The Cleveland Indians Might be Baseball's Best Team, So Let's Make Them Better

In general, we take catharsis where we can find it, and don't ask too many questions. One of the places we find it is sports: Turning a bunch of people in colored shirts running around into an emotional experience. All sports are fantasy sports, if you're not on the field. You project your feelings into a game, and then the outcome of that game gives you a little goose in return.

Case in point: the NBA Finals. You didn't have to be a partisan of either team to catch a contact high off Cleveland's curse-breaking or the lofty tragedy of the Golden State Warriors hoisted on their own nut-kicking. How could you not feel good about 1.3 million people adoring JR Smith like the Christ child in a half-deranged public lovefest of a championship parade?

What's more amazing is that the Cavs only had to smite the lesser of Cleveland's sports curses to set off that wild-eyed celebration. The Indians have wandered the desert for 68 years—22 years longer than the Cavs have even existed, 16 years longer than the curse LeBron killed. Sixty-eight years might not sound as impressive as the Chicago Cubs' 108-year drought, but in by some measures the Indians are just as star-crossed.

In fact, the Tribe has a unique success in … not succeeding. This is the 116th season of American League baseball; in the 115 years already in the books, Cleveland has failed to win the World Series 111 times, more than any other of the original eight AL teams. Two of those four non-losses were championships—in 1920, between seasons 3 and 4 of Downton Abbey, and in 1948, during Strom Thurmond's white-supremacist Presidential campaign (we've come so far!). In two seasons, Cleveland technically did not lose because there was no winner–in the 1994 strike year, and in 1902, when the World Series was canceled because of diptheria.

No founding club can match the Indians' knack for not winning. Since the beginning of MLB's common era, Cleveland only has one real rival for sustained non-achievement in the field of excellence, and yes, it's the Cubs. The Cubs and the Indians have identical records of 2 wins, 111 losses, and 2 ties since 1901.

The Indians' title drought gets a only a whiff of the attention elicited by the Cubs. This is in part because the Cubs are from a bigger market, have bigger stars, and play in a universally beloved stadium. They also don't have a racist logo, or the worst MLB attendance outside of Pinellas County, Florida.

But 2016 is a weird time to be alive. The rich-kid Cubs may have stumbled a bit once summer began, but they're still the favorite to win the NL. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Great Lakes, Cleveland has declared a Summer of George. Locals will be drunk on the Cavs victory until at least 2021, all eyes are on Northeast Ohio for the RNC (when we're not watching through our fingers), and the Indians might be the best team in baseball.

The Tribe ripped off a franchise-record 14 straight wins during and after the Cavs' Finals miracle. The Indians aren't just good; they're smiley, young, and likeable, the kind of team you might root for even if you aren't an everyday fan. Their formula for the best record in the AL doesn't boast the hair-on-fire hustle of the recent Kansas City Royals or the sizzle of the Cubs, but it might actually be more fun to watch.

It starts with relentlessly competent starting pitching. The stoic Corey Kluber is a known quantity after his 2014 Cy Young, and he might not even be the second-best pitcher on his own team because of Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar. Trevor Bauer is the pitching equivalent of prog rock. Josh Tomlin strikes out six batters for every one he walks. He doesn't strike out that many batters.

The offense isn't as sexy as the starting rotation, but they do alright: bargain-bin free agent Mike Napoli is mashing and exuding his delightful Floridian take on lumbersexuality. Sawn-off super-utility Jose Ramirez has a European soccer-caliber compellingly bad haircut, and a knack for clutch hits. Juan Uribe is Juan Uribe. And there's an actual breaking-out-as-we-speak star in Francisco Lindor. The second-year shortstop has an event horizon for a glove, a whip-fast bat, and a fluorescent smile. Cleveland has been a different team since his callup mid-2015. If you don't know about Lindor already, you should.

There is nothing sports fans love more than an old-fashioned exorcism—it provides of the positive emotions associated with solving a problem, but instead of applying hard work and discipline yourself, you just watch someone else do something. If the Cavs celebration is any indication, a Cubs–Indians World Series ought to lead to a rapture somewhere in the lower Midwest. That's certainly true for the Cubs, but the Indians just don't matter as much. I have a theory about why, and a second theory about how to fix it.

The theory: The Indians are handicapped by their own bad vibes, courtesy of a screamingly racist team logo and a team name that's less offensive but still uncool enough to merit replacement. Before you @-splain me, I'm not here to tell you why Chief Wahoo is bad (he's bad). I don't like him, maybe you do, fine, consider the debate embraced.

In something like Chief Wahoo's defense: Non-Clevelander critics often fail to understand that there are real reasons why Chief Wahoo persists, none of which (overtly) involve racism. For a lot of Cleveland fans, Wahoo stands for their city and their shared hopes, not for a demeaning caricature of Native Americans. That doesn't make the Chief not a demeaning caricature, but it's worth pausing to acknowledge that almost no one likes it when an outsider tells them to change. Even if they suspect that the change in question is a good idea. Think of the difference between knowing you ought to lose a few pounds and someone calling you fat. That said, you should still try to lose the weight, if only to spite the asshole who teased you.

The fix: If the Indians want to win hearts and minds, or at least get a lot of attention, they have a convenient nuclear option that they're probably not considering. The simplest, most effective way to delete a cumulative century of baggage — the losing, their spiritual carbuncle of a logo — is delete their name. Start fresh. They don't even have to start fresh, they can just start over. The team hasn't always been the Indians — they began as the Blues, switched after one year to the Bronchos, then changed again one year later to the Naps. That lasted all of 11 years, after which they've been the Indians. None of those names are exciting, and Bronchos isn't even spelled right, but they're also not racist.

But there's an even better option lurking just a few pages back in Cleveland baseball history. From 1887 to 1899, the city was home to a National League club that was initially known as the Blues, but soon re-dubbed itself the SPIDERS.

Things did not end well for the Spiders—in what was not the most sportspersonlike move of 1899, the owners of the Spiders bought a different team in the same league at the start of the season, and moved all the good players on the Cleveland team onto their other team. The remaining Spiders went 20–134, including losing 40 of their last 41 games, and the franchise folded after the season. But on the positive side: They were named the Spiders, which is not only not racist (spiders don't even see race) but is also several thousand percent more metal than any other MLB team name, past present and future.

I'm not saying that an unprecedented mid-season name and uniform change is the only way to get people to care about Cleveland's baseball team. But it is a way. Ditching Wahoo and the Indians nickname would at least be a start toward the team claiming their rightful place in baseball's collective imagination. That rightful place is "historically as bad at winning as the Cubs," but one step at a time. Like I said, take catharsis any way you can get it.

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