Terry Francona, new manager for the Cleveland Indians, got lost last week during a two-block walk from his apartment to the ballpark.

Not a two-mile hike.

A two-block walk. From my office to Longwood's Rotunda.

And he got lost.

Many folks chuckled. Some laughed.

The wise ones, however, remembering LeBron James, late of the Cleveland Cavaliers, nodded their heads sagely and took another sip of green tea before praying to Saint Christopher. They knew.

Francona was just a country boy from Boston. Cleveland's the big city. It could happen to anyone from a small rural community like Boston, MA.

“I got lost three times,” Francona admitted to ESPN.com, displaying the courage and self-awareness Christopher Columbus never could muster on his way to India for take-out curry and vindaloo.

“Even when I got to the garage two people who work here said, 'Hey, do you know where you're going?' I was like, 'Nope.'”

Pure corn-fed Bostonian to the bone.

Being an ex-manager of the Red Sox, Francona had no chance of conjuring the expeditionary fortitude necessary to successfully negotiate two entire full-fledged blocks in a city the size of Cleveland.

The internet is a wide cosmos of strange truths and twists of fate encountered by poor souls from New York City, Paris, Beijing, and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Wales who, in their own small domains can leave home for a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, and a glow-in-the-dark box of Kleenex and return safely the very same day they set foot outside their own front doors.

But put them in the megapolis that is Cleveland and it's just not fair, like jumping from short-season rookie ball directly to the Major Leagues.

The blogosphere is full of brave men like Terry Francona and braver women who simply wanted to cross the street in Cleveland to buy a newspaper and were never heard from again.

Or, if they were eventually found by search teams, they were mere shadows of themselves found still wandering the Cleveland streets years later, like the ghost of Sir Thomas Mallory on the frozen, precipitous slopes of Mount Everest. Or discovered somehow in another town altogether.

“I like being close to the ballpark, always have,” Francona said in the ESPN.com report. “If I had my druthers on the road, I would rather stay in a motel next to the ballpark than have to drive a half-hour.”

His “druthers,” Francona said, revealing his small town Boston roots.

Nobody wants druthers in Cleveland. They don't even know what druthers are. Do you boil druthers? Catch them with bait? Apply salve to them?

Druthers? Cleveland's got the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame, albeit without YES or The Moody Blues, and Cleveland's got Lake Erie.

But Francona does display those survival skills anybody from Boston, LA, London, or Pontnewynydd, Wales must possess to survive a two-block journey from their own Cleveland apartment to their own ballpark. Francona knows he should never be asked to travel a half-hour's distance when two blocks, after all, were beyond his grasp.

Stout, sturdy common sense that one would expect from such an idyllic, one stoplight crossroads like Boston.

Unlike many Cleveland expeditionary stories, Francona's ends well. An employee of the Indians picked him up in a golf cart and drove him to the stadium.

There was no reference to the Indians' employee having been playing a round of golf on the outskirts of the city and getting sucked into the whirling vortex-pumping maelstrom that is The Big Clever. It wasn't needed. One could easily imagine a quick peek into the rough at the edge of some fairway leading to a chance meeting that saves the new manager of the Cleveland Indians who only wanted to walk two blocks from his own apartment to his own ballpark.

There but for the grace of God, yes, go I.

And now we all know the truth about LeBron James, who crossed a Cleveland street one night for some Peppermint Tic Tacs and found himself, months later, another miraculous survival story, in the provincial backwater that is Miami.