It’s pretty significant to the future of the Cleveland
Indians that Mark Shapiro, who’s been with the team longer than the Dolans have
owned it, is packing his kit bag for the move north to Toronto and a similar
role with the Blue Jays. What is
probably far more significant to that future of the team is the lesser told
story that the Dolans are looking to sell about 30% of the franchise, at an
inflated valuation of course, in order to fund the team at more appropriate
levels.
According to a story in Monday’s Akron Beacon Journal, the
Dolans have hired an investment advisor to market the team to moneyed owner
wannabees looking to get into the game.
Now under normal circumstances a smart person might ask why anyone would
want to give a quarter of a billion dollars to the Dolans without any
meaningful chance to control the franchise’s fate. But those kind of smart questions don’t
really apply in the world of professional sports. Really smart investors
generally stay out of sports so the usual math tends to be meaningless.
What the Dolans are looking for is a lifeline, someone to
fund the team’s salary growth. In return
they’ll give up a seat in the owner’s box and a seat at the table at the winter
meetings. Implicit though is the
motivating factor of that minority owner.
He or she, but likely he, will become a member of the owners’ club and
thus be seen as a potentially viable buyer of a majority interest in a
franchise down the road.
It’s a construct that tends to work, by the way Jimmy Haslam
never becomes the owner of the Browns if he hadn’t started off owning a small
piece of the Pittsburgh Steelers first. It
gave the rest of the owners a chance to get used to his glad handing ways. Steve Biscotti followed a similar path in
Baltimore though he struck a particularly favorable deal against a craven,
bankrupt owner in Art Modell and essentially stole the franchise out from under
the Modell family. And a grateful generation of Clevelanders thank him.
In the near term this is a bit of good news for Indians
fans, assuming that the Dolans find the well-financed patsy that their plan
requires. It also demonstrates what I’ve
said for years. The Dolans simply do not
have enough money to compete with most other owners in major league baseball. The franchise doesn’t generate enough money
and the Dolans don’t have the wherewithal to deficit spend the team back into
the level of competitiveness that would significantly increase revenues.
This is where the story of Shapiro becomes most
relevant. For years Shapiro has guided
the direction of this franchise and has had to do it somewhat under unfavorable
battle conditions. Always trying to
scrape together enough money to make targeted investments without huge
downsides has led the Indians to essentially buy out the arbitration years of
its best prospects while setting the stage for those prospects to leave once
free agency beckoned. The history with
CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee would be played out once again with the likes of
Corey Kluber, Michael Brantley and Jason Kipnis eventually. It was always just a matter of time and may
still be.
This is what Indians fans have been conditioned to expect
and has been a factor, the degree of which one can debate, in the continued
muted interest in this team, assuming one judges interest by such pedestrian metrics
as attendance.
Shapiro has done his best to divert what’s happening with this
left hand by keeping the right hand in constant motion. The Indians, under Shapiro, have upgraded
Progressive Field (mostly with Progressive Insurance’s stadium rights money)
and have attempted nearly all manner of low cost distraction in the form of
constant, and branded, giveaways.
Shapiro has been a whiz at using other people’s money (other than the
Dolans, I mean) to cultivate an inviting fan experience even if the games tend
to be boring and the team often on, at best, the fringes of competitiveness.
It hasn’t worked. The
Indians consistently rank near the bottom in major league attendance and there’s
only so much for which one can continue to blame “the economy” before you come to
the conclusion that winning matters and winning consistently matters even more.
You want to understand why Shapiro would leave for what
amounts to the same job somewhere else?
That’s why. It’s not just more
money for him and his family but more money for him and his new team to play
with. The more puzzling question is why
he stayed so long.
Presumably Shapiro is well respected in baseball
circles. He’s the quintessential company
man. No one speaks more lingo and knows
more metrics. He’s personable without
being obnoxious. He’s probably a really
pleasant guy around the office and maybe even fun in the few unguarded moments
when he has a chance to kick back with a beer.
He’s had enough of success to make him seem competent without being so
competent as to be out of reach. In
short, the Toronto job couldn’t have been the first opportunity to have come
his way in 23 years with Cleveland.
Maybe it’s as simple as Shapiro being the eternal
optimist. Maybe he always figured that
at some point the purse strings would loosen and he’d have to stop soliciting
virtually every business near and far to partner up on this promotion or
that. At some point, though, life has a
way of turning the most idealistic among us into hard-bitten realists and if
there is one reality that’s well known under this Indians’ ownership it’s that
this team was never going to be funded at a level that would truly allow it to
compete on a regular basis.
Shapiro’s timing is a little curious though given how the
Dolans are shopping the team. That seemingly
represents the best chance to really infuse this team with money and would seem
like the opportune time for Shapiro to stick around. That’s what actually scares me most. If Shapiro doesn’t see that as the best chance
to right the team than what hope should the fans continue to cling to?
In some ways, Shapiro will be missed and in many ways he won’t. Under his watch he did bring the franchise
forward using analytics. What will never
be fully known are the decisions he was forced to make that ultimately put this
franchise in a state of suspended animation.
Paul Dolan is taking over the reins as president, content to
take on the role himself rather than look outside. There’s nothing in that sentence or those
fact that suggests, in and of itself, that fans can expect anything
different. That will occur, if ever,
when the Dolans find that quarter billion they want for a third of their
franchise.
