Labor Day look at the skyline

Three games with Detroit coming up. Six point five games back. Most of the current every day lineup has traveled up I-71. The players that should be playing are limping around, arms in slings, holding their sides after stretching in the morning. We should all do ourselves a favor, put on our Gerard Warren jerseys and start bitching about all things orange and brown. It is Labor Day afterall - it was a good run! The Tribe gave us a ridiculously fun summer. Walk off wins and all that. Good times. But when I look up at the skyline, I see the Terminal Tower.... yup, this is still Cleveland, and those Good Times had to end at some point. And they have.

It might SEEM like there is STILL THAT CHANCE left because of these games with Detroit and because SIZEMORE IS BACK today and we brought fucking god damn Jim Thome back and we have some good starters and a good bullpen ... but it would just be healthier to officially tone down our great big Chief Wahoo grins.

I'm making this announcement today because, more than anything, I need to make myself believe this. Waking up to see the tweet: "Grady Sizemore is batting leadoff" and knowing that a sweep would put us 3.5 games back with a ton of games to play leads my mind to wander. I'm easily tantalized, but not really because there is a real reason to believe - nothing factual, nothing solid - it's only because I so desperately want to believe. This season was just too special and fun to believe that it's going to end with such a thud. We were 30-15 and had the world by the balls. We swung a huge deadline deal and acquired the biggest prize on the market. We even brought back fucking, god damn Jim Thome, just to add that extra prodigal son, heart-warming, homecoming storyline. Aw, nice. Like Lofton in 2007, but with more bitterness.

Sure, the entire team has been on the DL this year, BUT we were able to kind of tread water without them. So WHEN they come back, we will REALLY turn it on! See, look! Grady's back... and Kipnis is supposed to be back this week ... and I hear Pronk is ahead of schedule ... and I'm sure Choo will be back soon too ......

No. Stop it. This is why I'm writing this. I've gone through that laundry list at least 10 different times this year, re-talking myself into a team that had already died. This season might have felt like a lucky, charmed, fluke of a season when there were few expectations in April, but now when you look at it, and you see the entire team out with injuries (and even when they come back, they get hurt fucking stretching. STRETCHING! Seriously, WTF is an oblique and why the hell do ours suck so bad?!) you realize this season had just as much, if not more, bad luck. So many should haves and could haves and what ifs. Honestly, what would the Tigers look like without their top four hitters? I'll tell you - they'd be GOD AWFUL. Not enough is being made about how banged up the Tribe has been, and yet how close they still are. Somehow we've avoided being GOD AWFUL, which is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the year, but the absence of GOD AWFUL doesn't print playoff tickets. But it has brewed false hope. A lot of it. I've been drunk on it all year. How drunk have I been on false hope? I started to believe Fausto Carmona "found it again." Jesus. That is not healthy. And that's why I'm writing this.

The true symbol of what I'm saying is Grady Sizemore. He's my guy. I have a shirt with his name on it. The dude, in a perfect world, could have been a top 5 player in all of baseball. However, not only is this NOT a perfect world - look up at the skyline again. If there ever was a comically imperfect, down right pathetic world, it would exist within stadiums on the shores of Lake Erie. Grady is the ultimate tantalizer. There is no reason for us to truly believe he's going to step back into the lineup and do anything. Earlier in the year he came off the DL (the second time) and sucked balls for weeks, until, of course, he looked like was turning it around and then went back on the DL. ..... I know that when he came off the DL THE FIRST TIME that he was unreal, smashing doubles the way he breaks hearts ...... but don't do it. Don't talk yourself into it. It's Labor Day, the team is 6.5 games back, the best players are in full body casts - it's time to talk yourself into Colt McCoy and Brian Robiskie, not Grady Sizemore.

If you doubt this thesis, even for a second, even if Grady smacks a double, and Asdrubal is up, and we're only 2 runs down, and we can chip into the Tiger's lead ... and if we can just win this one game, and then put Kipnis back in the lineup ... and then get Choo back in it .... and then if Masterson can match Verlander on Wednesday .... plus, we still play the Tigers three more times after this series ....

... Just take a deep breath and look at the skyline. Six point five games. That's a lot. In Cleveland, it's even more.

Go Tribe. Go Browns.