The Ugly
The worst of the worst.
My post on my favorite baseball movies from three weeks ago gave me an idea. No, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is not a baseball movie (if it was, my money would be on Tuco), but maybe I can adapt the title for my own purposes. I thought it might be interesting to pick three random teams from between 1985-94— one good, one average, and one terrible— and take a closer look at each of them in a three-part series. The fact that all three of them are from the 1991 season is just a happy coincidence, but I think it worked out well. This is the third and final part.
The Ugly: 1991 Cleveland Indians
Was there any doubt that my terrible team would reside in Cleveland? This series of articles was inspired by my favorite baseball movie post, and if you read it, you know I chose Major League as my number one. There’s a reason that movie feels so authentic. For most of my childhood, the Cleveland Indians were the worst.
Long before it was a trending topic, I wondered if there wasn’t some kind of curse on teams with Native American nicknames. If you watched the Indians and the Braves in the mid-to-late 80’s— not to mention my hometown Kansas City Chiefs, to jump to another sport for a second— it wasn’t an outlandish notion.
Cleveland was the perennial doormat of the AL East, and they hadn’t won a World Series since 1948 when Bob Feller and Satchel Paige were pitching. That’s thirty-one years before I was even born. Seven years before my mom and dad were born!
And they still haven’t won a championship, although they have managed to come close. Actually, close doesn’t even really do it justice. They lost to the Braves in six games in the 1995 World Series, and got oh-so-close to breaking the jinx in 1997 and 2016, before having their hearts ripped out in seven games by the Marlins and Cubs, respectively.
So times would not stay bad forever. Nowadays, I consider the Guardians, as they’re now called, one of the better run organizations in baseball. (Which is saying something, because they’re also notoriously cheap. But man, can they develop pitching.) And if you squint really hard at the 1991 season, you can see the early signs of it turning around. But they still had a long way to go.
Cleveland finished the 1991 season 57-105, setting a record for the most losses in franchise history. They had a -183 run differential, and finished 34 games back of first place Toronto in the AL East. As a lifetime Royals fan, these numbers are probably not as shocking to me as they should be, but if you’re a fan of a consistently good team, I’m sure they’re somewhat jarring.
So what was that I was saying about positives? Well, get out your magnifying glass, because here we go.
For starters, one of the best moves the club made was firing manager John McNamara after a 25-52 start and replacing him with Mike Hargrove. Hargrove was nicknamed “The Human Rain Delay” for his deliberate pace at the plate as a player, and sure wouldn’t have survived the pitch clock era, but he was a hell of a manager, and he oversaw the turnaround and accompanying success of the team until 1999.
Managers, even the best ones, can only do so much though. If you want to win baseball games, you need players. That was always a big problem for Cleveland when I was a kid. I generally remember them as a team filled with no-names. I’m not trying to diminish the talent of anyone who made it to the majors, as it exceeds my own exponentially, but these were the type of players you tossed aside when you got their cards in a pack. “Commons,” we called them.
Sure, they might have one guy who stood out. I remember Joe Carter specifically. He was the one legit All-Star for the early Indians teams I saw, and the one guy in the lineup putting up impressive stats. Although we all knew that his stats would be even more impressive if he had just a little bit of help.
The 1991 Cleveland lineup still had a lot of those common guys. 2B Mark Lewis, IF Jerry Browne, 1B Mike Aldrete, and DH Chris James, who did actually set the team record with 9 RBI in a single game, during a 20-6 blowout win over Oakland in May. This might have been the highlight of their season.
1B Brook Jacoby was a decent enough player, and an All-Star in 1986 and 1990, but he was nearing the end of his career and would not be a factor in their future success. Joel Skinner started 99 games at catcher, but that was only because Sandy Alomar, Jr. was hurt. Alomar was the AL Rookie of the Year in 1990, and would become a staple behind the plate for the AL in the All-Star Game over the next decade. So even though he was limited in 1991, that was something to get excited about.
Nor was he the only reason for hope. Carlos Baerga was beginning to make his presence felt, and a young slugger named Jim Thome arrived on the scene and played 27 games. On the pitching side of things, Greg Swindell and an up-and-comer named Charles Nagy showed signs of promise. The latter would be starting in the World Series a few years later.
But without a doubt, the showpiece was Albert Belle in LF. Belle was never a very likeable guy. He clashed with the media, trucked Brewers 2B Fernando Vina on a ground ball, and once tried to run down some trick-or-treaters in his SUV. But the dude could swing a bat.
His prime was too short, but man, was it something to see. He was arguably the best offensive player in baseball at his peak. A 5-time All-Star, he became the first player ever to hit 50 HR and 50 Doubles in a single season in 1995. He probably should have won the AL MVP that season, but the writers gave it to Mo Vaughn instead, presumably because they hated Belle’s guts. Hey, no one ever said life was fair or that karma wasn’t real.
In 1991, he was still spreading his wings and figuring it out, but he was already an offensive force, and by far the best player on the team. He finished 1991 with a statline of .282/.323/.540, 28 HR, 95 RBI, 31 Doubles, 2 Triples, .863 OPS, 134 OPS+.
Not too shabby, but like his predecessor, Joe Carter, he desperately needed some help. Unlike Carter, however, he got it. Not just the names I mentioned above either. More reinforcements arrived over the following seasons.
Kenny Lofton, one of the best leadoff men I’ve seen and a borderline Hall-of-Famer made his debut the next year, earning a second-place finish in the AL ROY race. Probably one of the few races the speedster ever lost in his life. He didn’t come by himself either. 1B Paul Sorrento and pitchers Jose Mesa and Eric Plunk were also called up.
Manny Ramirez came up in 1993. The following season, Cleveland dealt for Omar Vizquel, an all-time great shortstop, and signed HOFer Eddie Murray and Denny Martinez. A year later, they bolstered their pitching staff by adding Orel Hershiser and Ken Hill. Combined with the talented young core they’d been cultivating since 1991, Cleveland ended up in the World Series that October.
For fans of a perennial basement dweller, of which I am one, I can’t offer a much better example of why you should stick it out and never give up hope.
Thank you for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. I hope you’ve enjoyed this three-part series, and I’d love to hear your picks for the worst teams ever in the comments. Or maybe an even better question would be, what was the worst year for your favorite team? Let us know!
An example of losing 105 games and getting to the playoffs 3-4 years later. Several examples this year, Baltimore, Minnesota & Texas wins it all. Glad to see the Rangers win the Series finally, now just 5 teams left to win a championship. Thanks for the story and memories.