When the Chicago Cubs were eliminated from this year's postseason, their faithful were left with a familiar question: how to stay invested in October baseball when your own team is already watching from home. With this year's World Series set to close out the season - and no certainty about when MLB will next take the field in 2026 given the uncertainty hanging over the sport - one Cubs fan found an answer in an unlikely but fitting place: Cleveland.
A Drought That Cubs Fans Understand All Too Well
The Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians, are chasing a World Series title that has eluded the franchise for 77 years. For anyone who has worn Cubs blue, that kind of sustained heartbreak is not an abstraction - it is a shared language. The parallels run deeper than drought alone. Both franchises won exactly two World Series titles before 1950, then spent decades oscillating between competitive stretches and long, dry spells that tested generations of supporters.
A Century of Near-Misses and Hard Lessons
Cleveland's history is a study in frustration despite talent. The franchise fielded two of the pre-Live Ball Era's greatest players, Napoleon Lajoie and Tris Speaker, yet managed only championships in 1920 and 1948. The 1920 pennant arrived under odd circumstances tied to the fallout from the 1919 Black Sox scandal, while the 1948 title capped a run that briefly made Cleveland one of the American League's strongest teams. That strength proved fleeting. A record-setting 111-win season in 1954 ended in a World Series sweep, and the franchise then endured a brutal stretch of irrelevance that did not meaningfully lift until the mid-1990s.
The Manny Ramirez-Kenny Lofton Era, and a Gut-Punch in 1997
The 1995 Indians, built around a young core featuring Manny Ramirez and Kenny Lofton, returned the franchise to relevance and to the World Series, where they fell to the Atlanta Braves. Two years later came arguably the franchise's most painful moment: a Game 7 lead in the 1997 World Series against the Florida Marlins slipped away in extra innings, with Craig Counsell's name attached to both the tying and winning sequences. It was the kind of late-game collapse that lingers in a fan base's memory far longer than any regular-season triumph.
This Year's Guardians and the Stakes Ahead
Cleveland, now playing under the Guardians name, has reached the postseason eight times in the last 11 seasons, including the heartbreaking 2016 World Series run. This year's edition carries a resilient, "won't quit" identity, anchored by José Ramírez, one of the sport's most consistently productive yet underappreciated stars - even after an error in ALCS Game 2 contributed to unearned runs for the Rays. As Cleveland prepares for an afternoon Game 3 against Tampa Bay, the drought remains the defining storyline. For a Cubs fan who understands exactly what decades of waiting feels like, cheering for Cleveland this October is less a leap of faith than a natural extension of baseball empathy.
