Frank Roddy supports the Cleveland Indians and Donald Trump. Matt Brenner supports the Chicago Cubs and Hillary Clinton. When Roddy had a pair of tickets for game 2 of the World Series in Cleveland, Ohio, he knew who to call.
“I had 50 people I could invite to this game but I only have one friend who’s a Cubs fan and I knew what it would mean to him,” said Roddy, 28, sporting an Indians cap and shirt. “I knew it would mean more to him than anyone else.”
With flights in demand and prohibitively expensive, Brenner hired a car on Wednesday morning and drove for five and a half hours to be here; he drove back on Thursday, exultant after the Cubs’ 5-1 victory squared the series. This, after all, is history. The Cubs and Indians have the longest title droughts in baseball: 108 and 68 years without winning the World Series respectively. It is the resistible force against the movable object.
Cleveland, for a few golden hours, also felt like something of an antidote to, or at least a refuge from, arguably the most divisive and poisonous presidential election campaign ever. It is oddly reassuring to discover that there is still a place in the US not transfixed by Clinton’s reckless emails or Trump’s 3am tweets. Here sports comes first, politics nowhere. A baseball cap is still a baseball cap, not a marketing prop for making America great again.
Thom Majka, a sales rep who keeps his Indians cap on through every game for good luck, said: “These fans couldn’t care less about the election. Every day it gets nastier and uglier, not even talking about the issues. It’s a breath of fresh air to have something as easy as playing a baseball game. It’s like taking a shower: you’re all cleaned up.”
The Democratic and Republican nominees have historically high unpopularity ratings. Their contest has been extraordinary rancorous, including a tense debate in which Clinton castigated Trump over allegations of sexual assault and Trump threatened to jail his opponent. The blowhard billionaire’s appeal to authoritarianism and cries of rigging have led some to fear an existential threat to the republic.
But baseball, as American as jazz, as regular as the seasons, goes on. It is the most storied and soulful of US sports. It survived the second world war when Franklin D Roosevelt declared: “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.” After reaching the World Series at last, Cubs manager Joe Maddon watched the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams and wept. While pro football is by far more popular, baseball is cultural bedrock, a social safety valve for a fractured nation.
Cleveland feels this more acutely than most. Three months ago its basketball arena, cheek-by-jowl with the baseball park, hosted Trump’s coronation and dark vision at the Republican national convention. Where in July the strongman claimed that only he can fix the system, and delegates chanted “Lock her up!”, this week the Cleveland Cavaliers – led by the Hillary Clinton-endorsing superstar LeBron James – received their championship rings after ending the city’s 52-year sporting championship famine.
Where in July political hacks crowded bars and restaurants on nearby East 4th Street, this week sports fans erupted at every Indians run they saw on multiple TV screens.
Where in July street vendors sold hats and T-shirts with slogans such as “Hillary for Prison” and “Life’s a bitch, don’t vote for one”, this week the merchandise says “Hard working town Cleveland”, “Land of champions”, “C*town don’t back down” and “I liked Cleveland before it was cool”. And where in July party delegates walked behind high steel fences separating them from potential civil unrest and thousands of police, this week Clinton and Trump supporters rubbed shoulders, recalled learning the sport in corner parks and backyards, and went to the ballgame together.
Cubs fan Joe Wiegand, 51, from Maniton, Colorado, mused: “Baseball is a wonderful distraction from the workaday world and the issues at hand. It brings people together. It’s an important election and this is just a game but this is not only once in a lifetime, it’s once in three lifetimes. There’ll be another election in four years.”
Wiegand had come to add to the joviality of the proceedings outside the Indians’ Progressive Field (the name honours an insurance company, it has nothing to do with liberal politics). He bills himself as the “world’s premiere Theodore Roosevelt reprisor” and was dressed for the part, including a “1908 / Cubs” sign attached to his top hat – referring to a year when Roosevelt was in the White House and the Cubs last won the World Series (the Indians need only go back as far as Harry Truman).
“We are long suffering but always hopeful,” Wiegand said. “That optimistic statement: ‘Just wait till next year.’ We believe in the Cubs. There’s a great sense of relief and celebration just being in the World Series. And I think we will win the World Series.”
As he spoke, Wiegand was greeted by old acquaintances: Cubs fan Wendy Menard, 56, and her partner Chris Frampton, 57, an Indians supporter. The couple, both financial advisers, recalled being nine or 10 years old when they attended their first baseball games. Frampton said: “As much as following Cleveland has been difficult for a long time, I’m an Indians fan and always have been.”
Menard added: “It’s in your blood. Cut me and it’s blue.”
And how about the election? “What election?” Frampton shot back.
The Indians’ comprehensive 6-0 victory in game 1 on Tuesday, with pitcher Corey Kluber dominant, was celebrated by fans driving the streets blasting horns and high-fiving each other. The mood was more subdued on Wednesday as Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta took control over four hours in a raw 43F (6C); a crowd watching the game on two giants screens outside the park ebbed away into the night. A small plane flew overhead trailing a banner that said: “Trump tried to buy and move the Indians.”
The Cubs, whose home, Wrigley Field, is one of the great cathedrals of American sport, seem to have most of the country rooting for them. They have been striving and falling short for more than a century. Author Rich Cohen wrote in the New York Times: “For as long as anyone remembers, following the Cubs has meant embracing futility, choosing the losers over the winners, seeing the romance in failure.”
The “lovable losers” have suffered a legendary curse ever since a tavern owner, barred from a World Series game in 1945 because he was trying to bring in a malodorous goat, proclaimed that they would never win the title again. But inspired by Cubs fan Bill Murray’s film Ghostbusters, some fans have paraded the slogan “I ain’t afraid of no goat” and this year the team have carried all before them. Barack Obama has expressed hopes for a Cubs victory despite being a supporter of city rivals the Chicago White Sox.
Cleveland, meanwhile, is relishing its moment in the sun. It is one of America’s poorest and most racially segregated big cities; only Detroit fared worse from the trauma of industrial decline. It has had to live down nicknames such as “the mistake on the lake” while its river was so badly polluted that it caught fire in 1969. Progressive Field sits near steel bridges, smoking chimneys and slag heaps.
Todd Fisher, 45, district manager at PizzaFire restaurant, where “The Chicago” pizza has been crossed out and replaced with “The Ohio”, said: “It’s such a sense of pride and it brings the community together more than anything else. We’re still considered a blue-collar town. Growing up in my neighbourhood, we played baseball in the spring and football in the fall and winter. When all the jobs left, that’s what everyone clung to: our sports team.”
Majka, 63, whose daughter Stephanie favours the Cubs, agreed. “Cleveland is not a city people flock to as a major metropolitan area,” he said. “The 70s, 80s and 90s have been tough years and that’s why people hold on to their sports teams. Things in Cleveland are consistent. They put up with tough winters and losing sports franchises. They keep on coming back, hoping tomorrow will be a better day.
“People in Cleveland are hard-working and good-hearted and have their hearts broken thousands of times. To have the baseball after what happened in June with the basketball – two tremendous events in one year – was worth the wait. That’s the Cleveland mentality: the harder you work, the luckier you get.”
Cleveland is a Democratic stronghold but Ohio remains a perpetual electoral battleground. Majka says he intends to vote for Trump because he wants change from the career politicians who run America. But if he was forced to choose between picking the winner of the election or the World Series? “It’s got to be the Indians.”
Most fans would make the same decision in the view of John Grabowski, who teaches a sports history course at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “The election has been a long, brutal process and people are much more interested in the World Series,” he said. “It is pushing the campaign off the front of the news locally.”
Grabowski cautioned against notions of baseball as morally pure escapism, noting the sport’s own history of “chicanery and trickery”, but added: “Nonetheless it’s linked to what America is supposed to be about – the field of dreams. The idea was that in an industrial, smoky city you could get a ticket and walk through that gate into a green space. This is the pastoral aspect.”
Although there has been concern about the drop in African American players across baseball as a whole, both the Cubs and Indians have increasingly racially diverse lineups, he added, reflecting the diversity of the US itself. “You can see yourself on the field, no matter who you are.”
Baseball has arguably been in decline since the 1980s, although the sport has long served as a metaphorical shorthand for an idealised America. Grabowski sees evidence of a revival in that rose-tinted view in the era of Ronald Reagan – his celebrated “Morning in America” TV commercial was released in the same year, 1984, as the fond movie The Natural starring Robert Redford. Field of Dreams – “If you build it, they will come” – came out a few months after Reagan left office. Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore was conceived in the 1980s and completed in 1992, starting a trend for nostalgic “retro ballparks”.
Reagan’s promise to “make America great again” has been expropriated by Trump and sewn into baseball caps and other merchandise. Trump’s repeated promise at rallies – “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning” – is probably unfathomable to success-starved Cubs and Indians fans.
The battle shifted on Friday to Chicago, where residents are no less sports mad: box seats for the first World Series game at Wrigley Field in 71 years were selling on StubHub for $50,000 and more. But Grabowski, 68, whose father was a gifted amateur player, cannot bear to look. “My wife watches but I can’t,” he admitted. “I get too nervous. I judge what’s happening from the shouts downstairs.”
