Cheer up Green Bay, Cleveland takes cake as land of abandoned
Cleveland became the undisputed sports capital of the forsaken, anguished and dejected this week. Even as Brett Favre prepared for his treasonous return to Lambeau Field on Sunday, Cleveland ruled, thoroughly knocking Green Bay off the map.
It was painful just to imagine anyone from that city watching CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee face off in the World Series. If you're a sports fan whose dreams have been serially thwarted, you wanted to call up a bar in the Flats and offer to buy a condolence round for everyone in the place who ever loved the Indians. It doesn't matter what betrayals you've experienced -- living in Oakland and watching a pair of MVPs bail out two seasons apart, or seeing the Raiders reach the Super Bowl only to be crushed by their erstwhile coach -- you know Cleveland has it worse.
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| Watching Cliff Lee and CC Sabathia in the World Series can't be a pretty sight for Cleveland fans. (US Presswire) |
They are aces for the best team in each league, chosen to start Game 1 of the World Series, likely to start at least one more game each, and possibly two more. If Major League Baseball had a heart, it would insist on a TV blackout in Cuyahoga County.
Favre in Vikings purple constitutes heresy. No doubt about it. Packers fans have every right to be galled. He defined their town, and now he's the quarterback for a division rival. Worse, on Sunday, he's very likely to beat his old team for a second time this season.
But at least when the Packers parted with him, football considerations prevailed. The ending might have been artless, and perhaps premature, but it wasn't about money. Minnesota got Favre in middle age. Green Bay enjoyed him in his prime. Cleveland lost Sabathia at age 28; Lee a month shy of 31.
Green Bay got a world championship out of Favre. Cleveland, which has three times as many as sports teams, hasn't won a world title since 1964.
The people of Green Bay are still pretty fortunate. They have a decent team, with a chance to thrive under Aaron Rodgers someday. They don't have Eric Mangini treating their NFL team like a bunch of kindergartners. They're not in danger of losing LeBron James next year.
Come to think of it, you might want to buy two rounds at that Cleveland bar.
This is bigger than the economy of baseball, condemning fans in modest-budget cities to watch free-agency defections of their young superstars. Other teams have lost stars, and it hurt, but not like this.
After the A's lost Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada, they never faced each other in a World Series. Giambi went to the Series just once in seven years with the Yankees and lost. Tejada never made it.
Money forced Minnesota to let go of Torii Hunter and trade Johan Santana, but neither of them has been to the World Series.
Cleveland came so close in 2007, and after the Red Sox wiped out a 3-1 Indians lead in the AL Championship Series, the demolition commenced. Mark Shapiro, Cleveland's general manager, had already been forced to dismantle the team that went to the World Series twice in the '90s, and he did remarkable reconstructive surgery. Maybe, with the players he got by trading Sabathia and Lee before their contracts expired, he'll repeat the pattern.
Many people believe that a baseball salary cap could have saved at least one of the pitchers for Cleveland. Then no one could have offered Sabathia the $161 million deal he got from the Yankees. He might have stayed in the Midwest.
But football has a hard salary cap, and it hasn't protected Cleveland a bit.
It didn't stop Kellen Winslow from nearly killing himself on a motorcycle, or fend off accusations that then-Browns receiver Braylon Edwards picked a fight with an undersized buddy of the Cavaliers' superstar. This is all about Cleveland being Cleveland. What other city has whipped up crossover franchise dysfunction?
Of course, the Cavs themselves aren't a mess -- yet. But if salary caps prevented municipal heartbreak, no one would wonder whether James will be defecting to New York after this season.
There are no solutions, unless somehow the sight of Lee and Sabathia wearing other uniforms, surrounded by bunting, provokes epic pity in James, enough to keep him in town. But he's more likely to see the opposite -- the gilding effect of leaving Cleveland.
The drama and emotion of Favre's return to Green Bay won't last long. The implications of the Lee-Sabathia showdown may reverberate through Cleveland for years. Even thousands of miles away, you can feel the city's pain, and want to fetch another round.
Gwen Knapp is a sports columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.
