Behind the Infamous 30 Year Slump of the Cleveland Indians

If there is one thing that the Cleveland Indians is not happy to have gone through, it is the 30 years that they had to endure as a team that seemed to have been jinxed. The jinx that kept the Cleveland Indians from capturing the Major League title stemmed from a lot of factors, including the constant change in ownership, constant changes in player lineups and other occurrences. The Cleveland Indians spent three decades at the bottom of the pile due to these unfavorable situations, and these 30 years of low performance became known as the "thirty year slump".

This rather infamous three decades of the Cleveland Indians began when the team was under the management of Frank Lane. The bad luck that hounded the team was noted to have started a year after Lane took over the management of the team. The first brick to fall, so to speak, was when the Cleveland Indians lost one of their major players, Rocky Colavito, to a trade with the Detroit Tigers at the start of the 1960 season. This became sort of a precedent for a few more ill advised decisions that led to the 30 year demise of the Cleveland Indians.

The problems continued when the team saw numerous changes in ownership from 1966 to 1986. Within these two decades, the Cleveland Indians signed many players who were supposedly capable of getting the team out of the rut, but they were traded away because of bad decisions on the side of the management. The Indians started seeing a turnaround when they started the 1989 season, and the end of the 30 year jinx became evident by the time the 1994 season began. This can be attributed in part to a change in managers in 1991 which saw former Indians players taking the reins of the once floundering team.