By John Krull
Guest columnist
Baseball exists to break our hearts.
My beloved Cleveland Guardians fell to the detested New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series. The Guardians won only one game in the best-of-seven series, but that one victory was the stuff of song and story—a come-from-behind gem in which rookies and role players touched greatness to triumph in an extra-innings contest.
That was Cleveland’s one moment of glory during the series. For the rest of it, the Guardians were overmatched, a young team with a rookie manager trying to trade blows with seasoned pros.
After the Guardians went down to defeat in the last game, my son called me.
He, too, is a diehard Cleveland fan. He lives in New York now and enjoys going to Yankee Stadium wearing Cleveland gear when the Guardians are in town.
“This one stings,” he told me over the phone.
Yes, it does, for all sorts of reasons.
I’ve been a Cleveland Indians/Guardians fan—the team changed its name a couple of years ago—for as long as I can remember.
I was born in Cleveland. One of my earliest memories is of going with my father more than six decades ago to the old Municipal Stadium to see the Tribe play a game. I was maybe three at the time, so I didn’t understand much of what was going on.
But I loved being there with my dad, hearing the crowd roar from time to time while he tried to explain what was going on.
Dad loved baseball. A gifted natural athlete blessed with superb coordination, he might have been able to compete at a high level except for two things.
He was afflicted with a hereditary eye disease that compromised his sight and, for reasons that elude me, his father and stepmother discouraged his interest in sports.
My son shared his grandfather’s love for the game.
I took my boy to his first game—in Cleveland, of course—when he was four. Like his dad, he didn’t understand much of what was going on at first, but he enjoyed the crowd and the energy.
Later, when he began to play baseball, my son mastered the minutiae of the game, analyzing each contest with a devotion that was almost religious in its rigor.
For years, over every Labor Day holiday weekend, my father, my son and I went on baseball trips. If the Tribe was in town, we always went to Cleveland.
One of my fondest memories is of going to a Sunday game. After the contest ended, the (then) Indians invited kids and the adults with them to run the base paths.
I trailed behind, watching my father, then in his 80s, trotting along beside his nine-year-old grandson, both of them laughing with joy as they rounded third and headed for home.
When Cleveland battled the Chicago Cubs in the 2016 World Series, my son and I went to the first game, watching from seats so high in the stands that clouds seemed to float by.
Cleveland won that game, and we drove back home late that night in a state of elation. Our team, though, came up short in what was one of the greatest World Series in history. We lost the seventh and deciding game in extra innings. During the course of the series, both teams scored exactly the same number of runs.
One of the few consolations in defeat was that my father—who always had been a Cubs fan—finally saw his team triumph.
Dad died in the summer of 2023.
About a week after his death, my now grown son and I helped my daughter move into her new apartment in Boston. On the way back to Indiana for my father’s memorial service, my son, my daughter and I stopped in Cleveland to see a ballgame—and thought of our departed father and grandfather over the course of the nine innings.
When my son called after Cleveland’s latest departure from postseason play, we ended the conversation the way baseball fans always do. We reassured ourselves that there would be another season ahead of us.
After the call ended, I thought about how many such conversations I’d had with my father and my son.
About how lucky I was to share the game with them.
And about how much I miss my father.
Baseball exists to break our hearts.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
