyone left. But
Bill stayed put. Just maybe the rain--now falling hard--would
stop, the tarp would be removed, and the Indians would walk out
on the field. I took out the book I had brought to ward off boredom--Amy
Tan's "The Bonesetter's Daughter."
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his love is unrequited? Well, why should he? He's at The Jake in Cleveland! |
After an hour the dread announcement came over the loudspeaker: "The game has been cancelled. You can get refunds by . . ." Bill finally stood up and we left in silence.
After 50 years of love, it was time for the Indians to reciprocate and they failed. Never mind that it wasn't their fault. They had fallen short so many times over the years and Bill had always forgiven them and remained loyal. He always said, "Maybe next year."
And he said it again.
© 2002 by Joyce Kiefer.
The photos are the property of the Kiefer family. All rights
reserved.
*The Editors thank Bill Kiefer for being a good sport--and,
for the record, Joyce tells us he's the Most Valuable Player
in her league.
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