Another football season is in the books and it’s a tough time of year for bettors. With just hockey and basketball on the nightly slate, making money becomes difficult. Hockey is a moneyline sport, so a 3-3 night could still be a profitable one, and basketball seems to be a very up-and-down sport to bet. The lines are getting tighter at this point in the season as well, as the books have a good handle on the teams and some teams are clearly just playing out the string.

At this point in the year, the best thing to do is get extremely selective and make spot plays. Spot plays, if you’ll remember from previous articles, are games where you as a bettor should be able to isolate a team that isn’t going to give a max effort. In all three sports in play right now, NHL, NBA, and college basketball, the season schedule should start to take its toll. The NHL players are past the point where the season is fresh and new and the condensed schedule is creating some excellent spots to bet. The NBA season has just over 30 games to go for most teams and some teams will definitely be prone to take a night off here and there. In college basketball, the higher-ranked road teams are having a lot of trouble picking up wins in hostile environments, a lot of them coming out flat and not withstanding the home underdog’s initial push.

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This is one instalment in a team effort by The Cleveland Fan, highlighting the top local sports figures by jersey number. Please weigh in with your thoughts, in the Forum. As David Letterman would say, “For entertainment purposes only; please, no wagering.”

Ten.  That’s the number of League Championships that our three major franchises have brought home for the city of Cleveland.  Though we might consider the Force, the Barons, the Thunderbolts, Crunch, Gladiators, Monsters, and Lumberjacks in our “By the Numbers” series, I have to be real about which Championships actually matter more than a couple of square blocks away from the Wolstein Center.

Having said that, in 218 seasons of mainstream professional sports, and we have to count the All-American Football Conference, which the Browns dominated, there have been a grand total of ten championships won.  About half of those 218 seasons have been played in my 34 years on this planet, but not a single one of those ten were played in my lifetime.  So, it should come as little surprise to me that the talent at #10, at least from my lifetime, was so few and far between.  I was resigned to settling for someone a little too mediocre for a list like this when I found my obvious winner.

Not everyone with a .228 career batting average and a World Series ring should be recognized and, in turn, honored for their accomplishments in a Cleveland uniform, but we’re willing to make an exception for Jim Hegan.  He is our winner at #10, and it really isn’t all that close.  The disclaimer is that Hegan also wore 30, 40, 14, and later 4 for the Indians, but the glory of Jim Hegan exists in the form of #10, so we'll emphasize the great things for Cleveland and Hegan in they years he wore that number.

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Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse.

We just watched the guy who shanked us and took our wallet buy a lottery ticket with our cash and win four billion dollars. And when we called the cops, they told us to get over it and move on.

So congratulations, Baltimore!

Thanks to the 49ers...rather, thanks to the Ravens, the gleaming city along the Chesapeake dropped from No. 30 in the Sports Misery Index to dead last at No. 62 in the latest edition, taking away San Antonio’s claim as the least miserable sports city in North America.

Even more telling, with its ninth world title, Baltimore’s championship saturation now ranks among the top 10 of all eligible cities, quickly closing in on fellow East Coast behemoths Boston and New York.

If you’re looking for a silver lining (though you’re no doubt exhausted from doing so), on the grand scale it’s actually more appropriate that Baltimore won the Super Bowl than San Francisco, which has held two World Series victory parades in the past three years. So there’s that.

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This is one installment in a team effort by The Cleveland Fan, highlighting the top local sports figures by jersey number. Please weigh in with your thoughts on the "Boards". As David Letterman would say, "For entertainment purposes only; please, no wagering"


If this town has anything like “glory days” for those fans born after 1965 or so, it’s got to be that stretch in the mid-90’s when the Indians were a powerhouse, and The Jake was the place to be 81 times every summer...and a few more times in October. The last two articles in our series have featured Lofton (#7) and Belle (#8) from that team, and I fully expected to be following suit at #9 with Carlos Baerga. That is, until someone reminded me of the greatest hockey player in Cleveland history.

Say what? Yes, youngsters, Cleveland used to be a hockey town, and a good one....with a championship team, and a bonafide star in #9, Fred Glover. We’ll get to Baerga in a minute, as well as a couple of also-rans who wore #9, but first we need to talk about what used to happen down at E. 36th and Euclid at The Cleveland Arena. Because this series really should have a hockey player included as one of the top Cleveland sports figures, and let’s face it....this is our only shot.

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