My Credentials

You've asked — by email, by fax, satellite phone, voice mail, by telephone, telegraph and (somewhat inexplicably) by fortune cookie — about my credentials: What qualifies you, Phutatorius, to write this weblog?

Let me first tell you what I'm not. I am not a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. I am not a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. I have no access to the press box or clubhouse at Jacobs Field. I can't claim a degree or career in journalism. My baseball playing days ended when I was eleven (and with a mammoth last-at-bat home run, I should add). Aside from my status as low-level Internet Personality, I don't even enjoy the privileges of celebrity that might allow me to gush non sequiturishly in public about my favorite team (Billy Crystal) or to wag my fanaticism at the world from agent-procured field box seats (Ben Affleck).

My credentials are these:

*I was born in 1973 in Warren, Ohio. That's Indians territory, but we're close enough to the PA border that there's a strong contingent of Pittsburgh fans in the area. My local paper, the Tribune Chronicle, gives equal time to Pittsburgh sports. Growing up when and where I did, I might have been tempted to abandon my beloved Tribe in favor of another "local" team with better fortunes, but I never did. Surely, my interest in the Indians waxed and waned in proportion to the team's promise (such that for much of the time I was just this side of apathetic about the Wahoo Wonders), but I never sold out. I never sold out. I just waited.

*My grandfather on my father's side was always a fan. He owned an Italian restaurant with a television hoisted up in the corner of the dining room. One of my enduring memories of Greenie is that he sat in the restaurant and watched the Indians play ball every night. If there was a game, it was on. It didn't matter where the Tribe stood in the AL East standings (usually fifth or lower). My grandfather named my uncle, his firstborn son, after Bob Feller. My dad's cousin emigrated from Italy to work in the restaurant. He was a bartender there. Despite all the local influences, Emil was a Yankee fan. Emil was at the game, cheering the away team, when Gil McDougald's liner hit Herb Score in the face. He said you could hear the crack distinctly — it echoed through the park.

*The Herb Score I knew decades later called the games on WWWE, AM radio that my dad would play in the garage on the weekends while he washed his car or hosed down the garage floor. I remember Pete Franklin talking Tribe on "3WE" in the car; he was forever on the edge of bursting a blood vessel. I didn't particularly like Pete Franklin. I was young and he scared me. Only now, as I find myself uttering strings of obscenities at the radio when CC or Westie issues a leadoff walk, do I understand Franklin's passion. Of course, Franklin would later ditch Cleveland for the bigger New York market, but that's another matter entirely.

*I saw Rick Manning record the final putout of Lenny Barker's perfect game. I watched that game with my dad on Channel 43, WUAB. Between innings, Channel 43 would run Superhost ads ("Saturday afternoon: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla!") and maybe a few of those memorable "Garfield 1-2-3-2-3" spots, though the latter cropped up more commonly on Channel 5, WEWS.

*Sometime during the 1980s, the Indians went on an unexpected tear, winning nine or ten games in a row. My father took the family (my grandfather, too), to the stadium for a game against Kansas City. Dad had always said that for all the enduring hoopla over the Browns, Cleveland was really a baseball town. It just needed something, some sign of life in the Indians organization, to awaken it from its dormancy. There had to have been 50,000+ fans supporting the hometown team when we got there that night. The Royals beat us and ended the streak.

[Note: The usually reliable Retrosheet tells me that the Tribe actually won that game, and that there were only 23000+ fans in the park to see it. But this conflicts with my memory of the game, so I refuse to believe it. Retrosheet also reports that we lost nine of the next ten games — that I believe.]

*In 1992, the summer after my freshman year in college, I took a job as an intern in my father's office. A friend and co-worker approached me with a clipping from USA Today, touting the bright future of Indians minor-league prospect Manny Ramirez. "Remember that name," Sammy told me, and I did. But I was not always so well-informed. In one of my earliest forays on the Internet, I declared on an Indians bulletin board that the Tribe would rue the day it traded Felix Fermin to Seattle. "Gato's underrated," I wrote. "His numbers don't tell the whole story. He's a slick-fielding shortstop and he almost never strikes out. This Vizquel guy we're getting? He can't hit a lick."

*I bought a fitted Cleveland Indians home (red bill) cap, on the way to my first game at Jacobs Field in '94. When the MLBPA went on strike later that year, with the Tribe hot on the heels of the White Sox for the lead in the American League Central — the Indians' first real year of contention in my lifetime — I stuck a handful of safety pins in the Major League Baseball logo on that cap in protest. I tried organizing a fans' picket of the ballpark that August, but in the end I couldn't muster any interest. When the teams returned to play in 1995, I got in the habit of wearing the hat whenever the Indians were playing. One day my grandmother insisted that I take off the hat while we ate lunch. "It's impolite to wear a hat at the table," she told me. I obliged, and the Indians promptly fell behind the Blue Jays 8-0. I pleaded with my grandmother to let me put the hat back on. She finally relented, and the Indians mounted an historic comeback that culminated in Paul Sorrento's game-winning home run. That hat is twelve years old, and I still have it. It's natty, ratty, torn-up, and despite repeated launderings it smells a deep and disturbing kind of foul. It makes my scalp break out when I wear it, so I save its good karma for special occasions.

*My Grandpa Greenie had a stroke in the spring of 1992. He never fully recovered his faculties, and he died in December of '94. As a result he never got to experience the Indians' mid-90s resurgence, a fact that, along with the bitter postseason disappointments, will always make those years a little less than perfect for me and my family.

*I took the train up from NYC to Boston and personally witnessed the '95 Indians close out the Division Series against Boston at Fenway Park. A couple weeks later, my girlfriend had just dumped me, and I came home from a screening of Seven, probably the most gut-wrenching movie I had seen in years, to watch the Indians lose Game Six, and the Series, to the Braves. Talk about rock-bottom. Five years later I was married to that ex-girlfriend. She's the Love of My Life. Which just goes to show you can always bounce back.

*1997. What can you say about it? A team that barely surfaced above .500, then pulled together and made a truly inspiring run in the postseason. I traveled to Columbus to see friends and watch the Buckeyes rout Northwestern on the weekend of Games Six and Seven of the World Series. On the Monday morning after that brutal extra-inning concession to the Marlins, I bought a morning-edition copy of Sunday's Akron Beacon-Journal at the airport. The front-page headline — something like "Wright Leaves Game with 2-1 Lead" — reflected a moment in time when the paper had just gone to press and we were still closing in on victory. I kept that newspaper. It's packed away somewhere in a box in my closet.

*What else? Having lived in both New York and Boston, I've seen my share of road Indians triumphs and defeats. Sox fan hooligans chased me out of the park after a playoff win in '98. People grabbed and tore at my clothes (covered in Wahoos and Indians insignias) as I clawed my way to Commonwealth Avenue, where, sprinting to the T stop, I saw Ted Kennedy making his way into the Harvard Club. Rabid, violent Sox fans hurling beer and guttural epithets, Teddy Kennedy — this was the quintessential Boston experience. I only needed a plate of baked beans to top it all off.

*I skipped out of work one afternoon in 1997 to see Hideki Irabu pitch a matinee against Cleveland. Between innings I managed to get Marquis Grissom to throw a ball to me in the stands — by emphasizing that all the other fans clamoring for the ball were New Yorkers who were cursing him out every time he turned his back. Grissom threw the ball right into my hands — and I dropped it. Another fan ended up with the ball in the ensuing scramble.

*I am one of I imagine a terribly few people who can say he was in the crowd for a 21-1 loss to the Yankees and a 23-7 (playoff) loss to Boston. Thankfully I was in one of Fenway's signature "obstructed view" seats for the latter game. I also saw Russell Branyan hit his first major league home run at Yankee Stadium. I didn't believe at the time that this would be an historic event, the kind of "I was there" moment I could describe to my children when Branyan made the Hall of Fame. But I made note of the possibility.

*Every year I gut my bank account to buy tickets to the Cleveland series in Boston, where I live now. In recent years I've seen Pronk homer off Keith Foulke to win a game in the ninth, and I've seen Big Papi Ortiz clout a ball to deep center to take a save away from Fausto Carmona.

And this all adds up to what? Well, I guess it establishes that I'm a fan. That I have a time- and trial-tested enthusiasm and passion for the Cleveland Indians Baseball Club. And you can expect to see that in the inscriptions on this weblog. Will there be keen insights? Expertise? I make no promises on that score. I might accidentally hit upon a brilliant, expert observation or two, and I can say that there will doubtless be affectations of expertise on this page (be careful, reader!). More than anything, though, there will be passion. I'll be living and dying with this 2007 Indians team, just as I did in '06 and '05 and '04 and '03 and — you get the picture.

But enough about me. How 'bout 'dem Indians?

Because "This Is the Year" Was Taken . . .

Should I take it as bad karma that there was a preexisting blog at thisistheyear.blogspot.com — and that it wasn't a Tribe fan writing there, either, but instead some anonymous schlub who swears to lose weight and quit smoking in 2002? (Note the lack of updates after January 4 — I suspect the blogger's commitment to self-improvement faded shortly thereafter.)

I will not read anything into that fact, because right now I am at the peak of my confidence. The Indians Will Win the World Series. This year. It will happen. And I am committing myself to the project of chronicling this event as it happens. In real time. Not for me to wait for a good result, then work backward, falsely reconstructing my state of mind as the season unfolded. The result would be a manufactured memory — and worse, the manufactured memory of someone who was cautious, who seemed unwilling to invest the time and effort to chronicle the events of the 2007 season unless he knew he would obtain a result worth writing about.

I leave the retroactive coverage to the newspapermen — the Terry Plutos and Bill Livingstons who will surely, come October, be scrambling to slap together lucrative retrospectives of the historic '07 campaign, for release just in time for the holidays. A real fan knows, in his heart, that his beloved Tribe will climb to championship heights. And he knows it in February.

February is, to be sure, the most appropriate month for a declaration like mine. It's a "buffer month" — long enough after the tragedy of the previous season that one's residual cynicism is at its lowest point, but still well before the dates in March when key players start succumbing to hamstring pulls and elbow tweaks. The team hasn't been routed in months. The memories of blown leads are distant. Reports of prospect play from the winter leagues have been encouraging — and if they weren't, they didn't make the papers.

Rational explanations begin to emerge for the catastrophes of the year before. Indians.com beat writer Anthony Castrovince reports, for example, that Jhonny Peralta had Lasik surgery during the offseason to correct his nearsightedness. A positive offseason development, this is, and one that provides a satisfactory explanation for the giant step back that Jhonny took last year at the plate and in the field. He simply couldn't see the ball to catch it or hit it. Now he can. Problem solved. Contrast this offseason report to the news after Peralta's breakout season in '05, when he grew two inches over the winter, causing his hitting and fielding mechanics to go out of whack. This is a positive development. Good news. Reason for hope.

Now is the time to believe, I say, and now is the time to get started with the exercise of chronicling the Cleveland Indians' 2007 championship season — seen through the eyes of this fan, processed in his long-suffering and suggestible consciousness, and served up by weblog into something approximating a real-time narrative.

Today is February 21, 2007, and Anthony Castrovince has given me reason to believe that Jhumpin' Jhonny Peralta is on the cusp of a bounceback year. The Man at One Time Favorably Compared to Derek Jeter will return to his 2005 form, validate the long-term contract he signed after that year, and settle in comfortably at shortstop for the first-place team in the American League Central. Do I foresee an All-Star appearance? I say that's unlikely. But my first bold prediction of the year, grounded in nothing but my own fervent hope, is that Peralta will post .285-27-95 numbers (that's batting average-HR-RBI, by the way, for all you slick young kids raised on OPS), and Jhonny will flash an unspectacular but effective and consistent glove at shortstop. Oh, and what the hell: Peralta will drive in the winning run in Game Six of the ALCS — off Mariano Rivera, Huston Street, or Francisco Rodriguez. Take your pick.

Such predictions are what mid-to-late February is made of. More to come as it happens.