Cleveland’s Guardians of the Bland Bury Its Baseball History

T he Cleveland Indians have junked a century of tradition to rename their team with the bland title “Guardians.” This is done as a nod to the sensitivities of virtually nobody who lives in Cleveland or roots for the team. There was no serious popular groundswell for this decision. Like the All-Star Game’s boycott of Atlanta, it reinforces the message that the lords of baseball care more about the opinions of a handful of left-wing sportswriters on Twitter and ESPN than they do about the people who actually buy tickets and watch the games.

Unlike “Redskins,” the name “Indians” is not commonly understood or experienced as a racial slur, even if we acknowledge that “Indians” has been a common misnomer for Native American tribes for five centuries. Adopted in 1915 after superstar Napoleon Lajoie was sold back to Philadelphia to finish his career (they’d been called the Naps to reflect his dominance of the franchise), the name “Indians” was long thought to be a homage to Louis Sockalexis, a member of the Penobscot tribe who starred briefly for the Cleveland Spiders for 66 games in 1897 before his drinking problem wrecked his career. Sockalexis was the first significant Native American player in the game, and during his own time, he faced open hostility:

In [one biographer’s] estimation, there’s no question Sockalexis “inspired” the nickname. Whether the name was meant to honor him, though, is another matter. When Sockalexis signed with the Spiders in 1897, he caused great excitement among local media. He inspired local sportswriters to call the Spiders the Indians, or “Tebeau’s Indians” in reference to manager Patsy Tebeau. “It wasn’t meant to honor Sockalexis,” Rice said of the newspaper nickname. “Indeed, it was more to make a big fuss of the sensation he was causing by playing professional baseball.” Meanwhile, Rice said Sockalexis faced a “Jackie Robinson experience” on the field. Fans could be heard yelling ‘Scalp ’em!’ or performing rain dances in the stands.

Sports fandom is tribal; there were those who embraced the 25-year-old rookie slugger in the one magical half-season before drink caught up with him, and did so in terms characteristic of the 1890s, just after the close of the Western frontier:

Fans swarmed the stadium, eager to watch him. Sadly, they often expressed their support through the bigotry of the day, hooting, whooping, uttering war cries. Sportswriters slung stereotypes about the “redskin,” the “Chief of Sockem,” who, with his college background was a “noble savage,” an “educated Indian.” “The man who said that there are no good Indians but dead Indians or words to that effect,” wrote one sympathetic reporter in The Sporting Life, “surely never saw Louis Sockalexis.” After a game-winning home run, a headline declared: “INDIANS HANG ONE LITTLE SCALP ON THEIR BELTS.”

Sockalexis, for his part, was not from the Great Plains; he came from Maine, where the Penobscot Nation had lived on a reservation since the 1790s and made their living largely from logging. He had a college education, rare in the game at the time, having attended Holy Cross College and Notre Dame, albeit without graduating. Baseball in the 1890s was dominated by the working-class sons of Irish immigrants, and excessive drinking was epidemic. More than a few great stars drank themselves to death, albeit usually a few years past their ballplaying primes. It was the misfortune of Sockalexis that he was unable to hold his liquor even passably well enough to manage a few good seasons. In his one brief moment of glory, he batted .338 and averaged 20 triples, 106 runs, and 103 RBI per 162 games — good but not great numbers for the high-scoring climate of 1897. Given his age and athletic gifts, had he remained healthy and sober, it is certainly possible that he was on his way to multiyear stardom.

The chronology of the team’s naming in 1915, two decades later, has long inspired debate about the accuracy of the origin story. Sockalexis as the inspiration for the name acquired the status of local lore as far back as the 1940s, but the history itself is murkier. Sockalexis died in 1913 at the young age of 42, of a heart attack while logging in Maine, so his legacy in Cleveland was seen through somewhat rose-colored glasses by then. Hall of Fame general manager Ed Barrow once claimed that “Sockalexis was the greatest outfielder in history, the best hitter, the best thrower, the best fielder, and also the best drinker” — all obvious exaggerations.

“None of the news stories written about the name change [in 1915] mentioned [Sockalexis]. . . . An unsigned editorial in The Plain Dealer did mention Sockalexis.” Ace baseball writer Joe Posnanski describes the ambiguous historical record about the 1915 renaming:

Contrary to the story told so often, there was no team-naming contest. . . . Papers did solicit ideas from fans, but team owner Charles Somers put together a group of Cleveland sportswriters from the four papers and told them to come up with a name. They are the ones who chose the Cleveland Indians and there is no indication that they chose a name entered by a fan. No, they chose Indians for their own reasons. . . . A year earlier, the Boston Braves had a miraculous season — coming from last place on July 4 to win the pennant — and so Native American names were in. . . . The fact that the 1897 Cleveland team was often called “Indians” was not directly the reason the team was officially named Indians in 1915. But it was part of the decision-making process. “(The name) recalls the old fighting days of the early American League period,” wrote the Boston Daily Globe, “when the Cleveland players of those days were often referred to as the ‘Indians.’”

. . . As a child, I believed the Cleveland Indians were named for a great player named Sockalexis. As a grown man, I believed the Cleveland Indians were not named for an underachieving player named Sockalexis. Now I believe that the truth is somewhere in the silence between the notes. . . . I don’t believe the Indians were named to honor Louis Sockalexis, not exactly. But I do believe the ‘Indians’ name could honor him. That choice is ours.

On the other hand, the franchise has never made much effort to honor the memory of the man himself with a tribute at the ballpark, a statute, or merchandise. Now, it will have no reason to do anything but forget him and sand down its history to honor . . . some statues on a bridge.

Under the name “Indians,” the team had a storied history — one that includes not only many vivid baseball memories but also milestones of racial progress in the game. The Indians were the first integrated team in the American League in 1947, with Larry Doby; they added Negro League legend Satchel Paige and became the first integrated World Champions in 1948. They employed baseball’s first black manager, Frank Robinson, in 1975.

If the team were really determined to burn its bridges with the years from 1915 to 2021, it could have reached back in Cleveland baseball history and become the Spiders once again, or even the Naps. Instead, it will now be named after two big statues of white guys — the “Guardians of Traffic” — built with stonemason work by Bob Hope’s father. The bridge is now named the Hope Memorial Bridge, previously the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge; one wonders how long it will take for the Hope family or the statues of men holding stage coaches and trucks to be found problematic by the tastes of the rage mobs. Once you pay the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.