leveland Guardians” it will be. The news arrived on Friday, July 23, the day after the 225th anniversary of the city’s founding by a crew of Connecticut WASPs, who, having anchored on the southern shore of Lake Erie, gave the native people of the neighborhood not much say in the matter. A fan since childhood, I’d been dreading this moment since the front office confirmed, in December, that the Major League Baseball franchise in Cleveland would shed its longstanding nickname, Indians, after the 2021 season.
At this point, you’re liable to assume that I’ll spend the rest of this essay shaking my fist at left-wing social-justice warriors. It’s tempting. Be assured, I have words as well for culture warriors on the right who agreed to join the battle over the oldest sports tradition in that proud, misunderstood city on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. To those who began to wear the old colors and to flash the retired symbols not for love of the team but to own the libs, I say, “That’s when I knew the game was over.” Stay tuned for more on that.
First, a few observations about “the Indians.” It was elegant, tall and slender, the only one of the league’s 30 nicknames to begin with that trimmest of capital letters, I. The assonance with “Cleveland” touched you whether you were conscious of it or not: —and Ind—.
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