Time goes slowly from age seven to twelve, and when a youngster’s time is being navigated through snowdrifts, howling winds and temperatures below zero, the calendar slows to a frozen crawl.
Let’s call it “Winter in Cleveland” and then let’s try to estimate how long such a winter would seem to an eight year old boy. And then let’s call that stretch “October to April” or the approximate amount of time between the end of the last baseball season and the beginning of the next.
The Bronze Age, for instance.
I’d stare out my bedroom window. Those aren’t snow and snowmen out there, they’re icebergs and polar bears. Oh don’t fret, little Tommy, because spring training will be starting around the same time Cleveland is experiencing a heat wave, a weather condition I had never heard of and couldn’t conceive experiencing, ever.
My only guide to seasonal change and hopes of Spring Training’s arrival came from three daily dispatches from dishonest sportswriters at The Plain Dealer, Cleveland Press and Cleveland News.
Thrice daily, starting in February, the sports sections would be heavy with optimistic tales of how the new season was shaping up. It always looked good.
Yessir, manager Bobby Bragan would announce, the Tribe is poised for a big breakout year! The constellations are all in alignment, and we can’t wait for Opening Day!
They actually wrote stuff like that, the sports section merchants of lies and exaggeration. Each day they fabricated accounts of how sharp the team was looking in these exhibition games, how strong and healthy all the injured players from last year were feeling, how much improved the starting pitching, and possibly the best bullpen in the league.
And just to cinch it, the Easter Bunny would be batting cleanup.
Oh how I devoured those sports pages! How I believed the gaudy lies the reporters concocted, every day spreading the same manure to gullible readers back in Cleveland. They could not have been further off, or bigger liars. But how was a 12-year old to know?
Because every season the Indians would have a few weeks of competent, winning baseball surrounded by several months losing everything but their socks, caps and underwear. The Tribe then nestled into its comfortable yearly burrow of sixth place, and by mid-June the season would be pretty much over.
By July a fan would stand in the left field bleachers holding a big cardboard sign with hand scrawled letters: “WAIT TIL NEXT YEAR!”
Being a Cleveland Indian fan, and there was no better fan than I, helped shape my personality. “Twisted” my personality is surely more accurate.
Large Apples, But Still
Went to Safeway last week and bought myself two (2) Big Honeycrisp Apples. They rang up at the register at $4.79. I told the nice cashier (Tina) I should have rented them instead.
More Tax $$ Please
That flushing sound we just heard was Governor Brylcreem’s presidential campaign going over a cliff and into a toilet. So sad!
He’s the state’s political king, the guy who campaigned on fixing the state’s homeless catastrophe, then spent billions making it worse. He sucked another few billion bucks out of taxpayer wallets for the high-speed bullet train that since its birth in 2008 has yet to lay track.
(Note: The 1776 miles of transcontinental railway was completed in six years with primitive equipment and the inconvenience of the Civil War. Construction cost, translated into 2026 dollars, was $1.6 billion.)
It is beyond laughable that Newsom and hundreds of other lawmakers, care workers, case workers, anti-fraud departments and law enforcement were unaware the state had been bleeding billions through make-believe hospice care offices clustered mostly in Los Angeles County.
Waste, fraud, abuse? If you aren’t outraged you must not pay taxes in California. Punchline: State Democrats need more tax money and are now hunting down billionaires. Ha ha.
And really now, do we need a president who can’t read the scripts his speechwriters give him?
(TWK says the good news is we don’t have to worry about our pampered governor getting mad after reading this column. Tom Hine has been writing ‘Assignment: Ukiah’ for more than 20 years.)
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