How the Guardians, and SpongeBob, finally made me fall in love with Cleveland baseball
I am married to a Cleveland baseball extremist.
From the minute Sherrod, my husband, had an email address, every version of it has begun with “damnyankees.” The first time I saw it, I thought that meant he hated northerners. He asked me out anyway.
We began dating in January 2003, when I soon discovered that he only subscribed to cable during the baseball season. I married him anyway.
Every year, from opening day until the Cleveland team is played out for the season, we watch the game when he’s home. I use the word “we” loosely. Sherrod tracks every ball, strike and run as if he could be called in any minute to sub for beloved team announcer Tom Hamilton. I needlepoint enough pillows to fill a garage. A two-door one, with that side room for the motorcycle.
No more tiresome debate on Cleveland's team name
Cleveland’s baseball team has not won a World Series since 1948. This year turned out to be no different, except it is different in almost every way.
This was the first year our team played as the Guardians. No more tiresome debates about whether the Indians should shed their racist logo and name. Plenty of fans still hold dear their old fan gear, but the team’s name now pays tribute to the eight giant art deco sculptures standing sentry at our city’s Hope Memorial Bridge.
What a relief.
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Our team is the youngest in the league. Seventeen of the players made their MLB debut this year. All of them are younger than our family’s youngest child, but watching these guys play made me feel too young to claim it.
And that is the biggest difference of all, for me. I fell in love with this baseball team. On Saturday's chilly night, I was in the stands to watch the Cleveland Guardians pull ahead of the Yankees, briefly, in Game 3 of the American League Division Series. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
My new team needed me
It was the kind of game that made friends of strangers and converted nonbelievers. We could forget about the news and political ads, all the bills and deadlines. Time and again we rose to our feet, not in celebration, but in anticipation. What next from our boys? It was so magical that, at one point, I witnessed an avowed vegan raise her hand in the air and yell to the approaching vendor, “Hot dogs!”
(Perhaps that was me.)
We scored one run in the first inning.
We scored another in the second.
We tied in the third.
In the fifth, the Yankees pulled ahead.
For the next 45 innings, we waited. Or maybe it was four, but it felt like 45 because I was standing next to Sherrod and one of our best friends, Sue Klein, another lifelong Cleveland baseball fan. Before my eyes and definitely within hearing range they morphed from fans to pallbearers.
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By the eighth inning, I was silently plotting an alternative way to get home because no way was I riding in the same car with those two.
Then, I remembered my calling. I was a cheerleader raised by a cheerleader. (We are not talking about my dad.) I knew what I had to do.
I grabbed my red rally towel and started to wave.
“Where are your rags?” I yelled to my companions. They scoffed. “It’s a towel, not a rag,” they yelled in unison, which was pretty rich coming from two people who had stuffed theirs into their pockets.
Never mind. I was invested. My team needed me.
For the first time in my life, I stood and waved that towel over my head like a shipwreck survivor hailing a helicopter, pausing only after I swatted myself in the eye.
At the end of the eighth, I had to up the ante. At 10:42 p.m., looking through my clear eye, I did the unthinkable: I tweeted a photo of Sherrod and me and wrote: “Still hopeful in the 9th. #GoGuardians”
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This was an unprecedented commitment.
I hate being wrong. Worse, I hate being proven wrong. Double-bad worse, I hate being proven wrong on Twitter.
When you’re in love you do crazy things.
Enter SpongeBob SquarePants
Ninth inning.
Yankees: Three up, three down.
Suddenly, the crowd, including the pallbearers to my right, came alive.
Bottom of the ninth: Two outs, bases loaded. Oscar Gonzalez walks to the plate, and his chosen song begins to play.
Everybody sings:
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
SpongeBob!
SquarePants!
Absorbent Absorbant and yellow and porous is he.
SpongeBob!
SquarePants!
“The song came to me,” Gonzalez, 24, told The Washington Post. “I thought that was something the kids would love, so that’s why I chose it.”
Aww. Could he be any sweeter?
Of course, SpongeBob is our Nickelodeon cartoon friend from Bikini Bottom who worked as the chief fry cook at the Krusty Krab. He still works there, and I know this because I just Googled it, which is another thing I never thought I’d do but love is crazy that way.
That Oscar Gonzalez: He sure brings joy. He won that game with a walk-off single and we screamed and danced, and hugged people we couldn’t name. When was the last time you could say that?
Alas, ultimately the Yankees knocked us out of the playoffs. For now.
Here's to our team. These players, barely men, will never again be this young, this unlikely. But they will always be the first Guardians, the team that captured our hearts and made it possible to say “next time” like we mean it.
Because we do.
USA TODAY columnist Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, “The Daughters of Erietown,” is a New York Times bestseller. You can reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How the Cleveland Guardians, with the help of SpongeBob, won me over
