It seems to pain you. Certainly not many teams can provide quite so much agony as our Indians—the Cubs would have to be the angst champs, I guess—but there’s still the beauty of the game itself and the endless avenues of enquiry into its workings. One of the charms of the game, unique among the big-time sports, is the long apprenticeship required of almost all of its practitioners, which speaks to how complicated it is to learn and how difficult it is to master. A player like KDLC broke in to the Tribe system as a free agent signing in 2006; he was one of 42 teenagers who received Tribe paychecks that year. Only one of those, Jeanmar Gomez, has made it to the big leagues; of the rest, I think only De La Cruz and Nick Weglarz got so far as the 40 man roster, though I might have missed somebody. Watching these players progress and regress as they adjust to higher levels of competition is actually fun for some of us, kind of like following a breaker slowly rolling toward the shore.

KDLC’s task was to tame that wildness of his, something he was never able to do, but then he makes you ask the question: can you succeed in the big leagues with 5 BB/9? What if your WHIP is 1.1? Well, that’s Al Albuquerque. The point is not that de la Cruz should be equated with Albuquerque, or that his departure should be particularly lamented; but rather than simply dismiss him as sucky or without impact—both of which could be true—it’s more fun to look at KDLC as a ballplayer who poses questions that can be fun to unravel, or to try to unravel. Even poor Gator4God inspired a fun post from Andrew a couple of months ago, wondering if history was on his side (Not so much).

I guess the question for you is, what do you enjoy about the game? What do you get out of your fandom?