All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
It's winner-take-all baseball in Cleveland tonight, after the Cubs banged out 13 hits and throttled the Indians 9-3 on Tuesday to force a Game 7. To be honest, I have not been the most informed baseball fan of late, largely because my team's playoff drought is almost old enough to drive. But I do know that for the last three-plus months, the entire city of Cleveland, buoyed by a jubilant Internet, has been smugly basking in the glow of the Cavs' unlikely triumph over the Golden State Warriors, who blew a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals. (Have you heard? People forget sometimes.) Now Cleveland suddenly finds itself grappling with the crippling fear that its baseball team is about to fall victim to the exact same thing.
If you're looking for more than likely coincidental parallels that will nonetheless cause spooked Indians fans to start sweating underneath their Chief Wahoo–emblazoned T-shirts, they are most certainly there. Once again, it's the home team that has frittered away that seemingly insurmountable series lead, transforming what would otherwise be a raucous home crowd into a black hole of existential dread, threadbare nerves, and tens of thousands of mini-meltdowns ready to happen simultaneously. In August, Warriors coach Steve Kerr gave Cubs manager Joe Maddon some hard-earned tips on how to fish a wire-to-wire first-place season. And just as the Warriors' downfall was precipitated by their owner boasting of his team's superiority to The New York Times—seriously, the phrase "light-years ahead" probably still causes Steph Curry to break out in hives—so too has a certain prominent member of the Cleveland community made headlines for gleefully roasting the Warriors for blowing that 3-1 lead. From a karmic perspective, it is now distinctly possible that the collective glee over that first title is about to cost the city a second one.
Maybe the Cubs get wrecked tonight and this all just becomes a mildly interesting footnote to the Indians' first World Series title since 1948. But with everything that's gone down since The Shot and The Block and The Stop, Cleveland has to be feeling it right now.
Tickets for Game 7 start at a grand for standing room only, which means there could be a lot of light-pocketed, heavy-hearted Indians fans streaming silently out of Progressive Field tonight. I suggest enabling push alerts on Draymond Green's Twitter page now, just in case.