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All right, young Mr. Tony Restaino, this year's the year. Even your endearing devotion to the Cleveland Browns football team won't save you this time. Your "new look" Yankees are as thin as a dancer's dress at the Sundowner. Gray-haired arms, guys who had a good season last year with somebody else and the same pinched and trademarked Joe Torre stare.
You knew it was going south when their cable deal fell through this spring. The games aren't even on basic cable in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island! It is almost as though New York has become Montreal, where the games aren't broadcast in English. I'm writing this letter to you on Friday night, and I speak not only for Cleveland, but for the fans in Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Toronto and points west. WE ARE ABSOLUTELY SICK OF THE YANKEES!
It's been a sweet night, my friend. A night to savor, indeed. The Tribe won its ninth in a row and 10th overall in Kansas City tonight, 3-1. At 10-1, theirs is the best record in all of baseball. In Boston, the Yankees stumbled to their third defeat in as many games and enter the weekend with a lackluster 8-4 record.
Creaky Roger Clemens is the proud owner of a losing record and a 7.56 ERA. Jason Giambi isn't batting his weight. Bernie Williams and Shane Spencer are off to unusually slow starts and the oft-injured El Duque is throwing just well enough to lose games.
I know what you're thinking, it's early yet. It's a long season.
But somewhere, deep within the recesses of that pinstriped mind, wouldn't you like to be rooting for a team off to its best start in more than 35 years, whose young rotation has compiled a perfect 10-0 record and that boasts a lineup that took the losses of Manny Ramirez, Juan Gonzalez and Robbie Alomar as nothing more than minor bumps in the road?
The ignominy heaped on the rest of the American League by consistent, repeated and predictable Yankee championships has been too much for many fans to bear and more than likely accounts for the rise of professional football and basketball in the popular culture.
Let's face it, if you know how something's going to end, and then have to wait six months for the expected outcome to occur, there's not much drama. Like watching paint dry, my grandfather used to say.
From 1960 to 1993, the Indians finished as high as third place just once (1968). To the kids in the neighborhood, it was as though we'd won it all.
Ownership changes (there were seven during the '60s and '70s) and plans to move the team to Buffalo or New Orleans were the stuff of childhood nightmares.
The only major leaguer ever killed during the course of a game was Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman, and the only game ever forfeited because drunken fans rioted during a "Nickel Beer Night" promotion is also Cleveland's shameful cross to bear.
Catcher Bo Diaz was the Indians home run leader in 1981 with seven, and was killed a couple of years later when the satellite dish he was fixing on the roof of his house fell on him.
Lefty Herb Score went 36-19 during his first two seasons with the Tribe before taking a line drive to the face that blinded him in one eye and ended his career.
The club traded Roger Maris, Rocky Colavito, Greg Nettles, Chris Chambliss, Luis Tiant and numerous other stars for players whose names nobody remembers.
Contrast this to the merry and coddled childhoods enjoyed by Yankees fans. Monument Valley and the shades of the Iron Horse, the Bambino and the Yankee Clipper.
Reality rarely intrudes on youthful innocence when you've got Mantle and Maris on your team and it's Whitey Ford's turn on the mound. So great is this sense of entitlement that many followers of the Bronx Bombers still argue Don Mattingly's case as a legitimate Hall of Famer.
Go tell it to Buddy Bell.
It took almost 40 years for the first Indians team of my lifetime to make it to the World Series in 1995.
They did it again in 1997, and this season, my friend -- as your Yogi Berra once said -- feels like deja vu all over again. Salute, Tony.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 16 2002 |