Losing It

Managers or head coaches tend to get fired for a variety of sins, the most ubiquitous and least defined is when they’ve “lost” the team.  How does one actually lose a team?  Hard to say but like porn, you know it when you see it.

To look broadly for a moment, here’s an example.  Former Cleveland Indians catcher/journeyman Kelley Shoppach seems to be doing his level best to ensure that Bobby Valentine has a one-and-done season in Boston.  He sent text messages to upper management complaining about Valentine, which is the modern/coward way of registering dislike for your boss.

The point, though, is that Shoppach, when found out, had no problem fessin’ up.  That means that Shoppach is fearless or stupid or both.  I’m guessing both but leaning to fearless because there’s nothing easier for a general manager to do than to cut a journeyman catcher, particularly one who’s bitching about the manager.  But consider that if Shoppach isn’t the dumbest player in the majors and understands the relative lack of leverage his modest career provides he’s done the math and figures Valentine must be gone.  Who am I to argue the point?

But let’s localize the example.  The Indians have fallen off a fiscal cliff of their own due in no small part to imprudent management with an amazingly consistent ability to make bad decisions.  And while it wouldn’t surprise if the players all looked around and said to themselves “if the owners don’t care why should we?” why is it that Manny Acta can’t seem to channel Lou Brown, the manager of the fictional Indians in the movie “Major League” and rally the troops against the avarice of the owners?

Maybe because he’s lost the team.

I’ve seen 40+ years of Indians teams and in well too many of those years they have been lifeless blobs of protoplasm so it is worth remembering that when you try to contextualize this year’s model.  Still, the team that slept walked through a recent west coast trip in which it won one game, barely, but mostly embarrassed itself for nearly two weeks is in the running for its own special place on the bobby prize shelf.

Particularly dispiriting was the series against Seattle.  Up until the recent series was completed, these two teams were twin sons of different mothers.  In truth they still are.  But as the Indians barely registered a pulse in losing three straight, the Mariners ended up looking like a much better team.

Is that how this is going to go for the rest of this season?  Probably.  The better question though is can Acta survive it?  The answer depends on what Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti want out of Acta. 

Presumably Acta was hired to develop the young talent on the roster and get them to a place where they could compete.  Of course that was Acta’s charge in Washington and his teams then pretty much look like his teams now.

That’s not to lay all or even the lion’s share of the blame at Acta’s feet for how miserable the Nationals were under him or how miserable the Indians are under him now.  In both cases he was saddled by bad upper management that delivered to him an odd mix of young players with some potential and aging veterans that came cheaply.  In truth few managers around can make that mix work.

I suppose you could just focus on the young players on the Indians roster and ask yourself whether they are developing under Acta.  That’s where it gets difficult.  Asdrubal Cabrera has hit some sort of wall the second half of the season and has been mostly a non factor.  Jason Kipnis is finding his second year difficult.  Michael Brantley is developing but Carlos Santana is struggling.

This isn’t to lay all or even the lion’s share of the blame for this on Acta, either.  Young players develop unevenly and the additional pressure placed on them by the various veterans who are not even meeting modest expectations isn’t helpful to the process.

Still, since this is a bottom line business, the blame will fall somewhere.  It would be far more useful, probably, to fire the roster and keep the manager but I suspect Antonetti wears rose-colored glasses and thus will fall back on what is more easier and probably cheaper; fire the manager.

That said, if Acta does survive this season it will only be because it really doesn’t much matter anyway.  There are no miracle workers in sports, just other voices from other rooms.  The problems with the Indians run deeper than the manager but that doesn’t mean they don’t also run to the manager. 

Which should cause some concern for Acta, considering how the bad facts are stacking up like dishes in a frat house sink. 

The Indians have had two losing streaks of at least 8 games this season.  If not for a good start to the season, the Indians would easily be on a pace to lose 100 games.  They are 4-21 in their last 25 games.  Every time you turn around the opposing team seems to have 7 or 8 runs on the board.  They fired their pitching coach in mid season.  They have a closer who is essentially out of control, which, in truth he always was but now that he’s failing to save games it’s become apparent again.

Anyone of those things would be a good marker for believing that the wheels have fallen off.  Collectively the wheels aren’t just off, the whole damn vehicle is stuck in 8 feet of mud somewhere off the coast of Lake Erie.  None of that speaks well for Acta.  Managers and head coaches have been fired for far less.

The case for Acta probably comes down to two main points.  He didn’t put this roster together and despite the shitstorm, he’s remained calm throughout.  Maturity shouldn’t be underrated.  It’s the lack thereof that will be Valentine’s downfall in Boston and forevermore.

Yet as calm as he’s been, it would be hard not to notice a certain “read between the lines” quality to Acta’s comments lately.  It’s not direct criticism of his bosses, certainly, but it’s not as if it couldn’t be taken that way.

That’s the kind of thing, too, that gets managers fired as well, unless they already know their fates.  Acta’s been down this road before.  I suspect he knows how this all turns out.

More Than Just Manny Being Manny

It’s worth asking, even if the answer seems obvious: at what point will Manny Ramirez realize he finally stepped over the line? Undoubtedly there is considerable sentiment that Ramirez, like most other pampered and spoiled professional athletes, doesn’t even possess the gene necessary to express regret. And that may be true. But you have to think at some point on his trip across country to hook up with Casey Blake and the rest of the L.A. Dodgers that it had to flash at least momentarily in his mind that he may have pushed his clown act a tad to far.

Teams, particularly contending teams and particularly the defending World Series champs, don’t trade a current superstar and lock Hall of Famer in the middle of a pennant race without an awfully good reason. Yet it certainly seemed like the Boston Red Sox had good reason and more to send Ramirez as far away as geographically possible. Now he’s left with the realization, whether he owns up to it or not, that he carries a tarnished image to a city where image is everything.

Ramirez will always be seen as a somewhat beloved overgrown kid to Cleveland Indians fans. Like C.C. Sabathia, Ramirez grew up with the Indians. At every step of his development from the low minors to his pro debut to his last at bat with the Indians, Ramirez possessed one of the sweeter swings ever. He still does. As a neophyte major leaguer, his mostly harmless goofiness gave him the appeal of a Golden Retriever. The stories about a young Ramirez traipsing around like someone’s kid brother, absentmindedly leaving five-figure uncashed checks laying around in his car, bumming rides off of the clubhouse attendants, grabbing just about any bat in the rack at any moment, only made him endearing.

When Ramirez left Cleveland, he wasn’t excoriated by the fans the way Jim Thome was, even though he made the same unabashed money grab. Sure, there has been the occasional derogatory reference to him as Manny Dinero, but his returns to Cleveland have generated mostly a “wish he was still here” reaction whereas with Thome fans still boo him and consider him to be a traitor.

All of that may be due to the fact that Thome was far more forthcoming and articulate with the media, which ended up costing him dearly with the public. His claims of wanting to remain in Cleveland ultimately rang hollow. Ramirez in contrast never said much of anything to anyone. At the time, he simply let his agent, Jeff Moorad, manipulate the local media as he angled for the best deal for his client. It probably wasn’t a calculated move on Ramirez’s part so much as it was just another example of his seemingly casual indifference toward his career which to most seemed to consist of the beautiful simplicity of “see ball, hit ball, occasionally cash a check.”

To this day, any fan who says he really knows much about Ramirez is basing it more on hearsay than firsthand experience. At least until recently.

One of the strangest interviews that Ramirez has ever given (and he rarely gives them) was to ESPNdeportes.com earlier this week. In that interview he uttered his famous “the Red Sox don’t deserve a player like me” line, a quote that will certainly redefine him going forward at least as much as his “aw shucks” persona has defined him in the past. In full measure, the bomb he dropped was audacious in its scope: “During my years here, I've seen how they [the Red Sox] have mistreated other great players when they didn't want them to try to turn the fans against them. The Red Sox did the same with guys like Nomar Garciaparra and Pedro Martinez, and now they do the same with me. Their goal is to paint me as the bad guy. I love Boston fans, but the Red Sox don't deserve me. I'm not talking about money. Mental peace has no price, and I don't have peace here.”
It would easy to pick nits with Ramirez’s revisionist history. No question, though, that the Red Sox have an ignominious history when it comes to the way they’ve treated certain superstars, dating back to Babe Ruth. Still, it will be fascinating to see where Ramirez finds his “mental peace” next season and at what price. Having spectacularly eliminated a club with one of the highest payrolls in the league from the mix, this latest episode won’t help Ramirez maximize his value no matter how the rest of the season turns out.

The Red Sox may be employing the old “addition by subtraction” spin to this mess, but there really are no winners in this situation. The Red Sox can talk about the new calm and the “team first” attitude that has re-emerged in the clubhouse. And certainly Jason Bay is a decent consolation prize. But the Red Sox are not a better team today than they were with Ramirez no matter how it’s spun. Ramirez may feel like he pushed the Red Sox around pretty good and let them know that he won’t be trifled with, but it comes at a permanent cost to his reputation. The ESPNdeportes quote and his tired antics—the mysterious refusals to play, the half-hearted runs to first base—will linger. The Dodgers, too, aren’t going to come out of this unscathed. Ramirez brings baggage and unneeded attention for a team just trying to get in the playoffs. And the scruffy, unkempt Ramirez will, at some point, clash with Joe Torre, as old school of a manager as there is in the game.

The Ramirez situation provides some interesting parallels with the melodrama playing out in Green Bay with Brett Favre and the Packers. On the surface, there are similarities given the players involved. But one of the key differences is that Favre is unquestionably at the end of his career, Ramirez is not. However the Favre situation resolves, it won’t last more than another season or so. Ramirez is going to be around for awhile. Though 36, Ramirez has plenty left in the tank. And as long as the American League keeps the designated hitter, with that swing Ramirez can probably hit .280 and drive in 80-90 runs a game until he’s 50.

But whether he gets that chance depends on whether Ramirez returns to his more carefree ways or becomes permanently enamored with his new-found verbosity. Most any team can tolerate the old Manny being Manny. It’s the new Manny being Manny that will wear thin long before his considerable skills finally abandon him.

Leadership

There are any number of ways one can choose to look at the Indians collapse over the last several days. There are the individual plays, of course, that will be talked about and that list already has started: Kenny Lofton being called out at second when replays show he was safe; Joel Skinner’s puzzling decision to hold Lofton at third when he seemingly could have easily scored; Casey Blake grounding into the double play, etc.And generally individual games tend to turn on individual plays. That’s just the way it is.

But if the point in understanding what happened is to arrive at some greater truth that can be utilized down the road, then the real reason the Indians are cleaning out their lockers on Monday and Boston is preparing to play Colorado on Wednesday comes down to leadership. Boston had it, Cleveland did not. The inability of two of the Indians key leaders, C.C. Sabathia and Travis Hafner, to put the rest of this young team on their backs and close out the series when it had the chance is not only a stark reality to be faced but a situation to be addressed.

Sabathia may win the Cy Young award based on his performance this season, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who watched the Cleveland/Boston series who’d say that Sabathia is a better pitcher than Josh Beckett, particularly when it counted most. While Beckett seemed intimidated by nothing much, Sabathia acted almost overwhelmed by the enormity of the playoffs, starting with the Yankees series. He wasn’t completely ineffective, just mostly, but what he did do was demonstrate that at this point he’s not the fully realized superstar Cleveland fans would like to believe he is.

What was particularly frustrating in this regard is how he seemed to abandon what had brought him to this stage in the first place. He repeatedly nibbled rather than challenged, and in the process unwittingly set a tone for the other pitchers to follow. Outside of one glorious half-inning in game two when Tom Mastny set down David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and Mike Lowell in the 10th inning, Sabathia and, by proxy, the rest of the Indians pitchers, basically had no answer to the middle of the Red Sox lineup.

It would be hard to overstate how poorly Indians pitchers approached the middle of the Red Sox lineup. There is no question that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez are terrific hitters, but time and again Indians pitchers, led by Sabathia, treated the two, as well as Kevin Youkilis and eventually Mike Lowell, with such caution that they were pitching from behind even before they threw a pitch.

Ortiz, went 0-5 on Sunday and still batted .292 for the series. Youkilis batted .500 for the series while Ramirez batted .409. Lowell batted .333. But those raw numbers hardly tell the story. What matters most is that they were an intimidating presence in the lineup and time and again Indians pitchers simply pitched scared or expended so much energy trying to be so fine in their approach they didn’t even notice that the inning and the game was getting away from them in the meantime.

Consider, for example, game one. The third inning effectively spelled the end for Sabathia and the Indians. Julio Lugo led off with a double and was sacrificed to third by Pedroia. Up came Youkilis. Instead of Sabathia challenging him, he nibbled and begged and ultimately walked him on four straight pitches. Shaken, Sabathia then hit Ortiz to load the bases. After getting ahead of Ramirez 0-2, Sabathia couldn’t finish, instead throwing four straight balls to walk in a run. Lowell then him a double and a game that had been 1-1 was now 4-1.

In game five, Youkilis hit a home run off of Sabathia in the first inning. Ramirez then doubled and Lowell singled. The only thing that kept that inning from being bigger was that Ramirez got thrown out at the plate trying to score. In the third inning, after Youkilis hit into a double-play, Sabathia then walked Ortiz and Ramirez singled and the Indians were now behind 2-1. In the seventh, when Sabathia should have been sitting in the dugout, something for which he can’t be blamed, he gave up a lead-off double to Pedroia and a triple to Youkilis before being replaced by Rafeal Bentancourt. Youkilis eventually scored that inning on a sacrifice but the two runs were charged to Sabathia and the Indians were now behind 4-1 and that game, too, was now effectively over.

If there wasn’t a straight line from Sabathia’s performance in either game to ineffectiveness of Carmona, particularly on Saturday night, the line wasn’t very circuitous either. In the first inning Saturday, Dustin Pedroia was down in the count 1-2 and then singled. Carmona, like Sabathia, sensed the pressure and tightened up, immediately getting behind to Youkilis, who eventually gets an infield single on a 2-2 pitch. Ortiz comes up and all Carmona did was immediately go 3-0 on him, eventually walking him after getting the count to full. The bases were now full. Carmona then got ahead of Ramirez quickly and ultimately struck him out then induced Lowell to fly out. On the cusp of getting out of what was looking to be a disaster, Carmona seemed completely spent by what had already taken place. As a result he let down and eventually J.D. Drew drilled a 3-1 pitch over the wall in center field. That game was effectively over, too.

It’s not like these situations were limited to the games Cleveland lost. In fact, the middle of the lineup for the Red Sox was active throughout the series and caused Indians pitchers fits time and again. It’s just that in the games Cleveland won, the other Red Sox hitters had trouble capitalizing on all the attention that was being paid to Youkilis, Ortiz, Ramirez and Lowell.

But as intimidated as Sabathia and the rest of the Indians pitchers seemed to be by the Red Sox lineup, the Indians could still have prevailed if Hafner had been able to step up when Sabathia could not. Instead, Hafner effectively killed off whatever remaining hope remained after Sabathia’s flameout.

On Saturday night, despite Drew’s grand slam, the Indians were still just one swing away from tying the game in the third inning. Trot Nixon and Casey Blake had both singled. Grady Sizemore lined out and Asbrubal Cabrera flied out. Up came Hafner with the opportunity to do something special.

It may be unrealistic to ever expect a home run, but somehow great players find a way to seize the moment. Hafner, like Sabathia, showed he’s not yet in that category. When great was needed, he quickly went down in the count 1-2, a place he seemingly found himself in throughout the series. Hafner then grounded out to first to kill the inning and sap whatever chance the Indians had of getting back into the game.

If that seems like too harsh of an assessment, then consider the following. In Hafner’s first at bat in game one, he hit a solo home run. It was as good as it would get for him the entire series. He struck out in the fourth inning and flew out in the sixth inning (with Cabrera on base and one run already in). In game two, Hafner flew out in the first inning with Sizemore on second. In game three, Hafner went hitless. Although the Indians won the game, it bears mentioning that in the fifth inning with two out and one on, Hafner grounded out when a single would have scored two.

In the crucial game five, with Josh Beckett on the mound, Hafner had a chance to break open the game early. Sizemore led off with a bloop double and Cabrera singled. Hafner then grounded into a rally-killing double play, which was all the more deflating when Victor Martinez singled. Instead of a three or four run inning and a chance to send the Red Sox a message that they wouldn’t be intimidated by Beckett, the Indians only got one. Finally, in the eighth inning of game seven, after both Sizemore and Cabrera singled, Hafner struck out on three straight pitches.

You can’t fault manager Eric Wedge for sticking with Hafner, but the Boston series was the mini-version of Hafner’s entire season. Thus, his failure to step up in the postseason was not necessarily a big surprise.

But even if his failures weren’t a surprise doesn’t mean that they weren’t critical to the team’s overall failures, just as were Sabathia’s. This is a young Indians team that needed its leaders to step up when things seemed darkest. It’s hard to gauge, but the failures of these two could linger well into next season. Look what’s happened to Alex Rodriguez. Even if the Indians make the playoffs next year, the story line will focus on Sabathia and Hafner and their 2007 failures. Can they handle that additional pressure? It’s a question that will be asked until adequately answered on the field.

As the Indians enter the off-season, getting these answers correct will help determine the future of this franchise as much as anything else. In the case of Hafner, GM Mark Shapiro can only hope considering how much money already has been committed. With Sabathia and potential free agency looming after next season, Shapiro must go even a step further. If Shapiro convinces the Dolans to invest the kind of money into Sabathia that his regular season stats will dictate, then it will be as a result of a huge leap of faith that Sabathia will become what the Red Sox have in Beckett. The Indians can’t afford to get this wrong.

Road Games

There’s any number of roads one might consider going down after Thursday night’s Indians loss to the Boston Red Sox. But they all lead to the same place: The city of Boston with the Tribe up three games to two.

The first and far more traveled road in this town is the Negativity Boulevard. It’s hard to find it exactly on a map, but considering where the key sports venues are in this town, it has to be somewhere between East 9th and Ontario. At one time or another we’ve all been on it, many of us recently. Everyone by now knows this road, right?

It’s the road where Manager Eric Wedge convinced all his old naysayers Thursday night that he really isn’t a very good manager because he sent C.C. Sabathia out for the 7th inning Thursday night when it was clear that Sabathia was lucky to get through six after only giving up two runs. It’s also the place where a different group of naysayers are screaming for Travis Hafner to be dropped down in the lineup because he’s sucking the life out of this team with one lousy at bat after another. And while we’re here, how the heck did Kenny Lofton misplay what should have been a routine fly ball in the first inning Thursday? It led directly to Boston’s first run.

Hanging out on Negativity Boulevard can actually be quite fun, for a limited period of time. It helps cleanse the sole of the pent up anger over the fact that the Indians didn’t get it done in their own ball park, denying their fans to collectively rejoice in the exact moment that the Indians received their invitation to the 2007 World Series.

But hanging out on Negativity Boulevard is hardly recommended even if that’s where many Cleveland fans like to call home. In a sense, it’s hard not to empathize. Cleveland hasn’t had a championship team in any major sport in over two generations by this point. There have been any number of close calls which most can recite in painstaking detail. Indeed, it may not be the nicest place to live, but it’s the nicest place we know. It has a certain perverse comfort in the same way that pounding your head against the wall does—it feels so good when it’s over.

And far be it from me to stop someone from visiting an old friend every now and again. But as the brokerage houses like to tell us all the time when hawking their mutual funds: past results may not be indicative of future performance. Indeed, other than as interesting footnotes, nothing about what has taken place with prior teams in any sport in this town has any bearing on whether the Indians will advance to the World Series this year. Accept it.

And while I’m at it, accept the fact that you can change out of your so-called lucky shirt or stop aligning the remote control just so on your coffee table. If you really have that sort of dominion over the outcome of an Indians game by the shirt you wear or the chair you sit in, then there are probably even greater uses for such power, such as making that speeding ticket you got for going 85 down I-77 two weeks ago disappear.

For those who do occasionally leave Negativity Boulevard, it’s a short trip over to Indifference Alley. Most folks don’t like walking around in a bad mood all the time. Convinced, however, that ultimately nothing good could possibly happen in Cleveland sports, they eventually take a side trip down Indifference Alley, flipping the remote, for example, from the game to The Office even though the game is only two innings old, trying to convince themselves that they really could care less what happens in the game.

As if that ever works. Eventually they put on the picture-in-picture, just to keep an eye on the game in case something happens. And with the very next Indians hit, they get sucked right back in. So much for Indifference Alley. It’s only permanent residents are the wives and girlfriends who’d rather be shopping anyway.

A far less traveled road is Optimism Avenue, not to be confused with Naïve Street. See, on Naïve Street, a person doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Even though there is no cause and effect between Earnest Byner’s fumble and Edgar Renteria’s base hit, you can’t appreciate success without understanding its disappointing run-ups. The residents of Naïve Street just sort of believe everything will work out just fine even as the parking lot vendors are picking their pockets for nearly double the price during a playoff game.

Those on Optimism Avenue, on the other hand, have a clear understanding and healthy respect for the past. They know that in September it cost $20 to park in one of the lots on Sumner just off of E. 9th and now it is $30 but pay it anyway because it’s a small price to be part of history. These folks, too, believe everything will work out just fine because, sooner or later, it’s our turn, right? Right?

The final road is reserved for the remaining few who can place events into context. These folks live on Realistic Road. The reason you find so few fans living here is because it’s inconsistent with the concept of being a fan in the first place. As we get reminded from time to time (and as I’m doing for you right now), fan is short for fanatic, meaning someone whose emotions tend to run in extremes.

While you may not find many fans living down this road, it’s absolutely critical that the players live there. Boston’s Manny Ramirez received great criticism on Thursday for publicly extolling the credo of those who live there when he said, quite simply, that if Boston didn’t win the series, it wasn’t the end of the world. Dismiss that as Manny being Manny, but what he’s really saying is that as professional athletes, they can’t afford to be too optimistic, too pessimistic or too fatalistic. The only thing that works, that keeps them sane is to be realistic. Anything else and it is hard to perform.

In Thursday night’s game, one of the lessons learned for this young Indians team, frankly, is that they need to be more like Manny, except without the ill-fitting pants, the mile-long dreadlocks and the uneven facial hair. It wasn’t so much that the Red Sox did anything different so much as it was simply that they had been in this position before and thus were able to remain realistic about what would come next. They’d either win or they wouldn’t but no matter they were still going to play the game the only way they knew how. It’s what they came to do.

Fortunately, it isn’t necessarily a long learning curve in professional sports and won’t be for the Indians. By the time most athletes have reached this level, they’ve been in enough pressure situations for enough years that processing a new experience is second nature.

The other thing that’s important to remember, indeed what Manny and the Red Sox clearly understand, is that in reality this is a very good Indians baseball team even if it didn’t appear that way Thursday night. The Red Sox are neither intimidated nor overconfident, just realistic enough to know that their future can’t be predicted so no use trying. Simply stay in the moment.

This is the reality, too, that Wedge has drilled into his group over and over this past season. It’s what allowed them to overcome the harsh reality that good pitchers sometimes struggle and good hitters are still only successful slightly more than 30% of the time. Along with having hearts the size of Montana, it’s also what will ultimately allow them to apply the lessons learned and prevail in a series they should win, whether in six games or seven.

It's Not Personal, Just Business

As if Cleveland fans didn’t have enough to worry about, up 3-1 in the American League Championship Series. Now we have to fight against the big bad “national media” and its blatant cheering for the Boston Red Sox to win this series.

It’s a popular theory, repeated on these pages and elsewhere, that the “national media” has it in for Cleveland and would rather see the Red Sox in the World Series. But while oft repeated, it’s done so without so much as a source or even a drip of logic. In fact, to the extent that this amorphous “national media” wants anyone to prevail, it’s probably Cleveland. It’s the better story.

Cleveland fans are notorious for seeing conspiracies where none truly exist. There may be hordes of people rooting against the Indians and for the Red Sox, but at best an Indians win is a nightmare for Red Sox Nation and the Fox Network, nothing more.

The “national media” is not some homogenous entity that moves with a collective conscious and even if it did, it could hardly care who wins what. Its interest first, last and always will be in a good story and on that score, an underdog team with the second longest streak of World Series futility is a far better read or listen than another victory by a high payroll team that got the World Series monkey off its back just a few years ago.

I’ll concede, on the other hand, that there likely are certain executives at the Fox Network that may be wringing their hands a bit, but that hardly qualifies as a national consensus. Besides, these same network executives wring their hands at almost anything. It’s what happens when you pay billions to televise sports and other crap and realize that it was a pretty lousy investment in the first place.

The Fox Network’s woes in the ratings game are hardly a proxy for the concerns of the national media except as one of a billion angles to cover during the downtime between games. But a preference by Fox for a Boston World Series as the answer for ratings magic is more myth than reality, couched less in truth than in perception.

The truth is that the World Series ratings will suffer irrespective of the participants; something Fox probably realized when they signed their latest deal with Major League Baseball in 2006 at slightly less than the previous deal that first gave it the exclusive rights to the World Series.

It matters little, for example, if Boston, the seventh largest media market, has a direct stake in the game vs. Cleveland, the 17th largest market. Again, irrespective of the participants, the ratings have been trending downward since Fox took over in 2000. In fact, the last time that baseball had at least a 30 share, meaning at least 30% of the viewers watching television watched the games was, ironically, in 1995 with a 33 share. That translated into a 19.5 rating, or about 21 million viewers. That series, of course, featured the Indians and the Braves and was broadcast by both ABC and NBC.

But since that time, the ratings have trended downward to the point last year when the Detroit-St. Louis series got only a 17 share and a 10.1 rating or slightly more than half the viewers that watched the 1995 series. While that may be the all-time low, it wasn’t much lower than 2005 which featured the Chicago White Sox, a team in the nation’s third largest media market and a team also suffering Cleveland-like World Series futility.

In 2004, when the supposedly beloved Red Sox finally broke through, that series only had a 25 share, a 15.8 rating and about 17.3 million viewers. This is a full eight points and about four million viewers less than the Cleveland-Atlanta series in 1995 and, by the way, four points and about 1.1million viewers less than the Cleveland-Florida series in 1997.

The point, I think, is that if Fox is having problems with television ratings, it might want to start examining how it’s doing business.

For example, why did the Tuesday night game not start until 8:20? Forget about the appeal to the kids who might want to stay up, what about the adults? Last time I looked, not only do kids have school in the morning, their parents have to go to work. And as romantic as it sounds to be able to party late and get up early, it’s not such a fun or healthy thing to do on a regular basis.

This late starting times in the east is a question that’s constantly raised and rarely satisfactorily answered by Fox. The usual response is that the networks want the games to start at a time when folks on the west coast are coming home from work. Any earlier and they’re still at work. That’s true, of course, but hardly a compelling reason if you’re looking strictly at ratings as your guide.

Of the top 10 media markets, only two are on the west coast—Los Angeles at number two and San Francisco at number six. The remaining eight are evenly split between the east and central time zones, meaning that the overwhelming majority of the viewers in the top 10 markets combined would be home from work if the games started at 7 p.m. in the east. The story isn’t much different when you expand it to the top 20 or even the top 20 media markets.

Fox then compounds the problem by having extra long breaks at the half-inning. Certainly they need to sell extra time slots to pay for the broadcasts (witness, for example, the ever-lengthening and increasingly meaningless pre-game shows) and you can’t begrudge them that point. But it’s becoming a self-defeating proposition. The longer Fox waits to start the games and the longer they take to broadcast the games, the more likely they are to lose viewers, in which case the more commercials they’ll need to sell to recoup their costs, meaning even longer broadcasts, and on and on.

And these are just the most obvious issues. What about the strange off-day while still in the same city? If someone can offer a coherent explanation as to why Fox has chosen to kill the momentum of the Cleveland/Boston series by inserting an off day on Wednesday with the series still in Cleveland, drop me an email. And if Fox really wants to get deep into self-analysis instead of opting for easy answers, then address the continuous mystery that is Tim McCarver.

Though there is much that Fox can control and doesn’t, there are some things that are simply out of their reach. Baseball may be the great American pastime, but it’s hardly the national sports obsession. That belongs to football. For comparison purposes, Fox’s typical Sunday afternoon football broadcast garners a similar share and a nearly identical amount of viewers than its World Series broadcast did last year.

Another factor is that playoff baseball plays out like an extended cricket match. The Super Bowl is a one-time event, even if it comes around each year. Except perhaps for Game 7, none of the other games seem to capture much of the imagination of the casual fan even if the series can end sooner than that.

Just because Cleveland fans are paranoid doesn’t mean that others aren’t out to get them, but just not in this case. Whatever the concerns of Fox, it’s really nothing personal, just business. What Fox knows but just doesn’t say is that there really isn’t a match-up that exists that is likely to ever return the ratings to what they were in the early 1990s, let alone the ’80s or ‘70s. The landscape has simply changed too much.

Heart

Baseball, as Indians manager Eric Wedge likes to remind us, is a very difficult game. It’s why he tends to resist the opportunity to upbraid his players, at least publicly, when they fail to perform. Indeed it’s why Wedge steadfastly stood by his team during this middle of the season when they otherwise looked like they were on vacation, at least from hitting.

The tendency, of course, is to dismiss Wedge’s assessment of the game as an excuse to cover for the mistakes that get made. If that’s true, that’s fine. Part of a manager’s job is to have the backs of his players during the lean times. But Wedge issues that reminder as often as necessary predominately for one reason: it’s true.

Of all the professional sports, baseball seems to be the easiest to play to the causal fan. Unlike football, there are few if any instances of all nine players ever having to move in concert at one time to accomplish a singular goal. Unlike basketball or hockey, most of the time the players seem to be just standing around waiting for something to happen. Americans, in general, like their entertainment like they like their people—direct and with as little subtlety as possible. In that respect baseball will always suffer in comparison. You have a round bat, a round ball and you have to hit it square.

But every once in awhile, a baseball game comes along that is so transcendental that it makes every other sport look lame by comparison. Saturday night’s game ALCS game between the Indians and the Red Sox was just that game. It set the table for Monday night’s victory and for all that will follow as the Indians continue their march toward the World Series.

Unfortunately, those who know that game only by its final score will never appreciate its beauty, drama and suspense. They’ll also never fully appreciate why this Cleveland Indians team deserves a special place in their hearts and minds.

By now, of course, everyone knows the story line. After about five hours of play, the Indians broke a 6-6 tie, scoring seven runs in the 11th inning and completely letting out whatever air remained in Boston’s Fenway Park. While this was dramatic enough, it pales well in comparison to all that took place before it.

This Cleveland-Boston series features all manner of intrigue all of which was on display this past Saturday. The starting pitchers, so feared because of their reputations, were not able to contain the bats of their opposition. There was hand-wringing, of course, every other inning or so when David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez came to the plate. Not only couldn’t they be stopped, they couldn’t be contained. And who knew how important a seemingly innocent ground out in the top of the 6th inning that scored Jhonny Peralta would be?

But once Peralta scored, the game was locked into an endless loop of near misses and as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, it was hard to imagine it would ever end. The fact that it did end and in such grand style for the Indians had nothing to do with luck, karma or any other such cosmic phenomena. It came down to heart.

Start, for example, with the very first inning. After the beat down of the night before, the easiest thing for the Indians to have done, knowing they were facing Curt Schilling, was lay down. Not intentionally, to be sure, but it would have had the same effect. Instead, Grady Sizemore, who took the collar the night before, started it off with a hustle double and came home on Victor Martinez’s double. It sent a message to the Red Sox that what happened on Friday night stayed on Friday night.

Boston, of course, is nobody’s weak sister. With Fausto Carmona struggling with his control, the three runs the Red Sox scored in the bottom of the third was no more of a surprise than how they scored them, mostly at the hands of Ortiz and Ramirez.

Ramirez, the displaced Clevelander by way of Washington Hts. in New York City, is quite a study. He is a testament to all that can be accomplished with a spotless mind. He could stand in the middle of a hurricane and eat a sandwich. Completely unfazed by the circumstances or enormity of any situation, all he does is hit, with his bat, your bat or a waffle bat. And if he’s not hitting, he’s still scaring the bejeezus out of opposing pitchers anyway. Whereas Alex Rodriguez has a sensitivity meter with a hair trigger, Ramirez suffers no such burdens. It’s why Ramirez will always perform whatever the setting and why Rodriguez will always struggle particularly when the stage gets bigger.

The third inning should have and could have buried the Indians, particularly with Schilling on the mound. But Schilling was not able to perform one of the most important tasks a pitcher faces: shut down the opposing team after your guys have just put a crooked number on the scoreboard. Following singles by Martinez and Ryan Garko, Peralta hammered a 3-run home run to temporarily give the Indians the lead, 4-3.

Though Carmona did struggle, his ability to hold Boston in the bottom of the fourth inning after the Indians had just taken the lead was bigger than most even recall at this point. It didn’t work out so well in the fifth for Carmona, but getting out of the fourth was critical.

Like a boxer temporarily staggered, the Red Sox were able to regain the lead in the fifth, thanks in no small measure again to Ramirez. But by the time Franklin Gutierrez’s chop grounder allowed Peralta to tie the score in the top of the sixth, it was obvious to all that this was a team that wouldn’t die. No matter where the Red Sox pounded the wooden stake, either they were missing the heart or, more likely, the heart of this team was just too big to be stilled.

If the Red Sox had any doubts about that at all, they were silenced in the bottom of the 10th. With Ortiz, Ramirez and Mike Lowell coming to the plate and reliever Tom Mastny on the mound, there were few fans in either city that gave the game much of a chance to make it to the 11th inning. Even when Ortiz grounded out to Peralta, that still seemed the most likely outcome.

But all Mastny did was retire Ramirez and Lowell on harmless fly balls to right field. That momentum shift turned into the onslaught by the Indians in the top of the 11th and is what, ultimately, tied this series at one game apiece.

Every game is ultimately the sum of its separate parts and often the mini-dramas that brought about that final result get lost in the mix. And even if they do in this case, there is a major takeaway not to be missed. This team has heart and it has it in spades. The strength, character and will, all sports synonyms for heart, that it takes to prevail in such circumstances is widely talked about it but rarely witnessed. But when it’s there, it’s awesome in its power.

It directly led to Monday night’s victory, not by momentum but by shear force of will. It propelled Jake Westbrook to reach down to find something that had been missing for most of the season. It pushed Kenny Lofton’s hit over the right field wall. It’s the reason Rafael Betancourt was able to squeeze still another magic inning out of his tired arm. It’s why the Indians will win this series.

It’s one thing not to be favored in a series or being forced to play in an unfriendly environment. It happens to every team. Simply overcoming those odds is not, in and of itself, much of a deal. But overcoming adversity whatever the circumstances and with limited experience in dealing it is a much different issue. Not only did the Indians not let Friday’s demoralizing loss carry over to Saturday’s game, neither did they let the gut punches within the two games derail them from the mission at hand.

The Indians have had more talented teams in their existence that have accomplished much less. By winning on Saturday and again on Monday this team already has gone beyond expectations that were reasonable to make in the first place. The only thing that’s left is to finish the job. Don’t bet against them.

Stacking the Odds

It’s easy, convenient and commonplace right now to use the Indians’ win over the Yankees Tuesday night as a symbolic ending of sorts of another Yankees’ era. And if that turns out to be the case, it’s worth celebrating. But hopefully it has a much more useful purpose, that being as a substantive, if temporary, end to baseball’s bizarre economics.

Money matters in sports and always will. But whereas football with its hard salary cap and basketball with its semi-hard cap has brought a level of socialization to those sports that has been anything but evil, the capitalistic experiment that major league baseball has allowed to run nearly amok has created such galling disparities that it threatens the very foundations.

It’s been written many times already and is getting almost cliché to decry how the economics of baseball ultimately portends its downfall. If things continue unabated, that will occur. But thanks in large part to the Indians’ victory over the Yankees and what that likely means to the Yankees, the end of the world may be a little further down the road than it was at the start of the season.

Looking at the results of the divisional series in both leagues one conclusion to draw is that in the end, money didn’t make a difference. The combined payrolls of the Indians, the Diamondbacks and the Rockies do not equal what the Yankees spent on their mess of a team. But scratch a bit below the surface and you’ll find that for many years now there is no surer way to building and sustaining a playoff caliber team than by spending outrageous sums. That kind of spending doesn’t guarantee ultimate success but on the other hand it’s always nice when you can stack the odds in your favor and baseball still has too many teams trying to do just that, even as it threatens the game’s overall health.

The Yankees have been exhibit A. They may have had some trouble over the last seven years or so in terms of advancing to the World Series, but with all the talk about how that supposedly reflects on some mythical shortcoming of manager Joe Torre, don’t forget that in his 12 years as manager, the Yankees have not missed the playoffs. In that same period of time, the Yankees have spent nearly $1.6 billion on players.

The Red Sox have been exhibit B. In virtually that same period of time, the Red Sox have nearly matched the Yankees dollar-for-dollar in payroll and only finished lower than second in their division once, last season when they were third. As a result of their insane spending, those two teams are primarily, but not solely, responsible for baseball’s inflated economics and growing disparities between the so-called large market and small market teams.

Exhibits C, D E, F and G have helped and they are not hard to peg, either, even if their success has been less consistent. The Angels, Cubs, Tigers, Dodgers, White Sox and Phillies all have massive payrolls and have had for several years.

But over the last few years, a variety of teams, including three of this year’s four participants in the league championship series have demonstrated that being a low payroll team doesn’t necessarily translate to failure on the field. The same held true to a certain extent last year as well with the success of the Twins and the As. And while other examples can be had in most any other season, right now it sure feels like there is something about the way the Indians put away the Yankees in this year’s ALDS that could very well change the equation.

It’s unlikely that George Steinbrenner will be pleased with what he got this year for his $194+ million dollar payroll. It’s unlikely he’s pleased with what he got over the last three years for spending nearly a half a billion dollars, for that matter. And while he may be fiscally insane, he’s not stupid. Sooner or later he’s bound to notice the trend.

Indeed it’s actually happening and the Indians victory will only accelerate the process. When you look at the Yankees this past season, Alex Rodriguez, the best regular season player of his generation and one of the best regular season players of all time, helped keep the Yankees from falling completely off the map early. But his presence alone wasn’t enough to make them competitive.

It was only when the Yankees completely committed to youth, in the form of guys like Melky Cabrera, Robinson Cano, Chien-Mien Wang, Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes did they really begin to take off. The combined salaries of that group are around 10% of what Rodriguez alone makes.

Even if Steinbrenner proves to be too pigheaded to see the trends right now, it’s clear they haven’t been lost on their GM, Brian Cashman, who told the media Monday night that he is completely committed to organic growth. In other words, Cashman has seen what guys like Mark Shapiro have been able to do over the last several years and has realized that there may be another, indeed better, way.

The real question is that with religion seemingly suddenly returning to the Yankees, will guys like Theo Epstein in Boston and the lunatics running the payrolls of their clubs into similar ether come to similar conclusions. A year or two ago it would have been sheer folly to even consider that scenario. Now it may be slightly more realistic.

The Yankees payroll this past season was actually down from 2006. More to the point, with all their talented youth, their average salary per player was nearly cut in half, from almost $3 million to nearly $1.5 million. When Roger Clemens drops off and if Jorge Posada doesn’t resign, it’s likely to drop further. The real question is whether Cashman or Steinbrenner will be able to resist the temptation to grab another overpriced trinket if the Red Sox don’t do similarly. We can always hope.

The real likelihood in all this is that the Bostons, New Yorks, Anaheims, Chicagos and Detroits will only commit a payroll of less than $100 million as an acceptable but impermanent business model and that relative economic balance will be returned only temporarily. Instead, their commitment to youth will be as it’s been in the past—a means for replenishing their ranks to create attractive trade bait for teams like Cleveland with players like C.C. Sabathia whose talent and experience will eventually price them out of reach of their existing team.

But until that happens, we all can and should enjoy the respite because teams like Cleveland are likely to have the competitive advantage over their previously free spending counterparts. They have been operating in a budget constrained environment for years and better understand its vagaries. This, of course, doesn’t guarantee sustained success either, but for once it would be nice to have the odds stacked in our favor.