Low Cost, Low Risk, Low Effort

The only way a true Cleveland Indians fan could be surprised at the state of the team’s roster or the front office’s refusal to improve it at the trade deadline is if he fell asleep in a cave, woke up, and thought it was 1997.

This front office and this ownership group dangle the possibility of late season moves to a starving fan base to keep interest afloat but were never serious about really doing anything. That would involve risk and cost money and if there are two things that are anathema to this front office and ownership group it’s risk and cost.

The only plus side to this inaction is that by doing nothing they also did nothing dumb. The hottest of rumors involved a possible trade of Shin-Soo Choo because he’ll be a free agent at the end of NEXT SEASON and because he has in his employ Scott Boras. See, the Indians front office hates Scott Boras. Just the mention of his names causes them to wet themselves. Boras doesn’t think much of creative, hometown discount type deals. He’s as sentimental as a jellyfish and twice as slippery. In the 2012 offseason he’ll market and sell Choo to the highest bidder and there is no chance that it will be the Indians.

So, as is the custom here in Cleveland, the angst rolls, the chat rooms explode and the talk shows crackle over the possibility of getting “nothing” for Choo as he leaves for New York or California or Detroit.

Since we do know how this movie plays out in theory it makes sense to try and get something for Choo, in theory. But ask yourself whether you trust Chris Antonetti to get good value for Choo? Antonetti has nothing yet on his resume that suggests he’s got enough gravitas or savvy to convince a team to part with legitimate prospects in exchange for Choo. Stated differently, there's nothing to inform the fan that Antonetti could have ever been on the other side of the Ubaldo Jimenez trade.

Thus the calculus is whether or not Choo’s value to the team is higher as a player here for another season and a half or as a commodity to be bartered clumsily for a couple of players who we ultimately hope will get good enough to be traded down the road for other prospects.

Until Antonetti proves his meddle as a general manager the best, safest course is inaction. Better to actually watch Choo in Cleveland for another 200 games or so then to watch Choo play those 200 games for a contending team while grousing over the prospects his trade would garner as they toil in Eastlake or Akron.

Meanwhile, back where it matters, fan interest, at least as measured by attendance and television ratings, is ebbing. It's not that they can't figure out what the Indians are doing, it's that they can. The code, such as it was, has been cracked and the Indians are listing as a franchise as if this were 1989.

No question that the front office and the owners have noticed, but at the moment no one's quite sure what they plan on doing about it. For the time being they're trying to paper over the problem with promotions. But they can't have a fireworks display every night. Eventually they'll have to find an answer to the abiding question of how exactly it plans on having a team with enough heft to contend for an entire season.

It’s been a nice, pleasant surprise the last few seasons that the team stayed within spitting distance of contention until the Browns’ preseason started. But while the team generated some raised eyebrows for the first half of last and this season, few fans if any believed that the team was really built to contend. Even that, though, isn't the crux of the sin. It's more that there doesn't seem to be any intention to take the bold steps that contention actually requires.

The slightly broader context of this season begins with last season, extends to last off season and culminates, most probably, with the current disastrous road trip.

Last year’s team was achingly similar to this year’s model and therein lies the problem for the fans. There’s been no progress. Everyone could see the holes in the roster last year that caused the team to fade just as the season got interesting. That would seem to have begged an approach to fill those holes in a meaningful way.

Yet there was nothing bold done in the offseason to give the fans even a sliver of hope that this season would be anything different. It hasn’t been and so the fans, jaded by this vicious cycle of inaction, are losing interest.

Building a team the way the Indians are trying to do was never going to be an easy task. It relies on so many things going right and is so dependent on almost nothing going wrong. The front office has done a lousy job in the draft for the last several years and its impact is being felt through the lack of impact players in the minors. The front office keeps kicking the tires on retreads and it shows. Derek Lowe and Johnny Damon have very little left in their tanks. Next year's retreads aren't going to offer anything different. And the few risks it does take are always head scratchers. Grady Sizemore anyone?

We’re long past debating the frugal way in which this franchise operates. It won’t change and railing about it isn’t going to change anything either. But we’re not past debating the point as to whether Antonetti or Mark Shapiro can implement the strategy.

The early results on the Antonetti reign aren’t very promising as the wave of empty seats and lower broadcast ratings readily attest. All that's really occurred is a continuation of the Shapiro reign where a previous season's ability to contend was ignored in favor of a murky longer view involving progressively cheaper players and wounded warriors and a vague promise to do something when the time is right.

Well, guess what?, the time never seems to be right and that's ultimately what has the fan base miserable. You can't keep selling the same bottle of snake oil and not have the public eventually catch on. They have. The fans may be hopelessly hopeful but they aren't stupid. They may give the front office and the owners the benefit of another off season, but when that begets next year's Derek Lowe or Johnny Damon, they'll find other ways to spend their money. That means that Dan Gilbert and his casino, situated comfortably next door to Progressive Field, are likely going to stay healthy for another year while the Indians take on still more water.

Budget Fillers

There was a time in Cleveland when Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez and Omar Vizquel formed the heart of a team that gave Indians fans their most significant reason to cheer in decades. They were great players growing into the prime of their careers that several times put the Indians on the precipice of a World Series title that now seems further away then ever.

But players like Thome, Ramirez and Vizquel were never going to spend their careers in Cleveland. We can bitch about the reasons why but the truth is that the identity of a particular player and a particular team is as outdated as the reserve clause.

One of the byproducts of the system that Marvin Miller sold first to the players and eventually to the owners was a revolving door concept of player movement. You take two greedy parties—players and owners—whose economic interests naturally clash and eventually you end up a league full of players who, if there's any length to their careers, each probably average having played with 4 to 5 different teams by the time those careers are over.

If the Indians didn’t create the concept of “small market team” then they were at least at the forefront of the concept. When baseball’s runaway financial structure, driven by the kinds of dollars teams were willing to throw at players like Thome and Ramirez in particular, became too dizzying of a ride for less heeled owners around the league, teams either had to find a better way to make use of the money they had or become, well, the Kansas City Royals.

So for the Indians, like their West Coast cousins, the Oakland As, it was easy to say goodbye to players they never intended to keep and replace them with someone who might vaguely replicate their production at 1/10^th of the price.

As a result, every off season in Cleveland is filled not with splashy free agent signingsbut a smattering of goodbyes followed by acquisitions like Casey Kotchman, Kevin Slowey and Cristian Guzman. Even Derek Lowe fits the profile. It’s the only way that the Indians can think of to keep a budget within reason while still turning a profit for their owners.

But it’s a myth that only teams like Cleveland and Oakland do these sorts of things. The Indians and As may do more of this kind of barrel scraping then others, but there isn’t a team in the major leagues that isn’t in the market for an aging veteran pitcher with a history of success and coming off of arm surgery. Heck, Bartolo Colon was a big part of the Yankees’rotation last season.

That’s why it’s fascinating to watch when players like Thome, Ramirez and Vizquel, players who were such a big part of local fans’ dreams, face their comeuppance. No longer are they prizes to whom teams are still willing to throw indiscriminate money toward but instead they are, in effect, some other team’s Kotchman, Slowey or Guzman.

When the Oakland As signed Ramirez earlier this week, it more than drove home the point. Ramirez is mostly a discredited two time violator of baseball’s drug policy. He could be signed on the cheap because he grew fat and remained stupid and he has a 50-game suspension that still must be served.

But the other reason the As would take a chance on Ramirez is for the same reason that aging baby boomers will still buy tickets to a Paul McCartney concert. McCartney may be 70 years old but his voice is still good enough to make you remember when it was coming out of a 25 year old body.

So it is with Ramirez. He could get as big as Prince Fielder but as long as the sweet batting stroke remains in tact, and As general manager Billy Beane assures us it is, then there is very little to be lost except maybe a half million dollars if Ramirez is a complete bust. As cheap as teams can be, they still think little of giving away $500,000 to a player who could credibly occupy a final roster spot.

Still there is a certain pathetic underpinning to it all, isn’t there? Assuming Ramirez’s lack of self-discipline extended to matters financial, the assumption is that Ramirez signed because he needs the money. He never came across as someone who loved the game given his abject indifference toward its formalities for so many years. It's the sad epilogue really to the far headier days when he and his agent dangled the disingenuous notion of his re-signing with Cleveland under a “hometown discount” before maxing out with the Boston Red Sox.

Take away the two drug violations and Thome’s story closely parallels Ramirez’s. He left Cleveland in much the same way, with his agent trying to portray Indians’ management as the bad guys for not paying him his “value” even as he chased the maximum cash that any other team was willing to pay him knowing full well it wouldn't be Cleveland.

Thome had great years with the Phillies and became a very solid 1 percenter in the process. But age and weight and injuries caught up with Thome and for the last several years he’s been a hobbled mercenary looking for a few bucks and a way to extend his career. He’s now on his fourth team since 2006.

It, too, seems just a tad pathetic. And yet there is something gratifying by the way Thome, like Ramirez, has had to humble himself to those he exploited now that he's just another spare part, a plug hole in some team’s budget, as he clings to baseball even after making well in excess of $100 million during his career.

Then there’s Vizquel. He didn’t get there in the same way as Ramirez or Thome but he’s there all the same. Never the splashy free agent that either Ramirez or Thome was it could well be argued that his value as a baseball player was at least as high as either of them.

Vizquel didn’t leave Cleveland because he was chasing free agent dollars. He left because general manager Mark Shapiro kicked him, his 37 year old body and his relatively modest $6 million a year salary to the curb in favor of a potentially promising Jhonny Peralta who worked much more cheaply. Since then Vizquel went on to start for the San Francisco Giants for years but now finds himself as a 45 year old trying to keep a million dollar salary coming in. As long as he can still field the ball on occasion and doesn’t make waves, he’s the perfect plug hole in some team’s budget as well.

That Vizquel still clings to baseball as a bit player is a sad end to a glorious career. There's no reason not to take the money that some team wants to throw your way but it really is rather sad that in the pursuit of another dollar a player of his stature is willing to tarnish an otherwise glorious career.

In retrospect, it all seems rather ludicrous to have gotten so excited about trying to retain at least Ramirez and Thome, even as I still question Shapiro’s decision to jettison Vizquel when he did. Even if they all had remained in Cleveland and had put up exactly the same numbers as they did for their new teams, there is no certainty that the Indians would have won a World Series.

But even more to the point is simply that they more then prove that as much as major league baseball markets its superstars, the only real way to remain committed as a fan is to love the game more. Players come and go quickly, particularly these days, and their self interests will always break your hearts. But the game itself still endures and is the reason to watch. It’s the only way to be a fan in Cleveland and, frankly, every other city with a major or minor league team.