Outsiders' View: FCs From Around the League Weigh-In on the Indians

(Photo by Nick Laham/Getty Images)

Over the years, Cleveland sports fans have been subjected to some spectacularly bad teams.

The Browns have had exactly one good season since their reincarnation in 1999. They have never won a Super Bowl. Their biggest moments were "The Drive" and "The Fumble", both of which serve as reminders of failure rather than success.

The Cavs were pathetic B.L. (Before LeBron). People outside the state of Ohio seemed largely unaware that Cleveland even had a basketball team. Their only other successful stretch was a few playoff runs in the early 1990s that are remembered more for the buzzer shots by Michael Jordan that took them down, than the team itself. They have never won an NBA Championship.

The Indians, of course, were epically bad for 20 years in the 1970s and 1980s. In two decades they produced the inspiration for Major League, provoked the infamous "10 Cent Beer Night" riot, and secured exactly zero playoff berths. They have not won a World Series since 1948, a championship draught second only to that of the Cubs.

Suffice it to say that we Cleveland fans have a lot of experience with bad teams. We know how to love a loser, or at least have a good time heckling one.

We spend a lot of seasons expecting to lose and are trained to be okay with it. Given that, you would think we would be able to accept the 2009 Indians with, at the very least, a sense of resigned detachment. Unfortunately, it seems that we can't.

The problem is that we didn't expect this team to lose. They were supposed to be contenders. We had every reason to expect great things from this team before the season began, so instead of being resigned to their incompetence, we were shocked, disappointed, and can't stop trying to figure out what went wrong.

Most of us are pretty sure we are more qualified to evaluate the team than its own front office, but we've spent the whole season trying to determine what went wrong, and how to fix the mess. And we can't figure it out either.

Eventually, it occurred to me that maybe we were just too close to it to see things clearly.

Were we all perhaps clinging to expectations for players who would never meet them, when we should have been cutting the cord and searching for replacements? Were we waiting for the team to turn it around long after we should have seen that it would never happen?

Worst of all, had we perhaps overestimated our chances in the first place, believing we had a team with potential to contend, when in fact, there was little chance of this in reality?

By the midpoint of the season I deemed myself (as well as my fellow Indians' fans and the organization itself) to be too biased and too bewildered to answer these questions accurately. The only way to determine the truth seemed to be to seek outside opinion from an objective party.

It was thus with the hope of seeking the truth about the 2009 Indians from an unbiased source that I decided to poll my fellow featured columnists on Bleacher Report about the my beleaguered team.

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