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I wanted to know how my hometown experienced hosting the All-Star Game. The more I thought about it, the home run derby and All-Star Game itself are about ALL the fans (as it should be), not necessarily about Cleveland. So when I heard that All-Star weekend was going to be in my hometown, I knew that I had come home.Īt first, I was going to try and buy tickets to all the events, go try and soak up everything, but I ended up deciding against doing so 1) because I’m not made of money and 2) I wasn’t fully sure if that was the best way to get the experience I was looking for. Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Victor Martinez, Grady Sizemore, Shin-Soo Choo, and Travis Hafner in the 2000s to morph into Carlos Santana, Francisco Lindor, Corey Kluber, and Jose Ramirez in the team’s current form. My love for baseball and The Tribe has persisted my entire life as my heroes became C.C. Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field) was my holy land, the place I went to worship my heroes whenever my father would get tickets through work. I carried a small AM radio everywhere with me as a kid so that I never missed Tom Hamilton spin tales of Carlos Baerga, Charles Nagy, Sandy Alomar Jr., and Omar Visquel. Kenny Lofton was my favorite athlete ever, and watching Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez hit monster home runs was what made me a sports fan. My one true love though was the Cleveland Indians. Whether it was rooting for Mark Price, Brad Daughtery, and Larry Nance at Cavs games or watching Eric Metcalf, Ozzie Newsome, and Bernie Kosar dazzle for the Browns, I have always lived and died with Cleveland sports. The thing was, despite spending most of my life in a messy rapport with where I was born, my love of Cleveland sports teams has never wavered. No matter where I went, I was a Clevelander, and that was pretty great.

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That was how I came around full circle to love my hometown again. You could hear where I was from in the way I spoke and my love for idioms and apologizing, or see it in the way I stood, always with my weight on one hip and a thumb through a belt loop. It almost always happened within the first hour or so. When I moved in 2010 to join up with an old high school buddy out in San Francisco, one of our favorite games was holding back on telling new people where I was from in order to see how much time passed before they could guess I was from Ohio.

The weird thing is the older I got, the more I realized that no matter where I went, Cleveland came with me ⁠-that it was a part of my identity, of who I was and what I loved. So I left the very first moment I could, and in the 16 years since I first left for college, I have never lived in Ohio for more than a year. I wanted to see the world and learn everything, and Cleveland always felt like it was going to hold me back from doing just that. I was always a bit of a nomad, and I caught the wanderlust bug real early in life.

When I was growing up, though, I hated it here, and honestly not for any particular reason that could be blamed on Cleveland or my family or the people in it.

I have a complex love/hate relationship with my birthplace that has always vacillitated somewhere between how Zach Braff’s character from Garden State feels about his hometown and the way Ben Affleck and Matt Damon feel about Boston. In fact, despite being born and raised in The Land, I hadn’t been back to Cleveland for more than two or three days in probably close to a decade. Last Saturday, I walked down the hallways of Cleveland Hopkins Airport for the first time in over a year.

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