Aug 26th 2008 9:38AM by Tom Fornelli (author feed)
For a lot of fans out there whose teams don’t have any chance of making the playoffs this season, the final weeks of the schedule can be tough to deal with. On the one hand you don’t want to get labeled some kind of fair weather fan if you just give up on caring about the team. On the other hand you wonder what the point of wasting three hours of your day on a team going nowhere is.

Which is why you have to take solace in the small things your team can still accomplish. If you’re a Cleveland Indians fan, you can spend the rest of the season hoping the Tribe catches the Detroit Tigers in the standings, and if that doesn’t happen, you can enjoy the individual performances. Like the fact that Cliff Lee is probably going to win 20 games and the AL Cy Young on a bad team, or the fact Grady Sizemore made some history last night.

Grady became the second player in Indians history to hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases in the same season last night. Joe Carter was the first player to do it in a Cleveland uniform back in 1987.

Sizemore actually homered twice on Monday night, so he now has 31 homers and 34 stolen bases on the season. Which means that Indians fans still have something to strive for over the final five weeks. And that would be Sizemore becoming the first Indian to reach the 40-40 club.