A bright future, a dark memory

By STEVE KING

This is a story about the dates of two big events in Cleveland sports.

The first one is Wednesday night when the NFL announces its 2021 regular-season schedules for the Browns and everyone else. That’s when talk of one of the most anticipated Browns seasons in a long time – perhaps 3½ decades, to be exact – will ramp up even more than it already has, which is a lot. It will be the first real connection to anything involving the season.

Just writing that brought goose bumps for me, and maybe reading it did the same for you.

Coming off an 11-5 regular-season finish last year, a first-round blowout of the Pittsburgh Steelers and a near-miss against the Kansas City Chiefs in the divisional round, and with a young team, including at quarterback, that should only get better and better as time goes on, this season – this series of seasons to come — is full to the brim with hope.

Now for the other big date in Cleveland sports – in this case, not in the future but rather in the distance past, thus making it Cleveland sports history – as last Friday was the 64th anniversary of one of the saddest and most tragic moments ever. It was May 7, 1957 that Cleveland Indians fireballing left-hander Herb Score, one of the best young pitchers in baseball and the team’s best pitching prospect since Bob Feller two decades before,  was hit in the eye with a line drive off the bat of the New York Yankees’ Gil McDougald.

Score missed the rest of the 1957 season and much of 1958. He was never the same. His career was ruined.

With Score and a home run-hitting young outfielder named Rocky Colavito, the Indians, just three seasons removed from winning an American League-record 111 games en route to playing in the World Series, thought they had the nucleus of a bright future. Colavito was later traded in a highly controversial move and the combination of both of these events squashed those dreams

Let’s hope that what should be a magnificent Browns season is not ruined by – gulp! — some type of major injury.