Another Tough Reminder

Maybe there’s no great significance to an opening day loss in baseball. With its interminably long 162-game schedule played on a near daily basis over the next 6 months, major league baseball appears to offer plenty of chances at redemption.

Still, there’s something rather depressing about losing the opening game as the Indians did on Monday, 6-0 to the Chicago White Sox.

For one thing, it means that there is no opportunity for the Indians to be wire-to-wire division champions. Of course, the Indians have almost no shot at winning the AL Central anyway, but that’s beside the point at the moment. The loss represents just another little goal left unachieved.

It also offers a reminder of how different the game of baseball becomes the moment the regular season starts. The Indians, in many respects, were the surprise of the spring. They went 19-9 with a handful of ties thrown in, which offered some fleeting hope that pre-season predictions might be wrong. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, though, spring training records can be wildly misleading.

Almost any team outside of the Washington Nationals can end spring training with the best record if that’s the goal. Just play all your starters all the time while every other team is experimenting with young players and different combinations.

The Indians didn’t necessarily follow that directive specifically but manager Manny Acta did make a point of saying how important it would be to play his anticipated starters the latter part of spring training as a way of building cohesion entering the regular season. Translated, Acta was really following the strong wishes of general manager Mark Shapiro who was sick and tired of all the slow April starts under former manager Eric Wedge.

For a team like Cleveland that relies so heavily on attendance in order to fund its operations, a slow April that quickly distances the team from contention is a near death sentence. Combined with April’s usually iffy weather, there’s nothing that puts Indians fans in a Browns or Cavs state of mind than the potentially miserable experience of watching another April loss when it’s 48 degrees with a light mist coming off the lake.

But even that alone doesn’t quite explain why an opening day loss in Cleveland and a handful of other cities is so much more meaningful these days. For that you’d have to look at the payroll data released by the USA Today on Monday, the same day when the Indians were being shut out in Chicago, a divisional rival with a payroll that’s almost 80% higher.

The Indians now have the lowest payroll in the AL Central at $61.2 million. That’s almost 15% LESS than the Kansas City Royals who are next at $71.4 million. It’s $200,000 less than the Washington Nationals. Thank goodness that the league still has the San Diego Padres and the Pittsburgh Pirates, with payrolls of $37.8 million and $34.9 million respectively. Otherwise there would be even more embarrassment for this once proud franchise.

While the Indians’ average salary is listed at $2.1 million, this is one time where it’s far more meaningful to look at the median salary of $427,500 instead. Of the Indians’ $61.2 million payroll, more than half of it is taken up by three players that enter the season with extremely low expectations: Westbrook, Travis Hafner, and Kerry Wood. All have major questions marks. Hafner is supposedly swinging well, whatever that means, Westbrook is trying to come back from major arm surgery and Wood is on the disabled list with either a bad back or an indifferent attitude, take your pick.

Three more players, Jhonny Peralta, Fausto Carmona and Grady Sizemore, take up another 25% of the payroll. Sizemore is trying to find his way back from injury, Carmona is trying to find his confidence and the strike zone and Peralta is just trying to find himself. Yet as a group they represent potentially far more production than Hafner, Westbrook and Wood.

With more than 75% of the payroll owed to just 6 players, it’s a pretty steep fall off from there. The Indians have 16 players on their opening day roster (which includes players on the disabled list) making less than $500,000 (the league minimum is $400,000). Only one team, the Oakland Athletics, has more, with a staggering 20. However, there’s a bit of a caveat with Oakland. Three of those players are on the disabled list and may be in the minors once they recover.

While this may be a statement about the nature of both the As and the Indians, what it really says is that these two teams are fielding essentially minor league caliber teams and doing so because they don’t have enough money to do otherwise. Indeed you can make the case that the same is true of a few other teams who have similarly filled out their rosters, like the Pirates (15), the Rangers (14), the Reds (13) and the Nationals (12).

Some of this is partially explained by the fact that there are some good young players around the league still making barely above the minimum, keeping some team’s payrolls lower. That’s in keeping with baseball’s grand tradition in sticking it to players who have no leverage.

The Indians periodically have tried to be more progressive in their thinking and that’s why players like Peralta, Carmona and Sizemore are making so much more than their counterparts at the moment. But that isn’t always the answer either as the relative lack of production from these three hardly seems to justify the extra $13 million or so in payroll they are eating up at the moment.

But the handful of good young players making league minimum only partially explains what’s really taking place anyway. The fact is that the major league baseball is broken somewhat neatly into teams in the payroll penthouse and teams in the payroll outhouse and it’s time to stop pretending that none of this matters. It’s simply delusional to think that teams with a majority of its players barely making the league minimum are going to be able to compete over the course of a season with teams that have only a handful of such players.

If you’re a fan of the Indians or the Pirates or the Reds or the Royals, this is just a cold hard fact. One loss on opening day may not be particularly meaningful except as the start of losses that will inevitably pile up over the course of a season in which they won’t be competitive almost by definition.

If baseball isn’t going to address this festering problem through economic parity then at least it should consider complete realignment in a way in which teams aren’t grouped by quaint notions of geography and tradition but instead by payroll. Instead of an American and National League, you could have the Haves and the Have Nots with only limited interleague play.

That would at least give fans in cities like Cleveland, Kansas City and Pittsburgh a reason to shrug off a loss more easily. As it is, though, the concept of redemption in baseball is more illusory now than it’s ever been because major league baseball prefers to have those teams running its marathon uphill in a headwind with 5-pound weights around each ankle against others who always get to have the wind at their backs.

The Lost Weekend--Almost

Well, at least they avoided the sweep. But no one outside of Cleveland Indians announcer Matt Underwood actually believes, as Underwood said after the final out Sunday, that all is once again well with the Indians. Rather, had the Indians found a way to once again lose to the Oakland As, more than a few flat screens around northeast Ohio would have been in need of the Best Buy Geek Squad.

Until the Tribe found a way to squeak out Sunday’s 2-1 win, the highlight was the fact that only two of the three games found their way on local television. Sitting through two of them was more than enough to bring back a whole host of last season memories of what this team looks like when it doesn’t hit. It isn’t pretty in the same way that a head-on car crash isn’t pretty.

If there was a bright spot, and geez that would be hard to find, it had to be Cliff Lee, who pitched twice as well as the rest of the team played. For most of the game, it looked like it was Lee’s turn in the “hard luck loser” box pitching for a team that was treating Oakland’s Joe Blanton like he was Josh Beckett.

Sticking with the Cliff Lee theme for a minute, in a weekend that was discouraging on several levels Lee looked nothing like the pretender who was up there last year nibbling at the corners, treating every hitter as if he was David Ortiz and otherwise getting his brains beat in every five days until he took up permanent residence in Buffalo. In his first start of this season, Lee looked mostly confident and mostly willing to challenge the awfully young As lineup. If that seems like faint praise, it’s really not considering that the rest of the Indians lineup was much less willing to take on that challenge for most of the three game series.

A microcosm of the weekend’s offensive futility was the 7th inning of Sunday’s game. After Jason Michaels grounded out, Andy Marte and Kelly Shoppach singled. The As then walked Grady Sizemore, the only Indians player putting together decent at bats these days. Asdrubal Cabrera was up next and hit a perfect double play ball to As first baseman Daric Barton. Barton bobbled it long enough to keep the Indians out of the double play, although Barton was able to get Cabrera at first. The Indians, however, tied the game at 1-1. Give Cabrera the gift RBI.

With first base open, the As decided to intentionally walk Travis Hafner, which made some sense historically but not if you have access to the hitting charts of Hafner’s last 140 or so games, bringing up Ryan Garko, who traditionally hits Blanton well. After falling behind in the count, Garko walked on a 3-2 pitch to bring home the Indians second run. That brought on Santiago Casilla who proceeded to strike out Jhonny Peralta.

If you’re on optimist, you’d say at least the Indians took the lead. If you’re a realist, you know that this was the Indians best opportunity to break out of the offensive slump that’s gripped them over the last four games. Instead, they ended up with two runs as the result of an error (though it won’t appear in the box score as such) and a walk. The Indians didn’t come any closer to scoring the rest of the game and were left to protect what was a tenuous lead at best.

But the reason the Indians avoided the sweep is the reason they have a chance to be special—good pitching. When Lee was done after 6 2/3 innings, the pitching triumvirate that was so strong last season, Rafael Perez, Rafael Bentancort and Joe Borowski kept the As off the board. In truth, they were hardly challenged.

Indians Manager Eric Wedge, never one to register much of a pulse publicly, nonetheless hit the nail on the head, the best hit of the weekend actually, when he said that that the main problem with the offense is the lack of quality at bats. In each of Friday’s and Saturday’s losses, the Indians struck out 10 times. Not every strike out occurred while the Indians batter had his bat on his shoulder, it only seemed like it. And it wasn’t as if they were facing the Red Sox. Justin Duchscherer, which is at least as hard to spell as it is to say, baffled the Indians on Friday and teammate Dana Eveland, another pitcher unknown outside of the most hardcore of fantasy league players, did likewise on Saturday.

On Sunday, all Blanton did was what he normally does, give up hits. The only problem is that other than the aforementioned 7th inning, the Indians couldn’t string them together. In fact, as a measure of the lost weekend that the Tribe offense had, only twice in three games did it have two consecutive hits in an inning, the 7th on Sunday and the 6th inning on Friday. In fact, Friday’s 6th inning was a whole lot like Sunday’s 7th. Shoppach led off the inning with a single. Sizemore followed with another. Cabrera walked to load the bases, bringing up Peralta who hit into a double play, brining home a run. Hafner was up next and struck out looking, naturally.

The obvious counterpoint to all of this is that the season’s just six games old. There always are going to be stretches where it seems like every opposing pitcher is throwing softballs and stretches where it seems like they’re throwing BBs. The sheer length of the season is often underappreciated leading to drive-by analysis that lacks context. But on the other hand this is a team that is largely a carryover from last season and its weekend offensive struggles seem much more like a continuation of a pattern firmly established than a typical seasonal blip. If Tribe General Manager Mark Shapiro were more like Browns General Manager Phil Savage, he already would have seen enough, either David Dellucci or Jason Michaels or both would be on their way to Seattle and Ben Francisco would be on his way from Buffalo.

But the one thing that you can’t ever look like you’re doing in baseball is panicking. And that’s exactly what it would look like if Shapiro were to acknowledge what everyone can see is true—that without more offensive production from their outfield, the Indians are going to have a lot of hard luck losing pitchers this season.

It’s true that the Indians best hitter, Victor Martinez, sat out his fourth straight game, but his presence isn’t going to solve everything or even most things. Offensively, this is a flawed Indians line-up and will remain so as long as guys like Michaels, Dellucci and Andy Marte get significant playing time. Throw in the disturbing tendencies of Peralta to take weeks off at a time, Casey Blake being Casey Blake, and Hafner still unable to return to the form he had before he got married and you can see why the Indians scored six runs all weekend against a very average Oakland team.

But baseball, like golf, always offers a chance for immediate redemption. For the Indians, they’ll have to find it in Anaheim against a team far better than the one they faced this weekend. And if all goes as it usually does in baseball, then the Indians will end up averaging 10 runs a game against the Angels. But if things don’t turn around then, don’t look for it for awhile for after the Indians board that charter plane following Wednesday’s afternoon getaway game, they’re headed back to Cleveland to face, again, that dynamic one-two punch of Eveland and Duchscherer and the mighty, mighty As.