If one were to have guessed back in April how the curse of Chief Wahoo would do its thing this season—in which the Cleveland MLB team announced its agreement that “the [Wahoo] logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball,” but also that it would give the racist symbol a year-long farewell tour anyway—this would have been a good guess: Spend all summer inflating fans’ hopes by making the most of MLB’s unbalanced schedule to beat up on a historically weak slate of divisional foes only to immediately flame out in the playoffs in a three-game sweep that ends with a loss in front of the home crowd on Columbus Day, a national holiday—honoring a child-rapist, mass-murderer, and founder of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—which owes its continued existence to the same structural ignorance and ahistoricity that allows the “Cleveland Indians” to maintain their racist branding in 2018.
If there were such a thing as a sure bet, Chief Wahoo’s last stand on Columbus Day sure seems like it.
