Even if the home team doesn't win it's impossible not to root for them

I didn't watch enough baseball last year. Not only because I couldn't, but also because I didn't want to. Sacrilege, I know, for someone who has devoted so many hours of his life to the Cleveland Indians. Like most Major League Baseball teams, they played only 60 games last year, far less than half of the 162 they usually play. The pandemic cut the season short, then the Indians cut their postseason short by losing two straight games to the Yankees. Depressing, to be sure, but I paid them less mind than usual not just because the season and postseason were truncated. I also spent too many afternoons and early evenings watching state and national news conferences on the pandemic and later evenings following the presidential campaign, simultaneously fascinated and fearful. Now I'm not sure what I think of the team, whose season opens Thursday in Detroit. Part of the problem is that so many important players are gone, including Francisco Lindor, Carlos Carrasco and Carlos Santana. I'm still learning about newcomers such as left fielder Eddie Rosario, shortstop Andres Giménez and 100-mph reliever Emmanuel Clase. A bigger problem is my growing suspicion that my attention for the last 62 seasons — I started rooting for the team in 1959, when I was 8 years old — has somehow contributed to its record for futility. No other team has failed to win the World Series for as long as the Indians. They last won the Series in 1948, three years before I was born. In 1954, three years after I was born, they lost the Series in four straight games. It gets harder and harder for me not to believe, as the years without a title mount — it's now 72 — that my birth somehow jinxed them. Rather than face the possibility that only my death will unjinx them — too grim a thought even for a fan as bizarrely superstitious as I am — I've considered whether I might solve the problem by unfollowing them. I got some practice at that last year, and I could go cold turkey this year ... Except that I wouldn't find out whether: • Catcher Roberto Pérez regains his prowess at the plate and retains his prowess behind it. He hit only a single home run last year and had just five RBIs. In 2019, admittedly a full season, he hit 24 homers and drove in 63 runs. Both years, though, he won a Gold Glove as the league's best defender at his position. • Bradley Zimmer ever realizes the potential the team saw in him when it made him its No. 1 draft pick in 2014. How can I not root for a guy so fast and so exuberant that he crashed into Yankee Stadium's center field wall May 5, 2018, trying to catch a long fly ball? Shortly after that, he was sent to the minors and has been trying to work his way back to the starting lineup in the majors ever since. • A rookie with a body mass index punier than mine, Triston McKenzie, can hold down a job in the starting rotation. I weigh what he does, 165 pounds, and I'm two inches shorter at 6 feet 3 inches tall. How nice to think that "athletic build" might not be an oxymoron when applied to us. OK, I admit it. Baseball isn't just a sport for me. It's personal, which is why I'll never be able to quit rooting for the team. And hoping that my attention is not a cross it must bear. Andy Young is editor emeritus of The Chronicle-Telegram. Contact him at (440) 329-7111 or ayoung@chroniclet.com.