The tidbits that make up a season

Writing assignment to follow, please sharpen your #2 pencils

A long winter of predictions and projections draws to a close as the 2025 Major League Baseball season approaches.

Are you excited? I am excited. Yesterday, I stared into the mirror and said, “Fuck yeah. Baseball.”

There is never any telling what Cleveland baseball shall bring us. For me, that is much of the excitement. Some years an unheralded pitcher tinkers around and shows up with Cy Young stuff, or a twenty-year-old rookie wins seventeen games from the back of the rotation. I’ve seen fifty doubles and fifty home runs from the same player in a strike-shortened season and a twenty-two game winning streak that delivered free windows.

These are some of the season-long delights that baseball can deliver but some of the sweetest come on a single night. Surely you recall The Jerry Sands Game, the Austin Jackson catch at Fenway, and even Trevor Bauer’s final throw with Cleveland Indians. It wasn’t a pitch, but it did lead to what may have been Terry Francona’s finest hour as manager and reactions from Mike Freeman and Oscar Mercado that I can still replay in my head. A friend and I could only shake our heads in disbelief as Seby Zavala cranked his first three career dingers (out of fifteen total!) while the White Sox still managed to lose by one. This, by the way, is a classic Cleveland box score.

You just never know with baseball. Whether its future Hall-of-Famer homering in a snow flurry or a journeyman outfielder soaking in the chants of “JERRY, JERRY, JERRY!” from an entire stadium, any game on any day can make a memory that lasts a lifetime.

At the end of last season I asked readers to share some of their favorite moments from the year. To reverse-bookend the offseason I would love to see stories that might not resonate or be remembered by anyone else. The little things. Maybe Onion high-fived you on the concourse on her way to the Hot Dog Derby, or you were one number off from winning the 50-50 but caught a foul ball instead. It does not have to be from the previous season, but from any season of your fandom.

To help give an example of the kind of fun I’m hoping for, I will start.

My sisters and I took hold of the family’s tickets for the April 14th, 2017 contest. As happens sometimes, it was miserable. Not only were the Tribe getting pummeled by the Tigers all night but rain blew through and delayed the game. Cleveland didn’t even score until the bottom of the eighth, but the White Rajahs didn’t stop flowing and we decided to hang around until the end. Nothing better to do on a Friday night in April, right?

And this time, I think we really were right. The ninth inning rolled around and the Tigers held a 7-2 lead. Then, suddenly: a rally?! While I can check the Baseball-Reference link above I want to go off of my recollection which is that for no apparent reason the team remembered how to hit the baseball in the late innings. Yandy Diaz singled home a run and kept the bases loaded. After a strikeout, Francona looked down the bench and called for Lonnie Chisenhall to take the two-out at-bat.

Frankly, I was still drunk, soaked, and a little delirious at this point. We’d been at the game for close to four hours and you start to get a little loopy at that point even if you haven’t been drinking. Why not let Chisenhall hit? I can’t even remember why he wasn’t in the lineup that day, but I’m sure glad he wasn’t. The Tiger’s closer left a fastball elevated over the plate and Chisenhall launched it into the right field seats.

A few thousand of us who stuck around for it went ballistic, too. I think there were ten or twelve of us left in our section so we’d wandered down closer to the field and for whatever reason just started hammering the backs of the seats in front of us and screaming. I legitimately bruised my palms though I would not know it until the next day. Twenty-six outs of mostly brutal baseball and then, all at once, jubilation.

Austin Jackson struck out to end the game in the next at-bat but the sheer absurdity of sticking around that long for a lost game and catching a pinch hit grand slam? Wondrous.

May the 2025 season be filled with such tiny delights. Please, if you have a similarly random memory from your long (or short) career as a fan of Cleveland baseball, share in the comments below.