Baseball is the Sport for Dreamers

Allow me to start this blog of stories with a story.

It was probably sometime in July 2017. I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts, right across the river from Boston. I’d lived in the ‘ville since September 2002 and gone through many life phases during that time — grad student, band groupie, alcoholic whisperer, and was, at that time, a yogi’s yogi. Mostly that meant I ran a yoga and wellness center just down the road from Harvard University — have you heard of it? Anyway. My friend Shira, part of my yoga crew, had come to pick me up for a day on the Newburyport beach, Plum Island, where our friend Rebecca lived. Shira, it’s important to know, is basically an alien from another planet — a loving, energizing, delightfully chaotic planet, but an extraterrestrial one all the same. She is a curious and attentive and wonderful friend and she exuded happiness as I climbed in the car with her.

“How was your night?” she asked as she propelled us down the road.

What happened next was me providing what was essentially a pitch-by-pitch recounting of a dramatic 9th inning from a baseball game played the night before. All these years in the future now, I couldn’t tell you who was involved in the game or the action besides knowing it was Cleveland versus someone and Andrew Miller had, once again, worked out of some impossible jam. What I mostly remember is thinking I’d just say I’d watched an exciting baseball game the night before but the next thing I knew, I was way way deep in the weeds of every single detail of how it all went down.

Shira, wonderful friend that she is, just listened, intently, never interrupting except to ask a clarifying question. Her eyes were as big as the moon as I took her deeper into the nuance of an inconsequential mid-summer game. By the time I finished my harrowing tale — albeit one with a happy ending — I felt almost confused about how I’d managed to go on and on about this single half-inning of baseball to a friend I knew had no real interest in the topic at all.

What Shira did was wait to be sure my story was concluded before saying the words I will not only never forget, I actively think of almost every single day: “Sarah,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever cared about anything in my entire life as much as you care about that baseball game last night.”

All I could do was laugh.

I may share more of my personal story in future posts, but what’s important to share here in the first one is that I was born a Cleveland Baseball Fan and will die one. I went to games at the old Municipal Stadium as a kid and was one of a couple thousand fans in the stands that could seat 60k. A family friend likes to remind me that I used to wear floppy straw hats and read Babysitter Club books at the ballpark. All true. The teams were lousy back then, what can I say. But during my teenage years, that’s when everything changed — starting with Jacobs Field opening at the start of the 1994 season followed by the sellout streak that went on for 455 games spanning from 1994-2001, making every chance any of us got to be the ballpark the world’s most precious gift, especially considering how unbelievably good the team suddenly was.

Cleveland Baseball became a way of life as radio broadcaster Tom Hamilton became the narrator of my summer.

Even when I moved to Boston, arguably the best baseball city in America, my love for Cleveland baseball never waivered, even as I witnessed four goddamned Red Sox World Series celebrations during the nearly two-decades I lived in my adopted hometown (2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018). Instead of becoming a citizen of Red Sox Nation, I turned Cleveland’s annual pilgrimage to Fenway Park into a holiday I’d celebrate with my friends, rallying them to the ballpark, some of them even to cheer for Cleveland instead of the home team. I subscribed to MLB Radio so I could return to my happy place — which turned out to be anywhere Tom Hamilton is calling a Cleveland baseball game.

2016, though, saw another massive shift when Cleveland made it back to the World Series for the first time since 1997. Socially some things had shifted for me (namely out of the “band groupie” / “alcoholic whisperer” phases and into the “yogi’s yogi” phase) and so I no longer had a strong baseball crew. My wish to connect with other fans eventually led me to create a Twitter account I still use — @1CLEbaseballfan . I chose my handle very intentionally: I am just one Cleveland baseball fan.

In July 2019, I moved back to Ohio to earn my Social Work Master’s degree while also being closer to some family as well as my favorite baseball team. The pandemic semi-screwed up some baseball-related goals and plans, but not for long. In 2022, I went to my first-ever playoff game at Progressive Field. In 2023, I made a lifelong dream come true by becoming a Season Ticket Member. In 2024, I made my first-ever trip to Spring Training. In 2025, Major League Baseball invited me to be part of the inaugural MLB Fan Council.

And now, a Substack all about my favorite baseball team.

Read along if you please.

In future posts, I may dive more into my own approach to fandom or I may pose some questions to readers. I may need to vent during the inevitable rough patches just as I may need to pour my celebration around the great times into this vessel. Some posts will have a paywall and that’s mostly because the United States of America doesn’t provide free health care and my rent just went up and nobody’s grocery bills are getting less expensive. Some posts (like this one) will just be free, too. Subscribe for free or paid or just pop by occasionally to see what’s new.

Just like the average baseball game: you just never know what might happen on any given day with any given blog post.

What I know for sure is that baseball is the sport for dreamers. Just like life, you have to take everything one pitch at a time, one gust of wind at a time, one shifting shadow at a time. There is a magic to this sport that makes it an easy metaphor for everyday existence. Hope hangs on the air in the split seconds it takes from the time the pitcher releases the ball and the batter decides whether or not to swing. Stats are history — all that matters is what happens now, in this moment at this time. Anything is possible in baseball — and that makes it the greatest thing on earth.