Oh, man! Do I remember this time of year!

Looking at the recent Detroit and now the Chicago series do I remember this time of year!

The clock would turn to September and we would see these guys come up from the minors.  Now, before the internet exploded with minor league baseball all you would know was that so-and-so was being promoted.   Sometimes the guy, like Corey Snyder, would be hyped to the nth degree so you would be pumped when he came up.   Sometimes these guys would just show up without much fanfare.

The only constant was that the Indians were essentially eliminated by Sept. 1st.  

The Tigers and the White Sox are in deep rebuild.   The Indians, well, they never were in rebuild mode because that skyscraper crumbled in about 1960 and was never rebuilt.   What the Indians were doing in the 60s, 70s and 80s was moving from one dilapidated structure to another, putting a fresh coat of paint on a condemned building trying to make it seem like it was, somehow, new and improved.  You have to have been to the mountain to truly be in rebuild mode and Indians fans in those decades were the equivalent of living in St. Louis and straining to see the rocky mountains in the distance.  There was no hope, just a few 'faces of the franchise' to root for surrounded by fill-in veterans who couldn't hook on with contenders and placeholder career AAAA guys...and the joke of movies like Major League to portray the flailing and gnashing of teeth as the Indians would trade pitching for hitting and, finding out that they didn't have enough pitching, trade the hitting to get pitching back.   You get the idea. 

Now we are competitive year after year and it is teams like the White Sox and now the Tigers who are trading any tradeable piece that they can trade for any good return in prospects that they can get back.   They hope that a confluence of prospect development and veterans still being under contract or newly signed as free agents will occur as it did for the Indians in 1994-2001 and, from what I can see, for the Royals in recent years.   Certainly, the Tigers and, I think, the White Sox will have the cash to pull this off.   More than the Royals or the Indians ever will if they fall into these doldrums. 

So, Indians fans, remember those hollow decades of baseball in Cleveland and, when you watch the Tigers and White Sox roll out guys with ERAs over 6 and batting averages under .200, few of whom you have ever heard of, that we as fans have been there and done that and hope we don't have to go back any time soon.

As much as I don't want to say it because they are division rivals, I wish the Twins, Royals, Tigers and White Sox luck in their rebuilding.   Heaven knows that I, as an Indians fan, have been there and done that and I don't wish that experience on anyone.   Fortunately, for me and the rest of the Indians fans, we get to have some fun each September and, hopefully, in October.