CLEVELAND — The final out nestled in the glove of the visiting first baseman, who raised both arms to the air in triumph. The series was over, and his team had reached new heights. He vowed to keep the ball as a symbol of the achievement.
That scene played out last fall in Cleveland, with Anthony Rizzo of the Chicago Cubs, who ultimately presented the ball to the owner Tom Ricketts at a championship parade with millions of revelers. Before that, though, it had also happened in Toronto, with Carlos Santana of the Indians. He caught the foul pop that clinched the Indians’ first American League pennant in 19 years. It signified the possibility of the franchise’s first World Series title in decades.
The Indians, of course, came up one run short, losing in the 10th inning of Game 7 of the World Series. Santana keeps his last-out ball at his home here, so his family can see it. He stores his AL championship ring in a safe.
“I don’t want that — I want the big one, like champions,” Santana said Friday, by his locker at Progressive Field. “I felt last year like a champion, because we were fighting till the last out. Last year was very special, but the team this year is much better.”
The baseball playoffs start Tuesday, with the New York Yankees hosting the Minnesota Twins in the AL wild-card game. The Indians will play the winner in a best-of-five division series, with the first two games at home Thursday and Friday.
The Indians improved by eight games over last season, finishing 102-60 to earn home-field advantage through the American League Championship Series. It was only the third 100-win season in franchise history, after 1954 and 1995, the bookend years of a four-decade stretch without a postseason appearance.
The end of the Cubs’ drought has made the Indians the sad stewards of baseball’s longest active streak without winning the World Series. They last did it in 1948, when John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon were ambitious young congressmen and baseball had been integrated for one year.
The Indians’ pursuit will not grip the sports world the way the Cubs’ did. Sixty-nine years is a long time, but it is hardly a century of pain. Players know it has been a while, but the team’s tortured history is more of a vague concept than a burden. They do not expect it to resonate nationally.
“Nobody outside our fan base really cares how long it’s been since we won,” said Francisco Lindor, the Indians’ dazzling young shortstop. “The Dodgers fans, they don’t care that we haven’t won in a long time. The Yankees fans don’t care, the Red Sox fans don’t care. They just want us to lose against them — and that’s perfectly fine. We don’t want sympathy. That’s not how we play the game. It’s not like we want other fan bases to say, ‘Oh, my God, I feel so bad for them because they haven’t won in 80 years.’”
Eighty years, 69 years — what’s another decade or so when the Indians have waited this long? The fans, at least for now, seem upbeat. While the Indians still ranked near the bottom in AL attendance, they sold more than 2 million tickets for the first time in nine years. And, NFL misery notwithstanding, the Cavaliers’ 2016 NBA title may have changed the sports outlook around town.
The ghosts of squandered playoffs past — including a blown save in Miami in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series — are receding.
“This is my 29th year, and this is the only community I’ve ever known that had phrases to describe every failed championship,” said Tom Hamilton, the Indians’ longtime broadcaster. “You know: the Drive, the Fumble, the Shot, the Ninth Inning with Jose Mesa and the Marlins. It almost seemed like people perpetuated that misery. I don’t want to say they enjoyed it, but it was always a badge of honor. The Cavs eliminated some of that.”
The Indians did their part, too. The seventh game against the Cubs will be remembered as a classic, but for most of the night it wasn’t. The Indians never led, and they were trailing, 6-3, against Aroldis Chapman in the bottom of the eighth inning. Had they lost by that score, Hamilton said, the sting of botching a three-games-to-one lead might have felt worse.
Instead, the frenzied comeback to tie the game — on a home run by Rajai Davis, now with the Boston Red Sox — defined that team, which overcame several injuries to make a spirited, unlikely run. But this year’s team is no underdog.
After a lackluster first half, the Indians have soared through the last 2 1/2 months. They finished the season on a 32-4 tear, and trailed for only eight innings of their AL-record 22-game winning streak from Aug. 24 through Sept. 14. They outscored opponents by 254 runs for the season, the best run differential in the majors and the franchise high since that charmed summer of 1948.
“The length of the lineup and the depth of the team was a bit eye-opening to me,” said right-fielder Jay Bruce, who arrived from the New York Mets in an early August trade. “It’s like, wow, this isn’t just the nine guys on the field, there’s like 15 other guys who are quality and solid. That was the biggest thing during the streak. Some of our best players were hurt, and it was just like, next man up.”
The depth was by design. The Indians’ front office — which has served for years as a feeder system for envious rivals — has always been keenly aware of its competitive window. When it closes, the team acts quickly to maximize value and trade for the core of the next winner.
After Bartolo Colon anchored three playoff rotations, the Indians traded him to Montreal in 2002 for a package including a young Cliff Lee. Seven years later, after Lee had won a Cy Young Award, they dealt him to Philadelphia for a prospect haul that brought Carlos Carrasco, who was 18-6 with a 3.29 earned run average this season. Other high-impact players — Santana, Corey Kluber, Trevor Bauer, Michael Brantley — have come in similar deals.
When they fell short last year, the Indians did something unusual: They spent big, signing Edwin Encarnacion to a three-year, $60 million free-agent contract, the richest in team history. For players still processing the heartbreak of Game 7, the deal was a jolt that reinforced the urgency of the moment.
“I didn’t turn my phone on for a week, didn’t watch TV, flushed it,” said closer Cody Allen, who escaped to a vacation along the California coast. “Then I got home, and about a month after that we signed Edwin — so it was pretty exciting. It’s kind of weird to look back and say that the offseason following losing in the 10th inning of Game 7 of the World Series was a really exciting offseason. But we knew the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.”
Encarnacion, a former Blue Jay, has helped them do it by leading the team in homers (38) and RBI (107). Jose Ramirez and Lindor combined for a staggering 172 extra-base hits, and only the Houston Astros had a better on-base plus slugging percentage than Cleveland’s .788.
The Indians have also excelled on the mound, leading the majors in ERA (3.30) and strikeouts, while issuing the fewest walks. Kluber is likely to win the AL Cy Young Award, and Carrasco and Bauer have gone 35-15 behind him. Relief ace Andrew Miller lost five weeks this summer to knee tendinitis, but returned in mid-September.
“I was fortunate to get back when I did, because I was able to pitch back-to-back and go multiple innings and check those boxes,” Miller said. “I’ve gotten a lot stronger, and my symptoms are next to nothing. I feel like I can go out there and do whatever I need. At the same time, we’re a deeper bullpen.”
Now the Indians are the AL’s best team, perhaps the best in baseball, with expectations to match. The best team does not always win it all — and for almost seven decades, the Indians have not, either. But they will eagerly try again.
“Really, nobody else can draw off what we went through,” Miller said. “Hopefully, we can use that fuel and get one more win.”