I’d like to tell you about Scott Entsminger. (Forgive me: I have written about him before.) Entsminger lived in Mansfield, Ohio, about 80 miles southwest of Cleveland by car, and he retired after 32 years at General Motors. He had a wife, a son and three dogs. He loved to fish and played in a band with friends. And he died on July 4, 2013, at 55.
In addition to all this, Entsminger was, perhaps as much as he was anything, a Cleveland Browns fan. And his obituary contains two lines I think about all the time.
“A lifelong Cleveland Browns fan and season ticket holder, he also wrote a song each year and sent it to the Cleveland Browns as well as offering other advice on how to run the team. He respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pall bearers so the Browns can let him down one last time.”
That’s what being a sports fan is. Being a sports fan is about hitching yourself to a team that knows nothing about you and has no connection to your life whatsoever, a team that you’ll give a shockingly large amount of money, time and emotional energy to over your lifetime — with zero guarantee that any of it will ever pay off.
Because often it doesn’t. Remember how, when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016 after a 108-year drought, fans wrote chalk messages with the names of friends and family who died before they ever got to see their beloved team win a World Series? It’s a lovely story, but it also means that those people spent their lives waiting for a championship, believing they’d eventually have their day in the sun, that it would all be worth it. And it never happened.
That’s really the only storyline that matters in this year’s World Series, which begins Friday and pits the Milwaukee Brewers against the Tampa Bay Rays. The Brewers and Rays are two of five Major League Baseball teams that have never won a World Series. (The others are the Rockies, Padres and Mariners; Seattle hasn’t even reached a World Series.) Which means a whole bunch of people — fans of the Brewers or fans of the Rays — who have dedicated large swaths of their lives to watching a baseball team, who have never once experienced what the Yankees have done 27 times and the Cardinals have done 11, are about to have it all vindicated.
This is a big deal. Twelve NFL teams have never won the Super Bowl, including the Buffalo Bills (who have a real chance this year) and my beloved Arizona Cardinals (who do not). Ten NBA teams have never won a title, and 10 active NHL teams have never won the Stanley Cup. There are millions of fans of those teams who dream of seeing, just once, what the Montreal Canadiens have done 24 times, what the Boston Celtics have done 18 times, what the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers have both done six times.
Now, being a sports fan brings with it lots of pleasures other than winning championships: communal bonding, escape from the horrors of the world, paying 12 bucks for a domestic beer — all sorts of stuff. But the goal of any true fan is to get to say, just once in their life, that their team did it — that a thing they wanted to happen did in fact happen, and they really were alive to see it.
It’s a nice dream! But it doesn’t always work out, as poor Scott Entsminger understood. Heck, even if your team has won a title, it may have been so long ago that you weren’t around to see it. The lowly Jets have won a title, but that was in 1969. If you’re a Jets fan younger than, say, 60, it might as well never have happened.
That’s a reason Knicks fans were so joyous when they won their title in June. Sure, they’d last won one in 1973, but most of the people filling the streets of New York weren’t alive then. They sat through decades of terrible Knicks basketball hoping it would someday pay off. Then it finally did. Everybody lost their minds. As they should have! Nobody knows better than a long-suffering fan how rare this joy truly is.
Still: There is something particularly special about your team putting its first one on the board. The Rays have lost two World Series, and the Brewers one, which means the highlight of their franchise history, the furthest they’ve ever gone, was still just another failure. When you get that close and fall short, you can’t help but wonder whether you’ll ever make it back again. You’re not the Yankees or Dodgers, for crying out loud.
That’s why I can’t wait for this World Series. If the Dodgers had made it, sure, they’d be trying to win a third straight title, but had they lost, well, they’d be fine; they’ve got plenty. (And Dodgers fans, after losing to the Brewers in the National League Championship Series, do indeed seem fine.) But this might be as close as the Rays or Brewers get for a long time — they may not have a chance like this for another decade, or longer.
And if you’re a fan of one of those teams, well, are you sure you can wait another couple of decades? You sure you’re gonna make it?
That is how you raise the stakes for a series. It’s exciting that one fan base is going to finally get to celebrate something that has never happened. But it’s just as exciting — in a gut-punch way — that another fan base will get so close and fall short. (Again.) Who cares about another Dodgers or Yankees title? This is where the drama truly is. One fan base will be euphoric. And another will be let down by their team again. It might even make their obituaries.
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