It's baseball season once again.

I don't pay much attention to baseball these days. Ernie Harwell is dead, and because I don't have anyone else to follow, I'm a Cubs fan by default. In the end, spectator sports is like spectator sex - worth about as much as a warm bucket of piss.

I wasn't a Cubs fan when I was growing up, because that was only for rich kids, kids whose dads had union jobs at Central Foundry or some other auto plant. Dad was a farmer. You'd call him a sharecropper, but we didn't use that term; we called it farming on shares. Sharecroppers were southerners who raised tobacco and whose daughters were tramps.

We Were Indians Fans

We were pretty much all Cleveland Indians fans, and I never knew why, until recently. Detroit was slightly closer, their games were on WJR, and it was a straight shot on US 24. Cincinnati was slightly closer, their games were broadcast on WLW, and it was a straight shot on US 127. Chicago was further than Cleveland, their games were broadcast on WLS, and it was a straight shot on US 30. Cleveland? Their games were hard to pick up on the radio, and if we wanted to go there, you were out of luck; "you can't get there from here."

On the other hand, the very first major league baseball game was held between Cleveland and Fort Wayne, right nearby in Fort Wayne. Cincinnati always has a home game on opening day, because they claim to be the oldest team in professional baseball, but in fact, both the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Fort Wayne Kekiongas were playing for about a decade before the first league was organized, and nobody knows who was first.

Bobby Matthews Was Great

The Fort Wayne Kekionga were a pretty good team, when it came to playing baseball. They were made up mostly of former players for a Baltimore club, including Bobby Matthews, who threw a 2-0 shutout, that first game, although Deacon White of the Cleveland Forest City team ended up making a name for himself, too. Fort Wayne was the home of Jenny Electric, which later became General Electric, and so the Kekiongas played the first night ball game under Jenny's new-fangled arc lights. The Kekiongas' Jim Foran, formerly of the Philadelphia Athletics, hit the longest home run in history - it flew in the open door of a passing rail car, and the train went down the Nickel Plate Road, not stopping until it had traveled from Indiana all the way to New York State.

One thing they weren't good at, though, was getting people to come to the same ball park every day. They'd been barnstormers, and their promotional skills worked when it was a local team against the pros from Fort Wayne, but that required that they be hated interlopers; they didn't know how to cultivate a base of fans that loved them. League play was a financial disaster for the team, and they ended up being sold to Mr. Eckert of Brooklyn halfway through the first season.

After a series of sales and reorganizations, the Brooklyn team had gone from being the Eckerts to the Superbas and several other names, finally becoming a team that sports writers were calling the "trolley dodgers." Now located in Los Angeles, there are no longer any streetcar trolleys anywhere near for them to dodge.

Rooting For Cleveland

After years of cheering for "whoever is playing the Kekiongas", however, it was easy to cheer for the Forest City team, and later on, for whatever team was located in Cleveland, including a team called the Blues that later became the Indians. The original National Association of Professional Baseball Players eventually was succeeded by the National League, and the Cleveland Indians were part of the upstart American League, but no matter. Cleveland was ours.

And in the post-war era, Cleveland made it easy to be a fan. They won the World Series in 1948, and in 1956, Rocky Colavito started an 11-year streak of 20+ home runs per season. He played for the Indians from 1955 through 1959, when he was traded to the Detroit Tigers.

And at that point, I became a Tiger fan. You know, the Detroit Tigers, where Ernie Harwell was an announcer? That trade wasn't very popular in Cleveland. The Rock was the AL home run champion with 42 home runs in 1959, while Harvey Kuenn was the AL batting champion with a .359 average.

Bad Trades Are Part Of Baseball

It's hard to imagine why they traded. Both teams swapped one remarkable player for another remarkable player, gaining little there, but they lost players that fans identified with.

The Rock went to the Kansas City Athletics in 1964, then back to the Indians in 1965. He went to the Chicago White Sox for the end of the 1967 season, and then started playing for the Dodgers in 1968, ending the season playing for the Yankees.

Blondie says her Dad was an Athletics fan. It always takes me aback, as he was also a fan of the "Iggles" and other Philadelphia teams. Everyone knows that the Athletics were in Kansas City before they were in Oakland. They didn't actually move there until 1955, but they weren't doing anything where they originally had been located. Why was he one of their fans?

Inertia Wins Out

In any case, I didn't bother switching my loyalties away from the Tigers when Rocky Colavito left them, I just got less excited. I enjoyed Denny McLain as a pitcher, and attended a concert of his sponsored by the local Hammond Organ dealer, but I'm not sure that wasn't more a matter of curiosity about how good a baseball player could be on a Hammond Organ.

OK, I guess. It's hard to set yourself apart on an electronic organ - or any organ, for that matter.

Celebrating Denny McLain

So it's opening day. I ought to go down and play a song on the keyboard we have. There used to be a joke about learning the organ, because the book that came with a Hammond Organ taught you to play starting with the religious song "Far, Far Away." When someone bought a Hammond Organ, one always asked the new owner if their family was asking them if they could play far, far away. The new owner, not having heard the joke before, would always laugh.

But somehow, "Lady of Spain" seems more appropriate today.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Athletics - Baltimore - Bobby Matthews - Chicago - Cincinnati - Cleveland - Cubs - Deacon White - Denny McLain - Detroit - Dodgers - Ernie Harwell - Far, Far, Away - Hammond Organ - Harvey Kuenn - Indians - Jenny Electric - Jim Folan - Kekiongas - Lady of Spain - Reds - Rocky Colavito - spectators - Superbas - Tigers - WJR - WLS - WLW