There’s one very simple reason.
The four teams in the two League Championship Series this year rank, per Spotrac, No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and No. 24 in cash payrolls.
I’m pretty sure you can guess who No. 24 is. (FWIW, the Cubs are sixth in the Spotrac ranking.)
The Dodgers (1), Mets (2) and Yankees (3) have attempted to buy themselves a championship and they just might succeed.
The Cleveland Guardians, meanwhile, have a payroll of about $129 million this year, which is a bit more than a third of what the top-ranked Dodgers are paying their players ($326 million).
I’m only mentioning these because I thought it was an interesting contrast between the three largest payrolls and a team that’s won 90+ games for the fifth time in the last seven full seasons (2020 excluded) without ever being one of the game’s big spenders. The payroll thing is, however, a topic for another time — and I will address it at another time.
Instead, the reason you should root for the Guardians this fall is simple. It’s their championship drought, something we as Cubs fans are intimately familiar with. When the Cubs’ drought ended by winning the 2016 World Series, the then-Cleveland Indians World Series drought continued. It’s now at 75 years.
The Cleveland AL franchise does not have a glittering postseason history. They won the World Series the first two times they were in it — 1920 and 1948. And that’s it. In the 75 years since, they’ve been in four other World Series (1954, 1995, 1997 and 2016) and lost all of them, in 1997 in soul-crushing fashion when they were two outs away from victory in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7. And then an error helped lead to the winning run scoring in the 11th. If you don’t recall who scored that run… he’s now a familiar face on the North Side [VIDEO].
Imagine if the Cubs had not won Game 7 in 2016, but had lost in a manner like that. No, maybe better not to think about that.
But that’s what Cleveland fans have had to live with for eight years since 2016, 27 years since that 1997 failure, and 75 years in total. Between 1998 and 2022, they went to the postseason 10 times and failed to even reach the World Series in nine of them, and got to the ALCS only twice.
It’s time now, just as it was for the Cubs in 2016, for the Cleveland Guardians to end that franchise’s long, long drought and raise a championship banner.
I’m cheering for them. What about you?