The Price of Success

One of the most overused phrases these days, when referencing someone or something you disagree with is to say “he/she/it just doesn’t get it.” It’s a trite phrase, shorthand for a much longer explanation as to why he she or it isn’t doing what you think he she or it should be doing.

And despite my dislike for all things overused and trite, for the life of me I can’t think of a better way to describe both the Cleveland Indians in general and their new general manager, Chris Antonetti, in particular.

The Indians, in the midst of the kind of start that Eric Wedge used to dream about, are starting to build a little bit of buzz. Progressive Field isn’t in danger of selling out any time soon, but for now at least people are starting to take a little more notice then probably anyone anticipated.

In the throes of all this comes Antonetti to reinforce exactly why Indians fans always feel as those who run the organization are less concerned with winning then in meeting budget. In Cleveland, the two goals apparently cannot coexist.

Antonetti accompanied the Indians on their road trip to Kansas City and thus has made himself visible to the media in the same way his mentor, Mark Shapiro used to do. Stop by the television booth to chat with Rick Manning and Matt Underwood for an inning or two. “Good talking to you, Chris. Can you stick around for another half inning?” Then it’s up to the radio booth a bit later to see how Tom Hamilton is holding up. Conduct a little back and forth with the beat writers before the game and then back to the Mother Ship.

As reported by Paul Hoynes in Thursday’s Plain Dealer, it was during just that little back and forth that Antonetti was asked if ownership and the front office was prepared to add to the club if the team was still in contention by midseason.

That might be getting way ahead of ourselves, but on the other hand, it’s a nice little question. Now before we get to Antonetti’s spirit-sucking answer, let’s just pause for a moment on the premise of the question.

Underlying it is still the inherent disbelief from the media that the Indians have the horsepower to really sustain their quick start. That’s certainly understandable. You only have to recognize that people are fretting because Mitch Talbot is on the disabled list to understand why it’s hard to imagine the Indians remaining this competitive for the entire season.

Talbot was off to a nice start, but this is someone with just 31 major league starts under his belt. To say that his career is not yet fully established is just the kind of gloss that someone like Shapiro would put on it. In truth, with a 10-13 record last year and a 4.41 ERA, Talbot at this point in his career is only a middle of the rotation pitcher for the Indians because their rotation is so thin to begin with. And since he’s already 27 years of age, no one is going to confuse him with a phenom.

Yet, Talbot and his 1-0 record are now on the disabled list and it is actual cause for concern. In his place is Jeanmar Gomez and his 12 major league starts. Who knows if that would actually constitute a drop off since the two pitchers are so similar in so many ways (though Gomez is four years younger) and Talbot was only two starts into his season. But at the very least it suggests that whoever asked Antonetti the question was justified in doing so.

Now to get back to Antonetti’s answer, it actually had two component parts. First were the usual disclaimers. He said, “if the team is playing well, we’d have to see where we were at that point, what our needs are and what’s available.”

Time for another pause. Not to parse his words too carefully, but the operative word in that initial response seems to be “if.” It suggests that Antonetti, too, sees the question as surprising mainly because he probably never imagined the Indians being in the thick of a pennant race come mid season.

But other then revealing his own disbelief, which we all share with him, there is nothing particularly offensive about that part of his answer. What else could he say?

Because Antonetti is a Shapiro protégé, which means that nothing sounds nearly as good to him as his own voice, Antonetti kept going and that is where he decided, perhaps unwittingly perhaps not, to make sure no one gets too excited.

Thus he added “then we’d have to see what the acquisition cost would be in terms of players and dollars.” That’s Shapiro-speak for “we aren’t parting with any younger, lower salaried players to rent a pitcher or other necessary part to make a run this season, or any season for that matter. No chance. You hear me? No chance. Got it? No chance.”

Unfortunately, that’s the kind of support that Indians fans have learned to live with these last several years. This team has a budget, an ever shrinking budget at that, and nothing is ever going to cause them to deviate from it. Not on the field success, not the availability of a key player or two to make a run at a title, not pressure from the fans. Nothing.

It’s a dispiriting reminder that in a game with shrinking attendance and fundamental economic problems, the Indians’ owners are not going to get caught up in the heady frenzy of fleeting success if it means cutting into its slim margins.

I actually don’t blame Antonetti for coming up with that answer . The “woe is us” operating mantra has been drilled into his head by Shapiro and his bosses, Larry and Paul Dolan. If anyone thought that Antonetti would have a refreshing take or an original thought on this subject or at least one that wasn’t tethered directly to Shapiro, then they haven’t been paying attention. Antonetti wasn’t promoted because he has some other-worldly baseball acumen. He was promoted because of his ability to toe the party line.

The Indians franchise is inherently pessimistic by nature and acts as if success, as measured by wins and not by budget surpluses, presents a rather disconcerting set of problems to the mix with which they’d rather not deal.

What Antonetti’s rather revealing answer underscores is that the last thing this franchise wants to even contemplate at the moment is a level of wins that would raise fan expectations to the point that potentially risky moves might have to get made, moves that could blow the budget.

This is ultimately the trouble with the team, or more particularly, the people owning and running this team. The fans are singular and united in their interest; they want a winning team. The front office and the owners say they want the same thing but in truth what’s far more appealing to them is a team that doesn’t lose any money.

Their vision of this team is so short-sighted and narrow minded that it never seems to occur to them that actually demonstrating that they share the same goals as the fans, instead of just mouthing the words, could actually have some long-term financial payoff.

As it stands, we’re too early into the season to get angry about moves that will never get made. But we’re never too early into the season to re-learn the lessons that this franchise is really trying to drill into its fans’ skulls: ownership and management doesn’t have anyone’s back but their own.

Optimistically Skeptical

When a team that was expected to start out 2-8 suddenly starts out 8-2 you’re obliged to take notice. The Cleveland Indians, a rag tag collection of projects and misfits, has played as solid of baseball thus far as any team outside of the Texas Rangers and the locals are doing just that, taking notice.

It’s how they’re taking notice that is probably more of the story than the fact that the Indians currently on pace to win 130 games and make a mockery of the American League Central.

But no true Indians fan dares to even think that way or even risk getting too excited by a quick start. There are a variety of reasons for this.

You can start with the history of the franchise if you want. The phrase “swoon in June and die in July” may not have been invented specifically to describe the Indians teams of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but it fit them like a glove nonetheless. Fans tend to know their history when it comes to this team.

If you want to focus just on recent history, then you could look to the Eric Wedge years. Under Wedge Indians fans got used to seeing even objectively good Indians’ teams start slowly and spend the rest of the season trying to make up ground. Conditioned more to records like 2-8 than 8-2, it follows that there will be some confusion, like the kind your dog gets when you move his dinner bowl.

If you want to get institutional about the whole thing, then you can blame the ownership of Larry and Paul Dolan, coupled with the management of Mark Shapiro, for conditioning the fans to hope for much but expect very little.

Larry Dolan, upon taking over the Indians, made the kind of unfortunate promise that tends to get made in Cleveland sports. It may not be as descriptive as “mad dog in a meat market” but Clevelanders still roll their eyes when they think about Dolan’s famously saying that he would spend money on this time “when the timing was right.” Perhaps the timing just has never been right.

While it is technically true that Dolan has had relatively high payrolls during his tenure, those were essentially players and contracts left over from the Jacobs/Hart years. As those players and their contracts peeled off the books, the payroll purposely has been kept small as a concession to the economic realities of the city they play in and the other teams they consort with.

The one year Dolan really had the chance to fulfill his promise, following the 2007 season, he and Shapiro instead went into a different direction. They dumped payroll, slightly, while failing to add any player more meaningful than 2008’s version of Austin Kearns in the form of utility player Jamey Carroll. There would be no run at the championship as the Indians ended up winning 15 less games than the season before.

If you want to look at a seminal event in the recent history of this franchise, that was it. More than anything else, that level of inaction sent a message to both the fans and the other players on the roster that ownership was never going to spend the money necessary to maintain a club at a high level.

Since then, of course, Shapiro has taken to trading any tradable player who could otherwise bust the budget. Shipping away CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez were important moments in Cleveland history certainly but all those transactions really did was give voice to the direction the Dolans and Shapiro had already set in motion.

All that is why an 8-game win streak at the top of the season generates smiles but not enthusiasm, except among that small group of eternal optimists.

In truth, I admire those eternal optimists and I say that without a shred of sarcasm. Their ability to look at Jack Hannahan and see Brooks Robinson in his prime is heartwarming.

Though my admiration is sincere, where I do draw the line however is the underlying notion that somehow this group in all its rose-colored glasses glory represent the only true fans in this town. They aren’t and not by a long shot.

I have just as much admiration, for example, for the complete cynics whose numbers overwhelm the Pollyanna set. They aren’t any less loyal to their team, just far more skeptical. They look at Orlando Cabrera and see not a savvy veteran but a cheap player well past his prime able to find work only because there are too many teams in baseball.

Simply because this group wants something more tangible to believe in than an early season win streak is no reason to question their loyalty. They’re comfortable in their misery in the same way that the optimists are comfortable in their blissful ignorance.

The truth is that the fan base of this team is no different than that of any professional sports team. Since everything can be graphed into a bell curve, the same holds true for fans. There are the extremes at both ends and a large segment in the middle that float between optimism and a cynicism on a daily basis.

The other truth is that you never really know what kind of baseball season you’re going to get until it actually gets going. All evidence thus far to the contrary notwithstanding, the Indians aren’t a very talented team. Their starting pitching is suspect (or is supposed to be), their bullpen is a bit of a Rorschach ink blot and their hitting is average at best (or is supposed to be).

And yet as the season has gotten underway, outside of the first two games, every one of those suspect elements has performed beyond all expectations. Do Justin Masterson and Mitch Talbot really have 11 or 12 more of those same kinds of performances in them? Is Asdrubal Cabrera really going to hit 30 or so home runs? Has Chris Perez really turned into Dennis Eckersley?

Perhaps the best take away from those performances thus far is that each of those players actually has it within him to play at that level. That’s comforting until you remember that the fact that they are in the major leagues suggests that they should be able to perform like that.

The fact remains that Fausto Carmona along with Talbot and Masterson has demonstrated an ability to shut down an entire team’s offense. Perez can close out games and Cabrera can hit.

The real test comes in the ability to be able to perform at that level consistently. That’s not just the goal in baseball, it’s the goal in every professional sport. The golfing world is full of guys that can hit as good a shot as any player in the history of the game has ever hit. What distinguishes Jack Nicklaus from your brother-in-law is the ability to consistently hit those great shots.

The same is true in baseball. There’s a reason Ryan Garko is in Japan and Derek Jeter is still with the Yankees. Consistently producing is the difference and ultimately will determine if the cast of characters wearing Indians uniforms this season are the real deal or just another in a long line of pretenders.