Cleveland's sports teams are complete shit. That much is fairly well known. But what I want to talk about today is the fact that the situation in Cleveland has devolved to the point that Cleveland fans have actually reached the intersection of Shit and Ubiquity.
Otherwise known as Hell.
The reality is so giant and real that I'm just going to fire shotgun-blasts of thought at the wall of this page, and with any luck we'll have a moving piece of art when it's over.
Pablo Picasso's "Brownica."
Cleveland's teams are shit because the organizations are incompetent. They don't know how to choose players, they don't know how to refine player talents, and they don't know how to use those players when it counts. (They choose players at the top of the draft, and then the next year they choose players at the top of the draft, and then the next year they choose players at the top of the draft....)
I barely ever hang out with my friends to watch Cleveland sports anymore, because it's miserable to feel like hanging out with your friends is somehow bringing bad luck to the teams you're cheering for.
Obviously that's not the reason, but at least my brain can't stop making associations like that. And frankly even if it weren't like that, it's just not fun to cheer for something that plainly and obviously sucks.
But it's not even just the teams!
I could handle it if the teams were terrible but we had a really smart, snappy press corps that could have a lot of fun with literal decades of futility, but instead we have Mary Kay Cabot and Terry Pluto, who might as well be on the Browns' PR payroll, Paul Hoynes the toothless baseball reporter, nobody at all covering the Cavs, and a bunch of other stiffs who've affixed tape recorders to the pom-poms they carry around for the various garbage teams.
On the radio (92.3 The Fan) we have this daily lineup: 6:00am–10:00am Two Humorless Grouchy Old Fucks; 10:00am–2:00pm Two Insanely Boring Fucks; 2:00pm–7pm Two Criminally Stupid Fucks; and 7:00pm–midnight The Hoofs And Snouts That Remain.
The Grouchy Fucks could suck the fun out of a Thai massage; the Boring Fucks make the Grouchy Fucks seem like Mel Brooks and Howard Stern; the Stupid Fucks make me cringe the moment they start talking; and the Hoofs And Snouts is probably the best show on the station—highlighting the truly bizarre upper-level decision-making at whatever piece-of-shit media monstrosity owns that pathetic radio franchise.
And then on AM radio we have the fairly likeable Tony Rizzo and the contemptuously smug Aaron Goldhammer. Their show is actually decent for the 45 seconds per radio hour that aren't dedicated to advertisements about window installation.
The only saving grace is the blog presence. Cleveland has some pretty great sports blogs—I often frequent WaitingForNextYear.com and CavsTheBlog.com and a few others that still need to step up their game if they want me to mention them by name—and really even that is indicative of something that is true of most things in America these days: The overpaid establishment is an unambiguous disappointment, and the piteously underpaid independent organizations are the only things keeping the rickety house of cards from turning into a flat pile of jokers.
Speaking of which, here's a brief look at the flat pile of rich jokers here in Cleveland:
Larry and Paul Dolan—Owners of the Cleveland Indians (a city named after a man who deserted the city, and a team named that way because Christopher Columbus erroneously labeled the N. American natives as people from a country that was actually 15,000 miles away)—I know very little about these two men other than that they have proven to be cheap and uncreative—the worst of both worlds for a smaller-market team. I would wish for them to sell the franchise, but the new boss is inevitably the same as the old boss here in C-town.
Chris Antonetti—General Manager of the Cleveland Indians—is part of a team structure that has traded away the only three players it drafted in the past 20 years who turned out to be any good. All season long I was told to go (drive through the ongoing speed-trap in every sector of every predatory-cop-laden quadrant of the greater Cleveland area) to the aging ballpark and cheer on a team that beat all the bad teams and lost to all the good teams. "C'mon, folks, get a speeding ticket on the way to the ballpark, then search for $20 parking, ignore all the dead businesses and the fact that you don't have a job either, then make your way to your seat and watch an aging Nick Swisher do an on-field, in-game rehab on his tender shoulder."
Terry Francona—Manger of the Cleveland Indians—is already the greatest executive we've had in Cleveland in my entire life.
Dan Gilbert—Owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers (a team named after a synonym for lazy indifference)—once wrote a fan-inspiring, fiery open letter after the Whore Of Akron decided he wanted to fuck Cuban men in Miami—in fucking pink Comic Sans. I am one of the world's foremost defenders of that letter, but every day I have less respect for Dan Gilbert, who now seems to be a vacuum cleaner sucking up every cent he can from the cities of Cleveland and Detroit via fan-exploitation and the gambling addictions of those cities' aging populations.
Chris Grant—General Manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers—took two #1 overall picks and two #4 overall picks and turned them into the kind of trainwreck that isn't even interesting to look at.
Mike Brown—Coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers—was a disappointment when he coached in Cleveland, so they brought him back.
Jimmy Haslam—Owner of the Cleveland Browns (a team named after a man who was fired by the team that was named after him)—either knew what was going on at Pilot Flying J, and is therefore a terrible leader, or had no idea what was going on at Pilot Flying J, and is therefore a terrible leader.
Joe Banner/Mike Lombardi—President/General Manager of the Cleveland Browns—are men it is hard to like. Joe Banner clearly thinks he could have been Einstein's tutor (except Banner doesn't seem to remember that his Eagles never won a Super Bowl and ended up turning into a diarrhea salad by the time he left), and Mike Lombardi, as far as I can tell, is Joe Banner's Yes Man, if he's even still alive anymore.
Rob Chudzinski—Coach of the Cleveland Browns—is the Coach of the Cleveland Browns.
So it looks to me like the pits of Hell have quite a ways to go before we hit the fun trampolines at the bottom, like Boston did, and spring our way up to the Heavens of Obnoxiousness.
For now, on the long way down, I can see Anthony "Captain Fatty Garbage Truck" Bennett coming into sight, and it looks like a demon is feeding him two of those Elvis sandwiches!
By this point, I honestly don't know how many championships it would take to get the smell of sulfur out of my nose.
I think I stick with it all because it is a truly divine comedy—50 years of blind squirrels starving to death.
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