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, in the Boards. As David Letterman would say, “For entertainment purposes only; please, no wagering.”


Gaylord Perry pitched less than four of his 22 big league seasons for the Indians, but while he was here, he was the best player in town, and that’s more than enough to make him the best ever #36 in Cleveland sports history. As we’ll detail later, the competition for top honors at #36 was long on mediocrity and short on stardom, but Perry’s record in Cleveland would stand up well regardless of the number on his back.

As a 300-game winner and a Hall of Famer, Gaylord Perry’s place in baseball history would be assured even without the controversies that marked his career almost from the time he became a regular in the rotation of the San Francisco Giants in the mid-60’s. Perry will always be best known as the master of the spitter...or the greaseball pitch. For two decades, Perry threw the wet one, a pitch that baffled hitters, enraged opposing managers, confused umpires and inspired various rules changes and interpretations by league officials.

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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, in the Boards. As David Letterman would say, “For entertainment purposes only; please, no wagering.”

Number 35; if that’s the number you wanted to wear, chances are it’s available and you can have it.  If you think about it, who has really worn the number well enough to define himself as the guy you think of when you see the number?  If you’re a little older, and into hockey, maybe Tony Esposito of the Chicago Blackhawks is an obvious call.  If you’re a lot older, it might be legendary Eagles receiver Pete Pihos, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1970.  Of course, names like Kevin Durant and Frank Thomas probably roll off the tongue a little bit easier for the ESPN Generation, myself included.

Unfortunately, none of those great #35s ever wore a Cleveland uniform, so the pool we get to pick from here is filled with pre-season football studs, 4th outfielders, and garbage-time heroes of the hardwood.  Sure, Ken Keltner wore it for his 1 plate appearance that netted him an RBI in 1937, before he changed numbers several times throughout his illustrious career with the Indians.  Jerome Harrison put himself on a Top-10 list running for history wearing 35 in 2009.  Phil Niekro won over 300 games in his career, but was just 18-22 with the Tribe, only after winning his 300th game in Yankee pinstripes.

It’s unbelievable, because in hindsight, you wish you would have given the guy a fair shake, but Danny Ferry ends up representing the city of Cleveland and the region of Northeast Ohio for the number 35.  In the end, it really wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t fill the shoes of Ron Harper, for whom he was traded.  If anyone should dislike Ferry, maybe it should be Clippers fans, who never saw the Hyattsville, Maryland native wear a Clippers uni after being selected 2nd overall out of Duke in 1986.  Ferry opted to play overseas in Italy, where he played pretty well, perhaps not well enough to live up to the young Larry Bird stigma that he was somehow anointed with, but well enough to pique the interest of Wayne Embry.

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It has been a great seven years at TheClevelandFan.com. We have established ourselves as one of the premier Cleveland sports websites on the internet and have put together one of the most gifted and talented groups of writers, one that we believe rivals any other site out there. By “any other site out there”, we’re not just talking about the Cleveland-centric ones.

When Rich Swerbinsky launched TheClevelandFan.com on February 1, 2006, it began, as Rich said in 2008, with a “couple hundred buddies”. Now, TCF registers page views in the hundreds of thousands every month and the writer base has grown to include over 20 of Cleveland’s finest amateur scribes.

Since TheClevelandFan launched, all of us, to some degree, have endured the pain and suffering that leads some to undying loyalty and others to their breaking point. We have laughed, cried, jumped, screamed, applauded, berated, and gotten depressed over Cleveland sports. We have endured Browns games in blizzards. We have endured heartbreak in the playoffs for the Indians and Cavs. We have seen a King grow before our eyes and then leave, taking his talents, ego, and championship potential with him. We have gone through ownership changes, the hiring and firing of coaches, ill-fated trades and let our fandom generate blind hope, optimism, and invariable disappointment.

That’s just in the span of seven years. Through all of it, the writers of TheClevelandFan.com have been there. The writers of TheClevelandFan.com are going to continue to be there.

One of the best things to happen to us at TheClevelandFan was the partnership we developed with SportsTime Ohio in March of 2007. They gave us unparalleled visibility as a website dedicated to Cleveland sports. Our content has run on SportsTimeOhio.com and STOhd.com right on the front page, directing anybody who clicked on a link back to TheClevelandFan since the partnership began.

With the sale of STO to Fox Sports, the STO brand will be fully integrated into the Fox Sports family and that includes the website. As a result, our partnership with STO will no longer exist, but that does not mean that TheClevelandFan is going anywhere. We will continue to provide the content and the opinions you have come to expect from us and we hope that you will visit us directly at www.theclevelandfan.com.

Many thanks are owed to Kelly Myers and Mike Roche. They have been an integral part of our relationship with STO and are two very fine people. On behalf of everybody at TheClevelandFan, we wish them the best in their future endeavors.

This latest chapter in the life of TheClevelandFan has been exciting and tremendously helpful in getting our name out there, but it is far from the last. We are committed to continuing to be the voice of the fans of Cleveland. We want you to agree with us. We want you to disagree with us. We want to generate discussion among friends at the bar, co-workers in the office, and on our website message boards. We want to educate and inform. We want to spark debate. Most importantly, we want to be alive long enough to write about a Cleveland championship.

In closing, speaking on behalf of the writers of TheClevelandFan, we’d like to thank every single reader out there for taking the time to read what we have to say and give our heartfelt thanks and gratitude to the people who visit TheClevelandFan on a daily basis. In today’s dot com world, there is no shortage of websites at your disposal, but to choose to read us on a daily basis means a lot to the writers who take the time to put their love of Cleveland sports into words.

Please continue to frequent TheClevelandFan and we’ll continue to provide the best Browns, Indians, Cavs, and Buckeyes coverage on the web.

In the condensed NHL schedule, every point is critical, especially considering that every game is played against a conference foe. The Columbus Blue Jackets started to get healthy last week and now have put together an eight-game point streak. The team had a shot to tie the franchise record with six straight wins on Tuesday night, but fell in a shootout to the Vancouver Canucks. After securing 12 of 14 possible points this month, the Blue Jackets are now three points out of a playoff spot.

The one thing that observers of the Blue Jackets have taken notice of, pretty much since the first week of the season, is that the Jackets work hard night in and night out. They’re finally starting to see that hard work pay off in the win column. Seven of the last eight games for the Blue Jackets have gone to overtime, so they have played a lot of hockey and have battled through a lot of adversity during this stretch.

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