By The Chief
Long ago, before the MLB even existed, the Great Lakes region housed several tribes of men. The two most powerful of these tribes were the Miami of Chicago and the Iroquois of Cleveland. The two tribes led the region in both earned run average and homeruns, but they had never met each other. You see, the two tribes would only visit other tribes in their league. The great mound of Michigan stood in the way of the two ever hashing it out.
The Miami tribe had always heard stories about the prowess of the great tribes of India; a land all the way on the other side of the world. Rumors spread around the world that they had incredibly high slugging percentages. The Miami’s knew India was good, but thought that they were better. There was only one way to test it out. They had to get to India.
So they boarded their boats and took off on what they thought was the ocean, but was actually Lake Michigan. After only a few days of travel, around the great mound of Michigan, they arrived in what they thought was India, but we now know was just Cleveland. No one really knew how big the world actually was back then.
The Miami tribe got out of their boats and took the short walk to the ballpark, where the Iriquous were training. They did not speak the same language so it was very difficult to get the point across. The Miami’s called their opponents the Indians, due to the fact that they thought they were in India when they were actually in Cleveland. The Iriquois called their opponents the White Sox, due to their very clean socks and inability to spell the word socks correctly.
The two tribes started a bitter rivalry that still goes on today. Their tribe names eventually turned into team names, and the teams in actual India got significantly worse over the years. They quickly realized that they were way better at spices than baseball. Another similar India related misunderstanding actually happened a few years after the Indians met the White Sox, but that’s a story for a different time.