Series Preview: Indians at Pirates

Photo by Joe Sargent/Getty ImagesYou’ve heard of the Battle for Ohio, but it’s high time we start calling the Indians-Pirate series what it is: The Battle for Erie.

My hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania sits on the lake that share its namesake, with a beautiful peninsula and a mall that may or not be shaped like a gun and owned by the mafia. There was a Netflix documentary made about its most notorious murder. Its zoo was a punchline in a Mike Birglia bit and it infuriated people for years. It’s a small town just big enough to think it deserves more recognition than it gets, and in a lot of ways it does.

Erie sits nearly equidistant from Cleveland to the west and Pittsburgh to the south. Without…