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can bitch about the reasons why but the truth is that the identity of a particular player and a particular team is as outdated as the reserve clause.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.

Lingering Items--Homecoming Edition

Maybe I’m running counter to the flow again, but excuse me if I can't get too excited either way about Jim Thome returning to the Indians. I wasn't one of those who said that he should be booed when he left and I won't be one of those who believe we should embrace him with open arms now that he's gone through his tour of duty with the major leagues and can't find anywhere else to play.

Thome left the Cleveland Indians for the same reason every really good player eventually leaves the Cleveland Indians: money. That's not a sin. It wasn't Thome's fault, for example, that the Indians decided Thome wasn't worth the same level of riches that other clubs were willing to pay him. It's the reality of the business of baseball.

Indeed Thome maximizing the value of his skills by selling himself to the highest bidder is mostly the American way. All the b.s. about how Thome should have given the Indians a hometown discount was written mostly by 5-figure sportswriters pushing a quaint notion of a bygone era that they themselves wouldn't follow if the next newspaper down the block offered them a 10% raise.

But having left the Indians in exactly the same way that Albert Belle left the Indians, Thome should expect nothing more from the local fans then the same level indifference he showed them when he left. Maybe he was conflicted about taking all those millions, I don't know. But he certainly wasn't conflicted enough to leave some of them on the table and I don't begrudge him that. But neither should he nor Indians management begrudge that same level of indifference returned in kind by the very fans they’re trying to placate.

If Thome’s return is bothersome, it’s not because of Thome personally but what he represents: all that is wrong with the way major league baseball is run in general and the way the Indians are run in particular.

I don't want to get into my 7,000th screed about baseball's lack of economic parity, but it is useful to remember that when Thome left, the Indians made him a very competitive, albeit inferior, offer. The Philadelphia Phillies, unconstrained as they were by any sense of economics, had the media market and all the ancillary revenue that spills over from that to dip into when they signed Thome.

Cleveland and many teams like it are just not similarly situated, which is a very odd circumstance in which all the teams in the league are supposed to be equal partners. Baseball has long since stopped caring about the plights of its lesser teams even as Commission Bud Selig claims to celebrate the fleeting successes of the Indians and Pittsburgh Pirates before the crunch time of the season really arrives. The only small market team in the playoff hunt at the moment is the Milwaukee Brewers.

The truth is that there is every chance that had the Indians signed Thome that contract would have been the same millstone around the neck of the team that is Travis Hafner's contract, the player ironically Thome is now being called on to replace. Baseball owners share revenues like Apple and Microsoft share software strategies. For teams like the Phillies, they can just throw more money at their mistakes and leave the lesser jealous and the fans jaded.

So it's not a surprise that when players like Thome, broken down, aging and with skills actually diminishing, reach the end of their careers and no other team really wants them they return “home” like a prodigal son. It becomes a nice feel good story for those who still believe in the romance of sports but the reality is that the “trade” that brought him here was just a mostly cynical ploy by the Indians management to deflect fan attention away from the sinking fortunes of another lost season.

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A better feel-good story is the Browns’ signing of left tackle Joe Thomas to a 7 year contract for, I think, $100 billion, or something like that. The Browns signed Thomas just like other teams right now are locking up their versions of Thomas, because they can.

Whatever else you might think about the NFL’s system, and it’s been called all sorts of things by disgruntled players unhappy with their contracts, it works. The hard salary cap that exists in the NFL doesn’t keep teams from making mistakes, but it does limit how long it has to live with those mistakes. It makes general managers appropriately aggressive as a result.

The key to Thomas’ contract, similar to those being signed right now by other NFL stars, is that it’s not completely guaranteed. The stated value of Thomas’ contract is actually $84 million for 7 years but of that amount only a paltry $40+ million is guaranteed. By the time you figure in taxes and agent commissions, Thomas might only be left with about $20 million guaranteed.

NFL players went to the mattresses in an ill-advised strategy and came back with pretty much the same things they had when they left: a system in which owners are not required to guarantee player contracts. The firm money in Thomas’ contract is in the form of signing, roster and other easily attained bonuses and the more speculative and hence less lucrative money are the salary figures each year. The contract is structured to be as cap friendly as possible. Its length spreads the guaranteed money over the life of the contract and hence makes it easier for the Browns to have sufficient salary room to sign other players.

In short, even if Thomas’ career suddenly flames out in a year or two and he can’t protect Colt McCoy’s blindside any longer, the Browns won’t be strapped for either cash or cap space. If the Browns lose him to injury, the collective bargaining agreement offers them even more relief.

In Thomas’ case, unlike in many others, there’s every chance he’ll actually be with the Browns for the entire length of the contract. Offensive linemen of his caliber have about the longest shelf life in football. Even more encouraging is that there’s little chance that Thomas will suddenly turn into Chris Johnson, the disgruntled Tennessee Titans’ running back, and sit out if he learns a year or two into this contract that another left tackle is making more money.

Thomas is a stand up guy, a legitimate All Pro, and exactly the kind of player teams in any sport crave. His signing by the Browns not only represents a new high water mark for the franchise but underscores all that is right about the NFL and its economic structure.

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If there’s one thing that preseason football should counsel, it’s perspective. The Browns sloppy play in a loss to the Philadelphia Eagles on Thursday night can be mostly attributed to the dog days of training camp crashing into a short week to prepare for a game that they really didn’t prepare for anyway.

Teams that really want to win preseason games can. But that is no marker whatsoever for how that same team will play once the regular season rolls around. Teams that use the preseason for its intended purpose, to refine technique and evaluate players, generally are better rewarded during the regular season.

The Browns look to be a team in the latter category. They surely could have played McCoy and the starters much later in the game when the Eagles’ starters were off sitting in the locker room hot tub and watching the Kardashians or whatever it is that they do when they’re bored, and come away with a victory. But what would have been the point to that? A meaningless victory at the expense of trying to figure out how to make one of the league’s thinnest rosters a little more robust would have been time well wasted.

That doesn’t mean of course that there aren’t plenty of Browns’ fans with long faces on Friday morning. Any time the Browns lose there are plenty of long faces, which explains the mostly permanent mopey expression of many during the fall and early winter months.

For perspective’s sake, though, let’s not lose the forest for the trees. Quarterback Colt McCoy didn’t have a stellar performance statistically and was knocked around liberally. But he handled the adversity visited upon him by one of the league’s best defenses (and certainly one of the league’s best defensive backfields) well. Not every lesson is learned in victory. Most in fact are learned by after getting knocked down. So judge not the statistics but the bounce back come the regular season.

It wasn’t as if there weren’t bright spots. The Browns’ defense, particularly the line and the linebackers, looks significantly better under new coordinator Dick Jauron. There were a few blown assignments and some of the rookies got schooled by some of the Eagles’ veterans, but the difference in approach between last year’s unit and this year’s is almost as striking as the difference between an abacus and an iPad.

The offense is still a work in progress but as it struggled against the Eagles, perhaps some of it was best explained by Bernie Kosar while providing commentary for the game. He noted that the Eagles defense is used to practicing against virtually the same offense that the Browns run. There is nothing the Browns did, from the formations to the blocking schemes, that the Eagles haven’t seen over and over in practice during training camp.

That doesn’t mean that the offense isn’t going to struggle against teams less prepared. It will, particularly early. What remains to be seen is whether it will struggle to score on the same level as the Indians struggle to score. I doubt it.

So keep the loss in perspective. Everyone is still standing. Besides, with one tedious preseason game remaining, perhaps the only thing we can all say with certainty is that the regular season can’t arrive soon enough.

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With Jim Thome’s return to the Tribe, this week’s question to ponder: Who would you rather have seen return to the Indians, Thome or Omar Vizquel?

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The NFC Championship game is over and Brett Favre and his latest potentially former employer, the Minnesota Vikings, have been left on the side of the road to the Super Bowl. That must mean it’s time for Favre to begin his yearly kabuki dance to the tune of the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

As this ritual plays out each late winter/early spring, the radio inside Favre’s head must be on an endless loop of Mick Jones singing “If I go there will be trouble and if I stay it will be double.” Meanwhile the fans of the Vikings, this time, will be holding their collective breath to see if Jesus-in-shoulder-pads will walk across the Great Lakes and back into their open arms.

Favre’s inability to know when to say when isn’t unusual when it comes to professional athletes. To localize the story a bit, Jim Thome just signed a 1-year contract with the Minnesota Twins, putting him two teams short of completing the rounds within the American League Central.

Perhaps Thome signed with the Twins because he thought that the state of Minnesota and the Twin Cities possessed magical powers of rejuvenation as Favre enjoyed an excellent regular season all while complaining about every ache and pain in his aging body. Maybe instead this is Thome’s last stop on a very long career.

In one sense, it seems a bit sad and a bit pathetic to see once great athletes continue to hang on because they seemingly have nothing else to move on to. It’s also a little exasperating to watch Favre play the role of drama queen each off season. But to be fair we do live in a capitalist society and it’s hard to begrudge anyone doing what he can to make a buck. If the owner of the Twins or the Vikings is willing to dole out millions, how are they the bad guys for being willing to take it?

The short answer is that they’re not.

Let’s face it, the life of a professional athlete at the tope level is far more peaches than beans, to quote noted sage Archie Bunker. The salaries make no sense in the context of most everyone else’s daily life. It’s a great, if limited, existence. The song that really should play in their heads is “Money for Nothing.” And if you scour sites life Deadspin on a regular basis, you also learn that for most of them, the chicks are free, too.

And yet both fans and athletes continue to struggle with the question of when enough is enough. It’s one of sports’ great rhetorical questions.

Everyone has their own view on this, of course, and it really is athlete specific. Jim Brown and Barry Sanders, for example, walked away with still plenty left in the tank. As they did so, they left many fans in their wake aching for more. Johnny Unitas looked positively ridiculous riding the bench in San Diego for one miserable season at age 40. For that matter, Joe Montana looked ridiculous in Kansas City.

It’s not just the big names, either. Did anyone really want to see Jamal Lewis back with the Browns this past season? But there he was anyway unable to walk away on his own. In truth he was brought back only because head coach Eric Mangini didn’t feel like there was any other option. Mangini looked at Jerome Harrison and saw a part time back. He also looked at the rest of the roster and saw a bunch of untested rookies.

The plight of Lewis actually illustrates exactly why this issue is such a struggle for everyone involved. When Mangini bit hard and brought Lewis back he didn’t then want to disrespect him by having him stand on the sidelines. As a result he stubbornly trotted Lewis out there game after game, to the exclusion of Harrison mostly, even though it was obvious that Lewis was done.

Indeed, if not for Lewis’ injury, Harrison likely would never have had what turned out to be a break out season. It’s also fair to say that the Browns’ late season win streak, which occurred despite and not because of the quarterback play, doesn’t happen unless Lewis gets hurt. So in a sense, Lewis ended up repaying Mangini’s early season faith by actually getting injured. It probably is the single biggest factor in what saved Mangini’s job.

This kind of situation plays itself out over and over again in city after city, sport after sport. Favre is a Hall of Fame caliber quarterback. But each year he comes back is another year in which the player behind him has a lost season of development. It’s actually why Green Bay forced Favre’s hand. They were tired of promising young quarterbacks that the team would soon be theirs as it became more and more obvious that Favre apparently had no intention of ever retiring.

For the Packers, it’s worked out well. While Favre has been bouncing around the country, Aaron Rodgers has developed into a pretty fair quarterback who still has a decent upside. It’s likely Rodgers wouldn’t even be in Green Bay at all if the Packers management had decided to accede to each of Favre’s demands.

The Twins signed Thome not only because he can still hit the long ball occasionally but also for the so-called “veteran leadership” position. It’s really the same role Mark Grudzielanek will play for the Indians this season. I suppose it’s an important role, but it’s also a roster spot that won’t go to a younger player.

It’s not even that the Twins or the Indians won’t get some level of production out of Thome or Grudzielanek. They will. But at what cost? For the Twins, the cost might be far less than the Indians. They are closer to the playoffs than the Indians and someone like Thome could put them over the top. Is that worth a lost season to a promising rookie? Most would say “yes.”

But for the Indians, the answer is more complex. It’s hard to calculate what a year of development at the big league level really means, but it obviously means something. How would the Indians have known the value of Grady Sizemore had they kept in buried in the minors in favor of somebody who used to be someone who now was just hanging by the bottom rung?

The other side of that argument, or at least the one Eric Wedge always used to put forth, is that you’d rather see that promising rookie play regularly at AAA than occasionally at the big league level. It’s an argument of convenience.

In the case of Wedge, he much preferred the Grudzielaneks of the world anyway. But being a major leaguer is much more than just playing on the field. It’s the bigger crowds, the increased travel. It’s one adjustment after another and stunting that part of a player’s development isn’t healthy, either.

In truth, there isn’t a professional athlete alive that ever completely solved this internal struggle just as there isn’t a team that’s found the right balance. The guess is that Brown and Sanders had moments in the few years after their retirement where they thought they left too soon. And as Favre was picking himself up off the ground last week in New Orleans it had to occur to him that he may be getting a little to old for this stuff.

The irony, of course, is that when they do retire, as they must, then end up in much the same place as other retirees, playing golf. And of all the sports out there, only professional golf has figured out how to solve the problem. It created the perfect way for players to gracefully put themselves out to pasture. It’s called the Champions Tour.

Sentimental Journey

Who knew that Manny Ramirez was such a sentimental fool? Or Jim Thome, for that matter? But fools they are just the same.

According to a report in Monday’s USA Today, Ramirez and Thome were talking recently and were getting positively misty-eyed about the possibility of eventually making their final curtain call as ballplayers with the team that nurtured them through thick and thin, like Broadway Danny Rose, only to see them eventually turn their backs on them when the light shined the brightest.

Ramirez and Thome were two key players most responsible for the resurgence of the Indians in the mid-1990s. What made them both so beloved is that they grew up in the Indians’ farm system and went on to establish their reputations with the Indians. Playing together from 1993-2000, collectively the two had 441 home runs and 1485 RBI. During that stretch, the Indians were 703-525 and were in the playoffs 6 times, going to two World Series. An impressive run even if it didn’t pay off in the ultimate prize.

But if the Cleveland fans benefited from this golden age, it’s not as if the two players didn’t realize there was something in it for them. While each professed their great appreciation for Cleveland, and still do, it was hardly enough to convince them to give Cleveland a hometown discount of sorts in order to ensure that each would be here for the remainder of their careers.

Maybe it’s awfully naïve anyway to think that a hometown discount was coming from either player or even that it should. What the average fan doesn’t appreciate is the enormous pressure that each player (and those similarly situated) is under from both their colleagues and the players union to get that last dollar, the hell with loyalty. It’s the essence of free agency and the Marvin Miller Doctrine: the high tide raises all ships.

If players like Thome or Ramirez turn down precedent setting deals then, the theory goes, the rest of the players suffer from depressed salaries as well. As an economic theory, it has some merit. Setting salaries is at its core an exercise of comparisons and the lower the top, the lower the middle and the lower the bottom.

But it’s just these kinds of economic theories that are the reason the sport is in such financial and competitive straits in the first place. I don’t need to rehash the same rant, but the truth is that only certain teams can afford to pay top dollar and Cleveland isn’t one of them. And when only certain teams can sustain certain payrolls, the health of the league suffers.

Ah, but the health of the league has never once been a concern for the players union, which is why that never factored into their coercion of Ramirez, Thome and others. It can be argued that when Miller was in charge, the league owners needed to be reigned in. Miller fought against the reserve clause because it basically treated players like indentured servants. In that sense, Miller’s moves were for the benefit of the league overall. Free agency, in and of itself, is probably better for a sports league than not.

But the overall good of the sport was hardly Miller’s chief concern. As he said on many occasions, he represented the players, not the league and not the fans. If in making things better for his clients it had the unintended consequence of also making things better for the sport and its fans that was just a happy coincidence. Miller could have cared less.

Donald Fehr and the rest of the power brokers at the players union are worthy heirs to Miller’s legacy. The next time they do something for the good of the league, let alone the fans, will be the first time. Thus, the fact that they pushed players like Ramirez and Thome to turn their backs on a mid-market team like Cleveland for the benefit of the players overall plays into this dynamic.

But that doesn’t mean that Ramirez and Thome had to act like lemmings at the behest of the union. There was a middle ground in each case that would have greatly enriched each of them millions of times over without having to turn their back on the Cleveland fans. It just doesn’t happen to be a route either chose. It’s understandable, certainly, and personally I don’t hold any animosity to either for choosing the path they did.

Having chosen that path, now’s not the time to express regrets, mild though they may be. Both seem to be looking back at their Cleveland years with the kind of twinkle of some Grandpa Jones rocking on the front porch telling stories about when he was young. If it doesn’t strike you as more of a backhanded compliment than anything else, your ability to be offended has been blunted by the years of abuse that comes with being an Indians fan.

What’s really happening in both cases is that Ramirez and Thome, like Ken Griffey, Jr., are nearing the end of stellar careers. With that they know the days of multi-year contracts at $15-20 million per season are a thing of the past. Ramirez, for all his accomplishments last season, struggled to get just a two-year deal out of the Dodgers. In doing so, he took less pay than he wanted but did get an opt-out clause after this year. More importantly, the Dodgers were the only bidders. That might be due to a massive miscalculation on the part of his agents, but it’s also due in no small part to his age, 37, and the state of the economy. Thome is in his final year of his contract that took him from Cleveland to Philadelphia and then to the White Sox. He may come across as a combination of Woody Boyd and Lil Abner, but even Thome can see what’s happened to Ramirez and the free agent market when it comes to aging veterans.

The sentimentality that makes them wistful for Cleveland will no doubt get some fans anxious for a return to those glory years. Who wouldn’t want to see Ramirez and that sweet swing back in Cleveland? Well, for one, me. I’ve long since come to grips with the reality that in order to maintain your sanity when it comes to sport, love the game not the players. Both will break your heart, but the players will do it deliberately. That’s the difference.

The other thing to remember in all of this is that the reason both can now talk openly about coming to Cleveland is that the union doesn’t much care about them anymore. With their prime earning years behind them, the union’s interest in maintaining salary integrity (a nice euphuism for pushing for exorbitant salaries) is significantly less. It’s a nice bit of freedom for Ramirez and Thome but it’s also a freedom that comes too late to really benefit Cleveland fans. I wanted Ramirez and Thome during their primes, not the ones playing out the string.

If you want to get sentimental about a player, what about Omar Vizquel? He left Cleveland because he was forced to. General manager Mark Shapiro had no interest in signing him to a 3-year deal like the San Francisco Giants did. Shapiro was thinking about the development of Peralta and his upside. It was an understandable business decision.

But Vizquel had two good years in San Francisco and a third when he was hurt. It’s what happens when you get older. But Vizquel is still viable in some role, which is why the Texas Rangers signed him to be a bench player and part time sensi to the younger players on the roster.

It’s interesting that only the Texas Rangers bothered to sign this future hall of famer. Maybe he doesn’t fit in with the Indians are currently constructed, but it’s hard for me to imagine the downside of him doing for Cleveland what he’s doing for Texas. Jhonny Peralta and Asdrubal Cabrera and a host of others at the major and minor league levels can do for a little Vizquel in their lives. Vizquel, come back anytime. Stay as long as you’d like.

As Thome said to the USA Today, baseball is a funny sport and anything can happen. Indeed, it’s as likely as not that either or both of Ramirez and Thome will make a final stand in Cleveland. And if they do, they’ll probably be warmly embraced, like a favorite son returning home. That may be a nice coda to their careers, but then again every Cleveland fan has a bit of battered spouse syndrome coursing in their veins. Just once it would be nice for the Cleveland fans to realize that they always deserved better than having to be constantly reminded of why their good players left in the first place.

Manuel Labor

When Eddie Murray was fired last week as hitting coach of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Indians fans undoubtedly had a “been there, done that” expression on their face. But no sooner did that expression get wiped off then it appeared again, this time spurred on by Charlie Manuel and his return to Jacobs Field as the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies.

Without having to read one Philadelphia newspaper article or one Philly fan blog, Indians fans instinctively know that Manuel and Philadelphia aren’t likely in it for the long haul. In fact, it’s hard to believe the relationship, however tenuous it might be, is still in tact, if only because it’s Philadelphia.

As most will likely recall, Manuel essentially engineered his own firing here by demanding a long-term contract just as General Manager Mark Shapiro was blowing up the team as part of the rebuilding process that was scheduled to come to fruition just about now. It was summer, 2002, and the Indians were struggling, to put it charitably. By early July, they were nine games under .500 and 9.5 back of division-leading Minnesota. Well before that, however, they had officially entered rebuild mode by trading Bartolo Colon after owner Larry Dolan ordered that the payroll be trimmed dramatically.

Manuel was in his third season as Indians manager after having taken over for Mike Hargrove, whose own relationship with Shapiro was always strained. Manuel’s contract was due to expire at season’s end and since the Indians were entering a different phase, Manuel demanded that his contract be extended, viewing himself as the best person to aid the development of a new crop of younger players. Whether or not Shapiro agreed with that assessment, he clearly didn’t want to pushed into a quick decision given the major changes taking place on the roster.

According to media accounts at the time Shapiro and Dolan asked Manuel to stay on through the end of the season but Manuel was adamant—extend the contract or let him go right then. With this demand, Manuel committed one of the great sins any employee can make by painting his employer into a corner. To accede to the request would have been at the expense of their position in the hierarchy. Even in sports, there is a pecking order. Thus, irrespective of how either Shapiro or Dolan felt about Manuel, they really had no choice but to let him go right then.

Though Shapiro has never said, at least publicly, that he wouldn’t have eventually extended Manuel’s contract, although it’s easy to see why Manuel might have been worried. In the first place, he had a front seat to Hargrove/Shapiro cold war. It would be hard to blame him for wanting a repeat of that mess. Moreover, whereas the team Manuel was managing, at least prior to Shapiro tearing it down, had a lot of familiar faces from Manuel’s days in the Tribe’s minor league system, that was no longer true of the new roster. In fact, in that context, hiring Eric Wedge, who had been managing in Buffalo, made more sense than retaining Charlie Manuel.

But no matter how the actual firing played out, it seemed pretty safe to assume that Manuel and the Indians weren’t in it for the long haul either, whether because of Manuel’s recurring health issues or simply because Manuel never fit the mold of what guys like Shapiro and his ilk, i.e. the modern-day GM, envision in selecting the manager. If nothing else, Manuel is certainly “old school” and Shapiro is certainly “new school.”

Manuel has now been with the Phillies for two and a half seasons, the same as his tenure with the Indians. Although the record isn’t stellar, according to their web site his 173 wins are the most of any Phillies manager in his first two seasons since 1915. That might not be as impressive as it sounds since most new managers take over struggling teams. Right now, the Phillies are playing about the same as they have since Manuel came aboard, not bad not great. They find themselves only two games behind the Mets, having picked up four games on the division leaders in the last week and a half. But they are barely above .500, so it’s really a matter of divisional mediocrity more than anything else.

But it’s doubtful that Phillies general manager Pat Gillick envisioned a .500 ballclub when he hired Manuel. And irrespective of where the mistakes lie—player acquisition, player motivation or a combination of the two—if the Phillies do find themselves continuing to struggle at climbing to the upper tier of National League teams, the “fire Charlie” chorus, which has been in place since the day he took over with only the level of active members fluctuating, will get louder.

When that occurs, not if, mainly because it is Philadelphia after all, the real drama that will be interesting to observe is how Manuel handles it. Will he follow in the same footsteps he laid in Cleveland or will he learn from that debacle and play the politics as they demand to be played?

All this probably matters little to Tribe fans except that, like Murray, Manuel was part of something special when he was here in Cleveland, though, like Murray, not necessarily because of the last role he had in the organization. Murray’s presence in 1995 as a player helped sparked the renaissance. Manuel, who joined the Indians as hitting coach for the second time beginning in 1994, schooled that offensive juggernaut. Their contributions to Tribe history can’t be diminished.

But Manuel was always a much more engaging and beloved figure than Murray. He was accessible to the media and fans alike. Though his tenuous grasp of grammar made some question his intelligence, he was sincere at a time when slick played so much better.

Still, in the end, it was hard to get a good read on Manuel’s managerial skills while he was in Cleveland. He was managing under vastly different circumstances, with a payroll that was $91 million in his last season. In many ways, the Indians were on auto-pilot then and needed a caretaker, not a manager. When the Indians decided to blow it all up and start again, maybe it wasn’t the place for a good ol’ boy with health problems.

Perhaps his managerial career with the Phillies is really the better barometer. Hard to say, of course, but if that is the case, letting him get away in favor of making a long-term commitment barely registers a blip on the list of mistakes Shapiro has made during his tenure with the Tribe.

It’s likely that Cleveland fans don’t think much about Manuel these days, either way. He’s been tucked away in the National League for several years now and the Tribe is off in vastly different directions as well. While his presence here this week will never evoke the same sort of emotional response from Tribe fans as does each and every return of Manuel’s prized student, Jim Thome, hopefully if it evokes anything at all it won’t be so much of a “been there, done that” nod as much as it is even a slight smile for what he did accomplish here. Just like Murray.