They're leading the American League and they were supposed to be cellar dwellers. Now, your editor says you have to write an article about this surprising team in flyover country. Don't be alarmed - follow this easy guide and you'll be able to pop out your story in no time and it will look just like what everybody else is writing, so, therefore, it must be true!

How to write an article about the Cleveland Indians in 2011 if you write for a national media organization (pick 2 or 3 storylines):

• The Indians are surprising everybody (except, maybe Manny Acta).
• Cleveland is downtrodden (cite economic climate or sports disappointments or both).  
• Nobody's going to the games.
• Amazingly, those poor fools actually believe they can win (silly sods!) 
• Their payroll is really small but they're winning anyway .
• They blew up the team and traded away Cy Young winners. 
• It won't last.

You're welcome, national media. 

Woke up this morning and looked at the sports on TV/radio schedule in the Dispatch this morning only to find out that WBNS was not carrying the game on the radio.  This is not that unusual for day games - very often in the past, WBNS has not carried day games because it conflicts with their talk schedule. So I checked the rest of the weekend and found that they weren't carrying any of those, either.  When I got into work, I checked their website - nothing. 

So, I then checked the Indians website to doublecheck their list of radio affiliates to see if I'd missed something. Good luck trying to find the link to the radio affiliates on the new indians.com. There was a sublink on one page that linked to the page that the link was on - in other words, nothing. 

I fired off an email to Dave Van Stone, the general manager of WBNS AM-FM.  Here is his response:

Hi Greg - 

Our contract with the Indians expired at the end of last season.  

The Indians are looking for an affiliate that can provide clearance of more games than we are able to provide them. 

I tweeted to Mark Shapiro asking why there was no radio affiliate list on the website and that there was no radio affiliate in Columbus.  I got a nice response a few minutes later from someone with the Indians telling me that they were working on it and offering me free online radio access, which was thoughtful, and pretty good customer service. I buy the Gameday Audio anyway because I like listening to baseball games, so it would be giving me something I already have. I declined, but thanked them for the offer.

Happy Opening Day, Central Ohio. Hope you can stay by your computer and don't have to run errands. WLOH (1320 AM, Lancaster) seems to still be carrying the games, as does WMRN (1490 AM, Marion). However, these are both relatively low power stations whose signals barely carry into Franklin County, if at all.

UPDATE: Was sent this link to radio affiliates by someone in the Tribe office. It seems to be of limited utility, however, since it still lists WBNS.  And, FWIW, the station that carried the games before WBNS, WMNI (920 AM), now carries the Clippers.  The list also includes AM 1430 in Newark, which might carry as far as Pataskala or Reynoldsburg, maybe New Albany if the conditions are right and you have some tinfoil and paperclips to attach to your receiver antenna. So that might be another option.