There’s a song that just came out called “Cleveland.” No, it isn’t the one you might be thinking of. It’s not the one by the most successful singer in the world, who has been rich and famous for decades. You know, the one all about how people don’t like her and how she’s an “acquired taste.” It’s not the one where someone who has everything sticks it to the almost infinitesimally-impotent “haters.”
The one I am talking about is by Squirrel Flower, the band/nom de art of Ella Williams, who will never
have a fraction of the fame or fortune of the other singer. “Cleveland” is on her new album, Say a Prayer to The Gods of Getting Going. The song, and the album, is wrestling with restlessness and the longing for roots (she also wants to “say a prayer to the gods of standing still”). In her Cleveland she sings of a lover who says all the trains stop in Chicago, but she’s not sure. The chorus, with her distinct sound, somehow both grinding and soaring, a crunchy hard-driven dream, says, “he’s cute, but he doesn’t like Cleveland/no house no dog in the yard/Saturn return or Saturday baseball/guess I’ll go east on my own.”
It’s here I have to admit that, while Squirrel Flower is maybe my favorite current act — my only tattoo is a reference to one of her songs — my sympathy lies with the lover. I can’t claim to be cute; the years when that might have applied are in a fading mirror, if ever it applied. But I also don’t like Cleveland.
Specifically, I don’t like our division rivals and opponent in the ALDS, starting now (Saturday baseball, indeed). While the Twins might be the team I like the least, the Guardians are the most annoying, persistent, and consistent foes of the White Sox. From the ’90s teams that were nearly always better than our best to the Travis Hafner-led brutes of the 2000s to the consistently-competitive teams of the last decade, they have always been what we’re not.
Now, to be fair, the Guardians aren’t the Yankees, the team that has it all but still is obsessed with proving “the haters” wrong, at once arrogant and self-pitying, bullying and insecure, fabulously successful and still whining that they can’t have just a little more. There are few traits more disgusting, in sports or music or politics. That it is perhaps the dominant attitude of our times helps explain where we are.
The Guardians are more the contempt borne from familiarity and from my own Chicago insecurity. There is no reason why Cleveland — Cleveland! — makes us look so second-rate so often. It gnaws at me and produces unattractive snobbery. It makes me say cruel things about the Rust Belt, a region that has fully shaped my literary and political tastes. I should love and admire Cleveland, and I do — in theory. But baseball rivalries aren’t about theory. They are about the agony of losses.
So here’s why I can’t stand them.
While I have no real memory of the Bears ever playing the Browns, my feelings toward them moved from pity to contempt when they gave a hideous sex offender the richest contract in football, and their fans embraced him — not despite of, but seemingly because of his hideousness. They reveled in filth to stick it to the PC haters who simpingly thought massage professionals shouldn’t be assaulted. I can’t quite separate Browns fans from Guardians fans.
I hate them because I still have to think that their name is the Guardians instead of the Indians. This isn’t “oh, why’d they change it?” It’s that it took them so damn long that I will always have that racist name in my head.
And you know what? I’m a dead-ender for the old name, in a retributive way. I’ll never say the old name, but think that Cleveland will always own it. While “Redskins” was the most offensive name in sports, the Indians managed to sum up the American attitude toward Natives, taking a vast multitude of people and polities, of tribes and nations, and condense them down into one leering grotesquerie.
Cleveland kept the name “Indians,” and kept Chief fucking Wahoo, for decades and decades, through the civil rights era, through the heart of the American Indian Movement in the ’60s and ’70s, and until the 2020s. It’s insane. That doesn’t just go away.
In this way, I’m a bit like Aldo Raines, the Brad Pitt character from Inglourious Basterds. He knew the Nazis could take off their uniforms, and blend back into society. But that didn’t sit that well with him. So he gave them something they can’t take off — a scar that forever branded them a Nazi.
Incidentally, Tarantino named the character after 50s B-movie actor Aldo Ray, about whom Roger Ebert said, “Nobody smokes a cigarette like Aldo. There’s no forethought involved. No effort to seduce or impress audiences with an exaggerated pose or gesture. Aldo doesn’t have to pretend to be cool, threatening, bruised, battered or tough. He just is.” He’s mostly forgotten now, his career suffering from his own personal demons, and a movie audience that never fully resonated with his masculinity, both overwhelming and vulnerable. He lives on with Tarantino, and with my dog Aldo, named after the actor.
Ray never had the career he deserved, but who does?
Most musicians do not. Most actors do not. Most athletes do not. Is there a reason in the universe why, for so many people, Tim Anderons’s incendiary career is remembered for getting knocked down by José Ramírez? No. Because justice doesn’t exist in sports or in life. Sometimes, almost every time, the team you hate the most wins.
But it doesn’t always happen that way. The 2026 White Sox beat the Astros, a shell of their detestable dynastic self, but still favored and expected to win the Wild Card series. Just like the Guardians are expected to win the Divisional Series. And just like earlier this week — god, did that series really happen this week? — we don’t know how things will play out.
There are no real answers in life. I’m going to keep listening to Squirrel Flower, wondering if she’ll ever solve her twin pulls between restlessness and rootedness. I’m going to sit with my dog watching his namesake B-movie noir tough with a heart of gold even if the name is as faded as old reels. And I’m going to keep watching these White Sox try to pull off the improbable, knowing that if they do, they’ll turn the rivalry on its head, much like the Bears did with Green Bay last January.
And if not? It’s another reason I don’t like Cleveland. Presumably, I’ll never truly run out.
