62 Million Reasons to Find an Answer

It’s reasonably accepted in baseball circles that good pitching tends to beat good hitting. It’s why general managers build teams from the pitching mound out. But following the Cleveland Indians this season, particularly in the last seven days, what we’ve learned is that it’s equally true that bad pitching also beats bad hitting.

Around the fringes, people keep talking about the Indians’ offensive woes like it is the economy. Management, in the form of manager Eric Wedge and general manager Mark Shapiro, is reluctant to admit the recession that’s evident to everyone else, but it is now willing to at least concede that there has been some sort of slowdown. Well, recognition that a problem exists is always helpful, but Shapiro isn’t going to be able to paper over it by mailing out refund checks to the hapless that paid good money to watch bad baseball this past week and then skip town.

In a historical context, the Indians haven’t suddenly rediscovered the 1970s. But if you want to use history as a teacher, then just know that the last time the Indians went through a stretch like this they fired the hitting coach. Which raises the question, is current hitting coach Derek Shelton in trouble?

Following Sunday’s shut out to the terminally futile Kansas City Royals, Wedge said that everything was open for evaluation. Most of the ensuing discussion focused on the players, the lineups and darn near everything else but Shelton. If the team is really going to do something more than the usual gestures like changing the lineup and calling up a player or two, then Shelton is fair game. And if Shelton is fair game, then he has reason to be worried, for about 62 million more reasons than you think.

It was just under three years ago when Shelton replaced Eddie Murray under nearly identical circumstances, at least on the surface. It was early June and the Indians were hitting .243 as a team, a figure which is actually one point better than the Indians current team batting average. When Wedge fired Murray, he said “it's not just about right now, it's just about what we feel is best for our ballclub today, the future and long term. From an offensive standpoint, I feel we can do better. But it's not just about Eddie Murray. I just felt that we needed to make a change and I felt this was best for our ballclub.”

That move by Wedge was still one of the best managerial moves he’s made. Being freed from the shadowy grip of the moody Murray, Indians hitters across the board responded. By season’s end, the team’s average was .271, nearly 30 points higher. They were also fourth in the league in runs scored and third in on-base percentage. It was an onslaught that continued throughout 2006 as well. But as 2007 wore on and now nearly a quarter of the 2008 season in the books, the drop in production has been dramatic.

Clearly Indians hitters were more welcoming to Shelton, at least at the onset. But at this point, it’s almost as if you could simply substitute Sheton’s name in Wedge’s quote about Murray and make it fit equally as well. That doesn’t mean that Shelton is entirely to blame for the current woes, but it’s undeniable that the team has been in a hitting tailspin for most of the last 200 games.

The real onus for the offensive struggles appears to be focused far more intently on Travis Hafner, but that doesn’t take the heat off of Shelton. If anything, it increases it. Enough has already been said about Hafner’s struggles to fill the library in his hometown of Jamestown, North Dakota, which may not be saying much actually. And ignoring the roadside psychology of those who are prone to diagnose a problem they couldn’t be more ill-equipped to evaluate, the larger truth is that the correlation between Hafner’s so-called slump and the Indians overall offense is nearly perfect.

Certainly, Hafner’s personal lack of production accounts for a big part of the team’s dip. But it’s not just the lack of hitting. The real problem is the stench that Hafner’s struggles create on the rest of the lineup. There are such things as team slumps, but when the one guy more than any other in the lineup that’s paid to hit no longer can, all it’s done is increase the pressure on every one else. Other than catcher Victor Martinez, who is a hitting savant like Manny Ramierez but without similar power, you can literally see every other player in the lineup trying to do too much, time and time again..

If Ryan Garko, for example, swings any harder, his large intestine is going to pop out of its casing. Casey Blake seems to walk to the plate feeling like he has to defy his career stats and hit .350 and 40 home runs when the Indians would be far better off if he’d just get to those career averages. Asdrubal Cabrera just seems lost. Jhonny Peralta appears bored.

This is where guys like Shelton are really supposed to earn their keep. Wedge continues to bemoan not just the lack of hitting but the inability of his hitters to put themselves into good hitters counts. He’s been critical, too, of the lack of adjustments that his players are making from at bat to at bat and from game to game. The simple question is whose fault is that? Not to carry the analogy too far, but Shelton is somewhat akin to a football team’s offensive coordinator. If a team supposedly has the right players—and Indians management has made it clear that it believes it has the right players—then blaming the players only gets you so far. Time to turn to the one calling the plays.

But if you’re Shelton, where do you start given that there’s only 24 hours in a day? You could attack the symptoms, like Garko, Blake, and the dynamic duo of Jason Michaels and David Dellucci. You can try and straighten out Cabrera before he loses confidence. You can even given Peralta an extra can of Mountain Dew with his pre-game meal. But first and foremost, if Shelton is astute at all, his energy will be expended in figuring out if Hafner is salvageable. Right now the Indians have about $62 million committed to Hafner through 2013 and if he continues to hit like Bob Uecker then his deal will be a bigger albatross around the Indians neck than Barry Zito’s contract will be with the San Francisco Giants. If Hafner isn’t going to make it, the impact on the team and ownership won’t stop reverberating for the next decade.

Given the size of that investment, the Indians will dump Shelton long before they change course on Hafner, even as he’s become baseball’s equivalent of golf’s David Duval, a major winner who now can’t break 80. If Shelton doesn’t understand this calculus and find a way to right the biggest ship of all soon, then his inevitable firing in early June will actually be well deserved. The only problem, though, is unlike in 2005, an immediate resurgence doesn’t appear nearly as likely.

The Hole in the Middle

Before the start of last season, Mark Shapiro, the Indians general manager, said that a key barometer of the Indians offensive success would be whether or not shortstop Jhonny Peralta regained his rookie season hitting stroke. It seemed like a stretch. This year, not so much.

It’s not that Peralta himself holds the key’s to the Indians offense. It’s just that banner years from Peralta, Victor Martinez, Grady Sizemore and even Ryan Garko may be even more critical to the Indians returning to the post season than whether Fausto Carmona and C.C. Sabathia can apply the same kind of pitching one-two punch. With designated hitter Travis Hafner continuing to perform like Travis Bickle at the plate, the Indians can ill afford anything less from Peralta et al. than they got last season. They likely will need even more.

If the team that Shapiro has constructed is going to overtake the Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees or any of the other pretenders/contenders in the American League, it can’t afford another season with a hole in the middle of the lineup that Hafner was from May through the playoffs last season. That means that the Indians either fix what’s been ailing Hafner, they get even better production from the rest of the lineup or they find another answer. Likely, it will be a combination of all three.

By all accounts, Hafner is a good guy and he works hard. He seems to have an even demeanor with a player’s perspective on his 2007 season, which is to say that his memory is short. That’s all good. But what Indians fans want to know but don’t is whether any of that will translate into a better 2008 season. Good luck getting an answer to that.

Shapiro thinks he’s putting salve on the wound by downplaying Hafner’s struggles, suggesting that Hafner had a decent 2007 season, just not a great one. Manager Eric Wedge probably thinks he has the back of his player and the respect of the rest of the team by proxy when he publicly claims he’s not worried about Hafner. Hitting coach Derek Shelton probably thinks he’s being helpful by minimizing Hafner’s struggles, reducing them to a rather ubiquitous “he was just a little off.” But these three sat through the same season everyone else did and know in their heart of hearts that Hafner didn’t have a decent season, they should be worried, and they need to find some greater insight if this problem is going to get fixed.

For the most part, the Cleveland media seems to be buying the company line regarding Hafner, probably because Hafner is that aforementioned “good guy” that you really want to see succeed. But pitcher Cliff Lee is a good guy and that didn’t stop the media from burying him early last season after taking their cue from Indians management even though Lee was essentially the pitching equivalent of Hafner last season. Maybe the answer really does lie in a little extra time in the batting cage for Hafner, but so far that doesn’t seem to be working all that well either.

Just a cursory look at the spring training stats tells you that not much has changed in Pronkville. His preseason has been pretty much a microcosm of his 2007 season. Hafner started off well enough in February only to trail so much that by the end of spring training he was back to swinging wildly at pitches in the dirt. In his last 10 spring games, Hafner hit .156 with one home run and three RBI. If you believe in trends, as Shapiro and his cadre of statistical wonks tend to, there aren’t enough Rolaids in the world to ease the queasy stomachs that Hafner currently is foisting upon them.

One of the more popular excuses that have been made for Hafner for his dismal 2007 is that he was just a slump. That’s possible, but it was far longer and 10 times deeper than what most would otherwise consider a slump. Last April, Hafner hit .338 with 16 RBI, five home runs, and two doubles. His on-base percentage was .471, his slugging percentage was .550 and his On Base plus Slugging Percentage was a more than respectable 1.021. Those numbers compared favorably and, in most cases were better than his career numbers.

For the next four months, Hafner turned into Gorman Thomas, but with less power. In May, he hit .228, which actually was better by 10 points than his June. In July and August he averaged right around .251. But beyond just simple hitting, Hafner wasn’t producing runs. His power numbers were down, way down, but that only tells part of the story. With runners in scoring position, where someone like Hafner really is supposed to earn his keep, he was an embarrassing .226. That’s a full 50 points under his career average.

Even more telling is the so-called “clutch” statistics. With two outs and runners in scoring position, Hafner had 15 hits in 70 at bats for a .214 average. Though he had 15 walks that was confined mostly to the first half of the season when pitchers were more careful out of respect for his history. As the season wore on, careful wasn’t even part of the equation. Hafner had 65 walks in the first half of the season, 37 in the second half.

Hafner was only marginally better last season when the game was late and close (defined as a plate appearance in the 7th inning or later with the Indians either tied, ahead by one run or with the tying run on deck). But only marginally, hitting .253. Pick a statistic that matters and across the board Hafner was 30 to 40 points below his career averages in each of those categories.

In a way, I feel like Owen Wilson’s character in “The Wedding Crashers” when he was guessing the contents of wedding presents. I can go on all day like this. Hafner with the count 0-1 hit .238. With the count 0-2, he hit .176. In fact, the best Hafner hit with the count in the pitcher’s favor was .244 when the count was 1-2. That may not be any great surprise for any hitter, but again in each case it was still lower than Hafner’s career averages. In fact, it’s hard to find a measure by which Hafner didn’t significantly regress last season.

While this may seem like so much piling on, it’s really meant to emphasize that what Hafner experienced wasn’t any mere slump, the apologists notwithstanding. The fact that it has continued unabated during this spring only makes it more troubling. But beyond the impact on Hafner, it also deeply affected the rest of the lineup. There were lengthy stretches last season in which the Indians looked like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at the plate. As Hafner so often went, so did the rest of the order.

The question then is what’s really being done to fix what to this point is being written off as an anomaly. Again, to hear it from the Indians front office, not much. The party line is that there is nothing physically wrong with Hafner, but that same party does acknowledge that Hafner has a gimpy right elbow, enough so that the Indians do not even consider him to be in the mix at first base, except during some inter-league games. You don’t need to play a doctor or detective on TV to suggest that checking whether Hafner has changed his mechanics, even just a hair, to compensate for the lingering pain might be a good spot to start looking for some answers.

In a way, Hafner’s situation is like the person suffering from a pain in his shoulder that a team of doctor’s can’t isolate. Eventually, someone figures it out. Likewise, if Shelton and Wedge aren’t seeing something, then the Indians need to get some more opinions. A player doesn’t build a career with the kind of numbers Hafner had until 2007 only to suddenly go deeply south. There’s a reason for everything and right now the Indians entire strategy seems to be built around hope, as in hope that the pain will subside.

The Indians did win 96 games last season, tied for most in the league. By any measure, that’s impressive particularly considering it was despite Hafner. But for anyone watching the Red Sox playoff series last year, it presented an interesting picture. There were three keys to that series for the Indians: Sabathia, Carmona and Hafner. They didn’t need all three to play well in order to win, but neither could they withstand the ineffectiveness of all three. Unfortunately, that’s what they got.

The Indians are on the precipice of doing something great. The impending loss of Sabathia after the season only highlights how critical it is for the Indians to take advantage of the open window in front of them. But if they don’t want to spend the post-season watching someone else celebrate again, their choices are few. Get Hafner righted or get a Plan B. Another season of watching and hoping is not an option.

Axed. Again

Here’s an item that will have Indians fans wearing a knowing smirk: Eddie Murray was just fired as the Los Angeles Dodgers hitting coach. What’s amazing about the story is how eerily similar it was to Cleveland’s experience with Murray.

As most will recall, the Indians in 2004 were a mediocre 80-82, but it wasn’t for lack of offense. Sound familiar? That year, the Indians had a team average of .276, which was fourth in the American League and scored 858 runs, which was fifth. But they were 10th in the league in ERA and teams batted .271 against them. Really dragging the team down, however, was the return of the bullpen from hell.

Although 2004 was Murray’s third season as hitting coach and he seemed to be having success, there had been numerous rumblings throughout his tenure about his my-way-or-the-highway approach. He was surly as a ballplayer and didn’t seem to change all that much as a hitting coach. There were plenty of rumors about his inability to connect with the players. Still, entering the 2005 season, offense didn’t appear to be the problem.

But on June 4, 2005, with the Indians struggling mightily to score runs, they essentially conceded what was apparent to everyone else: Eddie Murray had to go. At the time of his departure, the team was batting a miserable .243. They replaced Murray with Derek Shelton and almost immediately went on a tear offensively that continued for the remainder of the season. The Indians ended up hitting .271, which was fourth in the league and scored 790 runs, which likewise was fourth.

When he was let go, Manager Eric Wedge told the media “We don't make hasty decisions. It was a process, and ultimately we decided to do it after the game today. There wasn't one particular thing.”

There isn’t anything particularly remarkable about that quote except that it’s nearly identical to what the Dodgers said today when they released Murray. Upon dumping Murray, General Manager Ned Colletti said “We don't do anything here quick or without a lot of thought and a lot of compassion. We feel like there's a lot of the season left and the offense can be a lot better than it is. We decided to do it now.”

Not only are the reasons similar, but so too are the circumstances. Last year, the Dodgers led the league in hitting with a .276 batting average. They were fourth in the league in runs scored with 820. This year, their batting average has dropped 15 points to .261, which is 7th in the league and they are 9th in runs scored. Murray has been replaced on an interim basis by Bill Mueller, just as Derek Shelton was hired on an interim basis with the Indians. Not surprisingly Mueller, like Shelton, said his first order of business will be to build a rapport with the players.

In the end, that was always the problem with Murray. He didn’t communicate with the media and, despite front office statements that Murray was more animated in the club house, he apparently wasn’t very communicative with the players either. It was said in both Cleveland and Los Angeles that one of the biggest problems was that Murray waited for players to approach him rather than the other way around. Maybe he felt that was the respect he deserved given his accomplishments as a player or maybe it was because as a great hitter himself, he felt that advice resonated best when it was sought not forced.

But whatever it was, at least this much is clear: Murray basically didn’t learn any lessons from his firing in Cleveland.

For all his shortcomings as a coach, the temptation to otherwise trash Murray should be greatly resisted. As a player, he was amazing. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame and it was well deserved. He hit 504 home runs and had a lifetime batting average of .287. By the time he came to Cleveland in 1994, he was somewhat a shadow of the player he once was. But he was brought in as the consummate veteran leader for a young and upcoming ball club and delivered mightily in that role. In the breakout year of 1995, Murray hit .323 and had 21 home runs in only 436 at bats. He also had 21 doubles and 82 RBI. It was Murray on the offensive side, with Orel Hershiser and Dennis Martinez on the pitching side, that combined for the final pieces of the puzzle to make 1995 such a magical year. For that Cleveland fans will always owe a debt of gratitude to Murray.

It’s hard to say where Murray may end up after his latest flameout. Given his experiences in both Cleveland and Los Angeles, it may very well be that he won’t find any coaching work anytime soon, which is probably just as well for everyone involved. Thus, in short order, this Hall of Famer will probably be out of baseball entirely, an ignominious end for one who brought so much to the sport.