John Lowenstein

"And he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter." – Leonard Cohen, "The Stranger Song"

The Indians never got anywhere near first place throughout the 1970s (or 1960s or 1980s). Judging from this John Lowenstein card, the strain of toiling season after season without hope of ever reaching the glittering lights of the playoffs was something the Montana-born Lowenstein was singularly equipped to handle. His westward-trudging pioneer ancestors had probably endured droughts and floods and scurvy and crushing isolation and perhaps even grisly skirmishes with the demographic represented by the huge script across Lowenstein’s chest. Replace the baseball uniform and cap with a dirty white shirt, fraying leather vest, and sagging mud-flecked bowler hat and Lowenstein is an extra in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, staring gauntly at the ceaseless gray drizzle, subsisting on diminishing rations of pemmican and horse oats, waiting uselessly for the shipment of prostitutes who though cheap will all be beyond his dismal means.