The Future Of the Indians...

It’s pretty significant to the future of the Cleveland Indians that Mark Shapiro, who’s been with the team longer than the Dolans have owned it, is packing his kit bag for the move north to Toronto and a similar role with the Blue Jays.  What is probably far more significant to that future of the team is the lesser told story that the Dolans are looking to sell about 30% of the franchise, at an inflated valuation of course, in order to fund the team at more appropriate levels.

According to a story in Monday’s Akron Beacon Journal, the Dolans have hired an investment advisor to market the team to moneyed owner wannabees looking to get into the game.  Now under normal circumstances a smart person might ask why anyone would want to give a quarter of a billion dollars to the Dolans without any meaningful chance to control the franchise’s fate.  But those kind of smart questions don’t really apply in the world of professional sports. Really smart investors generally stay out of sports so the usual math tends to be meaningless.

What the Dolans are looking for is a lifeline, someone to fund the team’s salary growth.  In return they’ll give up a seat in the owner’s box and a seat at the table at the winter meetings.  Implicit though is the motivating factor of that minority owner.  He or she, but likely he, will become a member of the owners’ club and thus be seen as a potentially viable buyer of a majority interest in a franchise down the road.

It’s a construct that tends to work, by the way Jimmy Haslam never becomes the owner of the Browns if he hadn’t started off owning a small piece of the Pittsburgh Steelers first.  It gave the rest of the owners a chance to get used to his glad handing ways.  Steve Biscotti followed a similar path in Baltimore though he struck a particularly favorable deal against a craven, bankrupt owner in Art Modell and essentially stole the franchise out from under the Modell family. And a grateful generation of Clevelanders thank him.

In the near term this is a bit of good news for Indians fans, assuming that the Dolans find the well-financed patsy that their plan requires.  It also demonstrates what I’ve said for years.  The Dolans simply do not have enough money to compete with most other owners in major league baseball.  The franchise doesn’t generate enough money and the Dolans don’t have the wherewithal to deficit spend the team back into the level of competitiveness that would significantly increase revenues.

This is where the story of Shapiro becomes most relevant.  For years Shapiro has guided the direction of this franchise and has had to do it somewhat under unfavorable battle conditions.  Always trying to scrape together enough money to make targeted investments without huge downsides has led the Indians to essentially buy out the arbitration years of its best prospects while setting the stage for those prospects to leave once free agency beckoned.  The history with CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee would be played out once again with the likes of Corey Kluber, Michael Brantley and Jason Kipnis eventually.  It was always just a matter of time and may still be. 

This is what Indians fans have been conditioned to expect and has been a factor, the degree of which one can debate, in the continued muted interest in this team, assuming one judges interest by such pedestrian metrics as attendance.

Shapiro has done his best to divert what’s happening with this left hand by keeping the right hand in constant motion.  The Indians, under Shapiro, have upgraded Progressive Field (mostly with Progressive Insurance’s stadium rights money) and have attempted nearly all manner of low cost distraction in the form of constant, and branded, giveaways.  Shapiro has been a whiz at using other people’s money (other than the Dolans, I mean) to cultivate an inviting fan experience even if the games tend to be boring and the team often on, at best, the fringes of competitiveness.

It hasn’t worked.  The Indians consistently rank near the bottom in major league attendance and there’s only so much for which one can continue to blame “the economy” before you come to the conclusion that winning matters and winning consistently matters even more.

You want to understand why Shapiro would leave for what amounts to the same job somewhere else?  That’s why.  It’s not just more money for him and his family but more money for him and his new team to play with.  The more puzzling question is why he stayed so long.

Presumably Shapiro is well respected in baseball circles.  He’s the quintessential company man.  No one speaks more lingo and knows more metrics.  He’s personable without being obnoxious.  He’s probably a really pleasant guy around the office and maybe even fun in the few unguarded moments when he has a chance to kick back with a beer.  He’s had enough of success to make him seem competent without being so competent as to be out of reach.  In short, the Toronto job couldn’t have been the first opportunity to have come his way in 23 years with Cleveland.

Maybe it’s as simple as Shapiro being the eternal optimist.  Maybe he always figured that at some point the purse strings would loosen and he’d have to stop soliciting virtually every business near and far to partner up on this promotion or that.  At some point, though, life has a way of turning the most idealistic among us into hard-bitten realists and if there is one reality that’s well known under this Indians’ ownership it’s that this team was never going to be funded at a level that would truly allow it to compete on a regular basis.

Shapiro’s timing is a little curious though given how the Dolans are shopping the team.  That seemingly represents the best chance to really infuse this team with money and would seem like the opportune time for Shapiro to stick around.  That’s what actually scares me most.  If Shapiro doesn’t see that as the best chance to right the team than what hope should the fans continue to cling to?

In some ways, Shapiro will be missed and in many ways he won’t.  Under his watch he did bring the franchise forward using analytics.  What will never be fully known are the decisions he was forced to make that ultimately put this franchise in a state of suspended animation.

Paul Dolan is taking over the reins as president, content to take on the role himself rather than look outside.  There’s nothing in that sentence or those fact that suggests, in and of itself, that fans can expect anything different.  That will occur, if ever, when the Dolans find that quarter billion they want for a third of their franchise.

Lingering items--Collective Shrug Edition

On Tuesday night, the Cleveland Indians beat the Oakland A's 1-0.  It was the second straight win for the Tribe over the As. It also was the team’s  8th win in their last 9 games and pushed their season record to 16-14.  Overall, a decent start to the season, right?  The answer depends on what you’re measuring.

While the Indians were winning there were a total of 9,474 people in attendance at that game or about 40 less than the night before.  Those are the kind of pre-Jacobs Field numbers that ought to give fans the willies.  Apparently it’s just giving them shrugs.

The Indians have the worst attendance in the major leagues and they aren’t even sniffing the next worse team, the Kansas City Royals.  In fact, the Indians would have to increase their average per game attendance by a whopping 27%, or another 268,000 fans over the rest of the season, just to equal the Royals’ average.

Parsing further, if you eliminate opening day and the first game of the Yankees’ series, each of which drew over 40,000 fans, the Indians are averaging almost to the person the attendance at Tuesday night’s A's game.  That would mean they’d have to attract almost a half million more fans than the current pace just to stay with the Royals' current average.

Lest anyone think this suggests that the Indians’ attendance is in a free fall, that wouldn’t be quite accurate.  Year over year the Indians are averaging a mere 534 fans less per game than at the same point in 2012.  This year’s poor attendance isn’t news, it’s the norm.

When you think about all this in economic terms it’s pretty clear that the Indians’ are losing more and more ground against their competitors.  If you assume that the average fan spends a mere $20 at a game, including his ticket, the difference between the Indians’ and Royals’ attendance translates to more than $5.3 million less in revenue for the Indians and that’s being exceptionally conservative in estimates.  It’s probably far closer to $10 million and likely even more than that.

There are a multitude of reasons for the Indians’ poor attendance including the deadening approach that the owners, Larry and Paul Dolan, have taken over the years.  A seemingly never ending string of poor personnel decisions wrapped around an exceptionally tight budget have combined to make the Indians not just a perennially lousy team but a boring one as well.  The fans have been systemically conditioned to expect the worst.  This past off season the Dolans decided to switch the paradigm, at least for one season, by spending money in advance of the revenues.  It’s resulted in a marginally better team and a less boring one to boot.  They lead the league in home runs, for example. But the revenues at this point aren’t following.  Indeed they are still dropping.  If that trend continues, don’t look for deficit spending next off season and so the spiral will deepen.

The Dolans haven’t been the worst owners in team history or even the cheapest.  But they haven’t done much to infuse the franchise with much excitement either.  They've entrusted their  franchise to Mark Shapiro, first as general manager and now as team president, and the results, well, speak for themselves.  Chris Antonetti is relatively new to his job but he’s a Shapiro acolyte and subordinate so there’s no reason to expect a different approach or result.  The on field results this group has achieved are dubious.  But perhaps the broader indictment is that they’ve been part of a far larger problem.  Their indifferent ownership and poorly executed approach has helped foster a town of indifferent sports fans, people that at best casually care about what's happening but certainly not enough to invest.

The Indians mostly own the spring and summer and as they’ve wallowed in the muck and mire, people who were once fans have been infected not with disdain but indifference.  At least when fans show animosity toward you they’re feeling something.  They’re engaged still on an emotional level.  When they’re indifferent it simply means they just don’t care what happens.

But we can’t lay this all at the feet of the Indians though because they have the longest season they get a slightly larger share of the blame.  Cleveland is a Browns town and it hardly bears mentioning the soul-sucking siege that this team has inflicted on this area.  Randy Lerner was not just a reluctant owner he was an indifferent one as well and it showed in both his approach and in his results.

The sale to Jimmy Halsam was at least two years too late.  Yet even with all the issues Haslam is facing professionally, he still remains the best hope to re-energize the moribund franchise.  Unfortunately, those professional issues are a huge distraction to Haslam personally and will be for months, if not years, to come.  Meanwhile he’s entrusted the day to day operations to perhaps the most boring front office executive ever in Joe Banner.  Holmgren was a joke but his nonsensical outbursts at least added comic relief.  Banner just generally rests his head on his hands and sighs.  It’s the perfect meme not just for the completed draft but for the fans as well.

Then there’s the Cavs, bleeding fans at a faster clip than even the Indians.  The Cavs have been in a free fall for 3 years now coinciding with the loss of LeBron James.  During that time owner Dan Gilbert has been mostly distracted by an expanding empire of other businesses including his casinos.  Fans also know that the NBA is the toughest league in which to turn around a franchise so even a fully engaged Gilbert wouldn’t make much difference anyway.  Fans don’t just know the Cavs are awful right now they know they’ll be awful for years to come as well.  Put it this way, when the biggest selling point going into the next season is to tout the rehiring of a former coach who couldn’t win a championship with LeBron James, the franchise is in more trouble than it realizes.

When you look out toward the horizon on each franchise there’s nothing much to see and there hasn’t been for a long time, especially in the case of the Indians and the Browns.  It’s had an impact, a significant one, on the fans.  They’ve gone well beyond cynicism and are now simply indifferent and if there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear from the Indians’ attendance results thus far, indifferent fans don’t throw good money after bad.

One of these years one of these teams will emerge to reinvigorate this town and give the fans a reason to believe again.  It's just that when you look out into the distance it doesn't look like a ship will be coming in any time soon.

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One team that isn’t suffering from an indifferent fan base is the Ohio State Buckeyes.  According to a study done by USA Today in conjunction with the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center, the Buckeyes are one of but a handful of schools that have self-sustaining athletic departments, meaning that their revenues exceed their expenses without the need for subsidies either from local governments or student fees. Of the $49 million in ticket revenue generated by Ohio State fans, $41 million was from football.  I'd say that the Indians, Cavs and/or Browns owners would do anything to capture that kind of passion and coin but I know it isn't true.  They've had any number of opportunities and simply haven't done it.

The larger story on the Buckeyes front though is that they are mostly an anomaly in college sports.  They are one of only 23 Division I programs out of 228 that broke even or were in the black.  Within that group of 23 were just 7, including Ohio State, that didn’t receive any form of subsidy from either taxpayers or students in the form of fees.  And of that 7, Ohio State has the most intercollegiate teams to support: 36 overall.

Meanwhile, the NCAA as an entity has never enjoyed greater profits.  It had a whopping $71 million budget surplus in 2012, which, when coupled with the previous paragraph, tells an intriguing and disturbing story about the state of college athletics.

Perhaps the poster child for how wrongheaded things have gotten are our newest bestest buddies, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.  According to the USA Today study, Rutgers spent over $28 million more on athletics then it took in just last year.  To cover the short fall it had to take over $18 million from other areas of the college and the other nearly $10 million directly from the students in the form of additional fees.  I suspect the financial picture for Rutgers will get a bit better as members of the Big 10 but that alone won’t suffice.  Just over half, 7, of the Big 10 schools are running at a profit and only 5, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Indiana and Nebraska are doing that without any form of school or student subsidy.  Michigan needed over $250,000 in subsidies to make ends meet, which isn’t significant but it is informative.  If they can’t at least break even on their own accord with a facility like the Big House in Ann Arbor and its 100,000+ fans for 7 or 8 games a year along with the massive amount of merchandising revenue they generate, then what hope is there for Rutgers?

There are any number of reasons this matters but the most important is the simple fact that getting a college education has never been more expensive or more out of reach to the middle class than it is now.  When a school like Rutgers is draining other academic programs as well as the wallets of its students to pay for athletics, you have to question what it's trying to accomplish as an institution.  And Rutgers is hardly alone. Fully 90% of Division I schools are doing something similar though perhaps not at the same scale as Rutgers.

If you’re looking for another reason this matters consider Indiana University.  Though the school turned a small profit in its athletic program in 2012, about $276,000, it needed nearly $2.8 million in subsidies from the school and the students to get there.  In other words, it didn’t really turn a profit at all.  But let’s suspend that bit of reality and consider the impact of robbing Peter to pay Paul at Indiana.  Because there are no coincidences, that university recently announced that it is limiting all employees there to 29 hours or less of work each week as a way of avoiding the impact of the Affordable Health Care Act, a result it wouldn’t need to worry about if it would quit paying subsidies to its athletic program. Quality employees who have options will eventually leave IU for a school that offers them better benefits, like health care.  It's a topsy turvy world where school administrators fund a mediocre athletic program at the expense of the larger mission and the general welfare of the rest of the school's population.

The real benefactors of this insane race for athletic prominence and its increasingly illusory promise of pots of gold is undercutting the very reason these academic institutions allegedly exist.  The NCAA could do something about it though that would cut against its own economic interests.

I’m not sure exactly how Rutgers can sustain itself as a viable school, let alone a member of the Big 10, if it continues to run up such huge deficits.  Surely its board of trustees must be asking themselves that very question and if they aren’t they should be removed.  The same goes for virtually every school running at a deficit.  At some point some prominent school will drop out of the race either by force or by conscious, but it will happen unless there is a massive change in attitude and approach.  But as we’ve seen for so long, the NCAA traffics in the small problems like tattoos while the rest of the house is literally on fire.

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The Browns have a rookie mini camp this week and if not for them signing a pile of undrafted free agents it probably could have been held inside a conference room in Berea rather than on the practice field.

To this point two of the draft choices have been arrested with one of them, Armonty Bryant, a serial offender.  I knew Joe Banner was following a rebuilding blue print from other teams, but I thought it would be the Philadelphia Eagles.  I didn’t realize it would be the Cincinnati Bengals.

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Given the character issues that already have emerged with this Browns' draft class, this week's question to ponder: Does anyone in the Browns' scouting department know how to even do a Google search on prospective draft picks?

Lingering Items--Ownership Edition

There’s no real playbook for how exactly one goes about the business of actually owning a professional sports team except, of course, the requirement that you have or have access to plenty of money.  But once secured, the day to day job of owning a team is mostly a blank canvas.  Jimmy Haslam, the now-conflicted owner of the Cleveland Browns, apparently is still early on in feeling his way through the process and fans here are worried.

As you’ll recall Haslam gave up the CEO job at His Pilot Flying J truck stop empire in favor of doing whatever it is that owners of professional sports teams do.  In the few months he’s actually owned the Browns, that included quite a bit of activity.  He finessed Mike Holmgren out of town, he fired a general manager and hired another, he fired a coach and hired another, he met with city leaders and then, for good measure, he secured a nice little annuity for his team by selling the naming rights to its stadium for a 20 year term.  It was certainly more than 6 days of work.

But having crossed off those tasks from the mental list of “to dos” that he keeps, Haslam started to realize that there wasn’t much left for him to do at the moment particularly if he was going to allow the people he hired to run his football business to actually do their jobs.

So Haslam decided to push out the executive he just hired from Pepsico to run Pilot Flying J by giving him a different role and took back his old job of CEO.  It was kind of a ballsy move, actually, the kind we’re not used to seeing here in Cleveland.  Holmgren for example couldn’t muster the courage to fire Eric Mangini and put himself in as head coach when that was all he really wanted to do.  Indeed the Holmgren example is instructive.

One of the reasons Holmgren ended up being a lousy whatever the hell he was stemmed from his inability to see himself as anything other than a coach.  He lacked the guts to take the job himself when that would have served both him and the fans far better than hiring Pat Shurmur.  Holmgren thus dithered in a role he was ill suited to play, grew bored quickly and mailed in his job performance, figuratively and literally.  In that sense and with that as a data point, maybe it is good that Haslam went back to what makes him happy.

But Haslam better become more sensitive to the fan base he serves.  Fans here don’t like finding out from the local newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee that he’s had a change of heart about how he spends his day.  They wanted to hear it first hand and didn’t.  Haslam owed this courtesy to the Cleveland fans he expects to support his now hobby and not to the citizens of Knoxville who were just getting to know the new guy at Pilot Flying J.

As to the move itself, Haslam is adamant that nothing has changed regarding his commitment to the team, telling the Plain Dealer that “I don’t think anyone would question our passion, effort, intensity or devotion to the Cleveland Browns and, candidly, to Northeast Ohio.  Our family has a tremendous investment, and we want to win as bad as anybody does up there and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win.”

Not a bad rejoinder to those who would question his commitment but it would have been more effective if he had not referred to the fans as “anybody..up there.”  It probably would have been the opportune time to start referencing the collective “we” and not remind everyone that depending on the route you take, there’s one possibly two states between where his team plays and where his real passion lies.

This is where we get into the whole “how exactly does one actually go about being an owner?” discussion.

In Cleveland the last two owners have had no other job beyond owning the team and I don’t think anyone would hold either up as a model owner or a model for Haslam to emulate.  Art Modell didn’t adapt to the idle time well so he tinkered and tinkered with the team, convinced himself that he knew as much about football as anyone on the planet, and set in motion a decades long course of losing everything he built because of it.  Randy Lerner on the other hand had an immense capacity for being bored perhaps the difference from Modell being the fact that at least Modell at one time in his life actually held a job.  Lerner was like the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy, dividing each day into increments of frivolity in order to make his spectacularly inane existence manageable.

I suspect that most owners in the NFL have some outside business interests that keep them busy during the down days of the NFL, meaning mid February through mid July, but on the other hand Haslam is now one of the very few owners in the NFL who has a completely separate full time job as CEO of a pretty good sized company.  That role requires him to satisfy a whole host of constituents, not the least of which are family members with sizeable stakes in said company.  In other words, Haslam as CEO requires a fair amount of attention to that task.

Does that mean Haslam is destined to become another crappy owner of the Browns?  Not necessarily but there is pause, isn’t there?  By default, Haslam won’t assimilate very quickly if at all in the local community.  In that regard, his “up there” comment is very telling.  Then there is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about—the management team he put in place to run the Browns in his absence.  Fans seem relatively sold on Joe Banner as, I guess, club president or whatever he’s calling himself, but are less so on Mike Lombardi who, whatever his title might be, is the guy populating the team with free agents and draft picks.

Haslam as absentee-owner (and a house in Bratenhal that he says he’ll occupy once or twice a week in season doesn’t make him resident) could work but at the very least the jump he made back to the family business was too soon.  Fans have not had an opportunity to get comfortable with the team Haslam put in place and given all of the other similar teams put in place before them there’s a pretty good chance that fans will never get comfortable with them.

I think Haslam owed it to the fans to stay the course he set out, basically promised, when he became owner.  It was a bit of a bait and switch and is now another reason for fans to think that this isn’t going to work out any better than anything else that’s been tried. The fans may not be right, indeed they usually aren't, but it's up to Haslam to prove them wrong and right now he hasn't made much of an effort to do that.

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Speaking of owners, the Cleveland Indians’ Larry and Paul Dolan are putting together a nice little offseason for themselves.  When they set out to rectify the chief criticism of them it should be noted.  And so it is that the Dolans have pumped an additional $20+ million into the payroll and hired an actual, honest-to-gosh successful manager for this upcoming season in an effort to rebuild fan faith and recapture fan enthusiasm.

For what it’s worth, it’s hard to tell really whether either of the Dolans are otherwise gainfully employed outside of their duties as owners.  They have investments certainly and other businesses but neither are acting as CEOs of other on-going concerns.  Has that helped or hurt the Indians, hard to say.  But I think the fact that they live locally assuage any concerns about their commitment to the town or team.  The concern with them has always been their financial wherewithal and their generally self-fulfilling prophesy way of running a team they purposely labeled small market so that they could justify running it in small market ways.

The Dolans haven’t become the Steinbrenners but no one expected them to.  But for the first time in years they have decided that reinvestment was needed, the growing number of empty seats around Progressive Field being a serious clue.

There’s no way of knowing at the moment whether the Terry Francono, Michael Bourn or Nick Swisher moves will bear fruit except in the Cleveland-curse sort of way that we know nothing ever works out like it should.  But rightful credit is due to the Dolans and to general manager Chris Antonetti for doing something.  They had to.  If the offseason had consisted simply of bringing in a washed up Jason Giambi and a weak armed Daisuke Matsuzaka, and we’ve had exactly those kinds of offseason in each of the last 10 years, then fans would have blown their brains out.  To put a sharper point on it, fans would have stayed away in even bigger numbers than last season and the Dolans would find themselves struggling to meet the modest attendance totals of the Indians circa any year prior to the move to what is now Progressive Field.

At this point there isn’t any question that the Indians are an improved team from the mess that was last season but just how improved is the real question.  Perhaps the biggest question though is whether this is a one year cash infusion or part of a multi year plan to actually reinvest in the franchise and get it back to where it can actually compete.

Where the Dolans have failed the fans in the past has been in not building on a previous season’s success.  That they have finally reinvested in the team is great and is applauded but it must be part of an overall attitude change and not a one time event or the alienation from the fans they feared for this year will simply be delayed by a year.

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This all brings us to the last owner in town, Dan Gilbert.  He’s closest, perhaps, to the model that Haslam seems to be adopting.  Gilbert is a Detroit person through and through but what he’s done to overcome the perception as an out of towner has been to move some of his business operations to Cleveland.  Jimmy, are you listening?

The other thing though is that Gilbert, in the various enterprises he has going including the new casino, is perhaps the most distracted owner in town.  Has that negatively impacted the Cavaliers?  Hard to say and the reason it’s hard to say is that the NBA is by far the toughest league in which to build a team back up from the bottom.

The NBA’s history is irrefutable at this point.  Once a team sinks to the bottom it’s at least a decade before it’s competitive again and that’s assuming competent management.  You can try to accelerate the timetable but it’s rarely been done.  The salary cap and the draft lottery combine in a unique way to keep bad teams down for as long as possible.  The Cavs seem on track in that regard.

The reason Gilbert seethed when LeBron James left had everything to do with the financial impact it would have on Gilbert’s empire knowing this history.  With James out of the mix, the Cavs overnight became a bottom tier team with all of the bottom tier  perks that come with that status such as empty seats and decreasing revenues.  If the Cavs were a stand alone enterprise that would be one thing.  But the residual impact of those empty seats spills over to concessions and, more particularly, to a difficulty attracting casual gamblers to the Horseshoe Casino.  A full Quickens Loan Arena for 40+ winter nights a year translates to a lot of lost money at the gaming tables and slots.

Would the Cavs be further along if Gilbert were focused entirely on the Cavs?  Again, hard to say.  Gilbert, like Haslam, believes in hiring professionals to run the business while providing oversight that hardly requires a 24/7 level of concentration.  So Gilbert’s success, like Haslam’s, will depend fully on whether the general managers they have on hand are up to the challenge.

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A popular question floating around this past week, given the Indians' moves, has been which local team is closest to the playoffs? The better question and this week's question to ponder is which local team is the furthest?

When Perception Meets Reality

At the moment, the Cleveland Cavaliers management team is in flux and because of it the perception is that the team itself is a mess. After all, its head coach has been fired and their designated target replacement turned them down. There’s a new general manager in place but no one seems to know it.

Yet they just completed a season in which they again won the most games in the entire NBA. They fell short, spectacularly short, in the playoffs and their best player may be headed elsewhere, but that’s been the case since he signed his last contract. In other words, for the second straight season it’s been mostly the status quo.

Meanwhile, perched across the plaza from them are the Cleveland Indians, as stable of a management team that exists in baseball today. The perception is that a number of factors outside of their control, including a bizarre and unfair economic structure that baseball allows to exist, make it difficult for small-market teams like Cleveland to be successful and so it’s not a surprise that they aren’t.

Yet on the field the Indians are mess of a team. Whatever economic hardships that baseball inflicts on them, and they do, it is still a team with no unifying theme, populated with veteran has beens and young maybes that loses, spectacularly so, night after night after night after night.

But to hear fans in Cleveland talk, you’d think it was the Cavs, not the Indians, laboring under an elevated security code level.

The danger is when fans allow perception to become reality. It gets fed by writers like Bill Livingston claiming that Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is an activist with too much ego to be successful in professional sports. You then have other writers, local and national, scratch their heads at the release of Danny Ferry as general manager. Finally you mix in the ongoing uncertainty of LeBron James and the notion that Tom Izzo turned down the head coaching gig and all of the sudden it’s easy to conclude that the Cavs are viewed as a franchise on the decline.

Hardly and the reason I know that is because of that franchise perched across the plaza from them. If you want to see a once glorious franchise careening down a 45 degree hill without any brakes, the Indians are your ticket.

Each day that goes by, the picture of the Cavs gets a bit clearer instead of more muddled, particularly with respect to the on-court product. The post-Cavs NBA playoffs made us all realize that Cleveland fans were mostly sold a bill of goods, starting with the acquisition of Shaquille O’Neal and continuing with the trade for Antwan Jamison, that all the parts were in place for the beginning of what might be a multi-year run at the NBA championship.

What we found out, when the hype was stripped away by a Boston team that was, at a minimum, better coached is that this Cavs team had flaws. O’Neal doesn’t exactly heal with the blood of a 23-year-old anymore and could never really get untracked for the playoffs after sitting out the latter part of the season with a thumb injury.

Jamison is a nice player but his best days, too, are long gone. He’s got some interesting moves around the basket and can find a way to score and once in awhile can get on a run but for the love of God the guy is awful from the free throw line and is slower on defense than the kid in your gym class with his pants hitched up to his navel and playing in street shoes. Mo Williams showed that the 2009 version we saw of him in the playoffs was no mirage. He’s a good 82-game player who can’t yet cope with the pace and intensity of the playoffs. Maybe he never can.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In a sober moment you really can see the problems in this team that the playoffs exposed. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good team. It just means it wasn’t good enough to win a championship.

Time will tell whether Gilbert was right in dumping Ferry and head coach Mike Brown, but at this juncture nothing about either move looks particularly crazy nor does it brand Gilbert as an impatient and impetuous owner whose ego outstrips his skill. In fact, Gilbert’s track record demonstrates that he reserves for himself the biggest of all decisions, as it should be, and then get mostly out of the way. The next time he storms the court to protest a referee’s call or takes to an internet blog to rage against the NBA machine will be the first time.

If Gilbert is an activist owner, what does that make Randy Lerner? He and his family have owned the franchise for more than a decade now and all he’s down is rebuild from the foundation up every few years as if on cue.

Maybe Gilbert’s tinkering this off-season is making fans nervous, but his moves pale in comparison to the many, many missteps of Lerner over the years. Are fans really looking the benign neglect of owners like the Dolans. It’s Lerner’s incompetence as a decision maker that has ruined the Browns for a generation of fans, not his intent. As for the Indians, it’s the Dolans sleepy existence as owners that is mostly responsible for recreating the glory days of the 1970s.

Let’s start with Lerner. He’s demonstrated, like Gilbert, a willingness to spend money. What he lacks, though, is a commitment to excellence. He says he wants a winner but then disappears for long stretches of time to pursue his other interests. Not a crime, certainly, but not the act of someone consumed with success. It shows in the results.

As for the Dolans, the best way to illustrate their tenure is to look at the bankrupt performance the Indians put on against the Pittsburgh Pirates this past weekend. In the course of three games, the Indians let the Pirates not only stop a 12-game losing streak but also start a two-game winning streak. In doing so the team played the kind of baseball that would embarrass most American Legion teams.

The errors and missed opportunities on the field this past Sunday defined both the team and its ownership as well as anything I’ve seen or heard in years. The core of the problem is that the Dolans and Shapiro have become so practiced at creating the perception that the team is financially handicapped that it has now become their reality.

As a result, the team no longer defines success by wins or losses on the field but by balance sheets and profit margins. It would seem like you can’t have one without the other but actually many do and Indians are on that track. The guaranteed money generated in baseball from media revenue, combined with even modest attendance, can make a team profitable if it’s payroll is small enough.

As a result, the Indians continue to shrink the payroll knowing that they can still eke out success as they define it irrespective of the product. All it does, of course, is to create a death spiral to the fans that actually care about such trivial things as wins. Just ask Pirates fans who have now seen their team go more than a generation without a winning record.

That’s what dysfunction really looks like. What the Cavs and Gilbert are going through right now hardly approaches that level. They are simply experiencing the natural flow of any well run organization. It’s just that in Cleveland fans always have had difficulty distinguishing perception from reality.

Figuring It All Out

When the Cleveland Indians were busy trying to win games in spring training while other, more experienced teams were simply getting in shape, there was more than a few hints of optimism among local fans that perhaps this team was better than anyone anticipated.

Well past the quarter pole of another depressing baseball season and this team is exactly as anticipated. Not better, not worse, but right where a team with these kind of players ought to be. In last place and lucky to win 1 out of every 3 games.

If your glass is half full maybe you can put some of the blame on the injuries to Grady Sizemore and Asdrubal Cabrera, both out several weeks with serious injuries. But it's not like Sizemore was tearing it up before he went down. He looked mostly lost at the plate but at least was playing solid defense. Cabrera was one of the bright spots of the season.

Manager Manny Acta indicated the other day that after the All Star break, the shuttle between Columbus and Cleveland would be running full time and non-stop. That begs the question, of course, of why not now? One of the abiding mysteries of this season is general manager Mark Shapiro's dogged insistence on trotting out all manner of retreads along side the prospects he collected when raffling off the few good players the Indians used to have. Apparently the few Indians fans willing to pay to see this team will just have to be patient a little bit longer.

There's a tendency when things are going this bad for a team for fans to lose perspective. That's why I suspect more than a few people will think this is maybe the most miserable baseball season they've ever seen. I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to ponder franchise lows, but in truth all this season feels like is just one of the dozens this franchise has put together in the last 5 decades.

You can pick whatever reference point you'd like, but personally I like to start with 1959, a year in which this team won 89 games and finished second in the American League, 5 games behind the Chicago White Sox. That year the Indians also finished 10 games ahead of the Yankees. It looked like the beginning of something positive.

It would be 6 more seasons before the Indians finished above .500. Their 87-75 record in 1965 was good for a lousy fifth place finish. Three seasons later they finished above .500 again, going 86-75 in 1968 for a third place. It would be another 7 seasons before they'd break .500 again. You get the pattern.

The thing to remember, though, is that in each of those blue moon seasons when the Indians would actually be competitive, the seasons that followed were absolutely horrendous. For example, after the Indians won 86 games in 1968, they won only 62 the next season. Then in 1971 they won only 60. Indeed their best season between 1968 and 1976 was when they went 79-80 in 1975. That's when the league didn't care much about teams actually completely a full 162-game season.

Then, of course, came the even darker ages. Between 1977 and 1991, the Indians lost 90 or more games 6 times and in 3 of those seasons they lost at least 100. There were also seasons of 89 and 87 losses. It was pretty hopeless, desperate times.

Then came the strike-shortened seasons of 1994 and 1995, the move to Jacobs Field and the beginning of what is now known as the golden age of the franchise. Since 1995, the team has been in the playoffs 7 times. In the 94 seasons prior to then, they had only been in the playoffs three times, winning the world series twice and losing, in devastating fashion, the 1954 in four straight despite having one of the best pitching staffs in baseball history.

It's pretty clear that the golden age was brief and has since ended and the only argument is when. When history is written, most will point to the 2007 season when the Indians collapsed against the Boston Red Sox in the ALCS after holding a 3-1 lead. It's not just that the Indians lost that series but it was the disheartening, soul-sucking manner in which it happened. Seemingly invincible in games 2, 3 and 4, the team collapsed and was never even in any of the next 3 games. I'd say it was a collapse of historic proportions but then I saw the Cavaliers lose to the Celtics this season in a similar manner so it's all perspective I guess.

You could actually make the case though that this franchise really turned in a much different direction as far back as 2001. After losing to Seattle 3-2 in the divisional series, the Indians have had only two winning seasons, 2005 and 2007. With the benefit of hindsight, both look more like an anomaly than a concerted effort to keep this franchise competitive with the top tier of the league.

Consider, for example, that following each of those seasons the Indians almost stubbornly refused to make an additional, but perhaps financially costly move or two to push themselves over the top. Each time the team regressed.

At the time it was just frustrating. But now, in context, you can see more clearly see that those moves would have deviated from the plan.

The plan was launched when Larry and Paul Dolan purchased the team. Hamstrung initially by a payroll they inherited, the Dolans wth Shapiro as their implementer have been in a long but steady retreat mode, convinced that baseball's spiraling economics could bankrupt them if they weren't careful.

Having become convinced that they couldn't change baseball's fractured economics, they instead have embraced them by becoming in word and deed a small market team that that would be competitive, if ever, when the moons aligned and prospects all got good at the same time. So far their reach hasn't come close to matching their vision.

Plagued by poor drafting and poor trading, Shapiro has mostly a mess in front of him at the moment and he can't find the his broom.

As you look at this Indians team at the moment is there any player that really excites you and makes you think that perhaps he's the next Evan Longoria or Albert Pujols? Players develop at different rates and perhaps it's not fair to judge players like Lou Marson, Luis Valbuena, Lou Marson, Matt LaPorta and Mike Brantley at the moment, but is there anything about any of their games that makes you think, hey, once this guy gets it figured out watch out?

Jason Donald brings a certain energy to a team in desperate need of some, like a can of Red Bull to a college kid around 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night and Trevor Crowe has had his moments. But right now the only two young players on this team that seem worth getting excited about are Shin-Soo Choo and Cabrera, maybe Fausto Carmona as well. If you want to stretch it, maybe Mitch Talbot, too.

The question is whether this is enough to build a team around. At the moment it hardly looks like it, at least in the hand of the current regime. Shapiro, who has been on his job long enough to be fairly judged, hasn't made the grade. For every one or two decisions that have turned out well, 10 others have been colossal mistakes. As general manager's go, he's essentially Luis Valbuena, meaning that he'd need his next 50 or 60 key decisions to be on the money just to get himself back to the Mendoza line.

Going into today's game against the Yankees, the Indians are 18-30 and already have no chance of finishing at .500. That will make it two straight seasons. One more and they will tie the longest such streak in the so-called golden era. It seems as inevitable as making it four straight the season after that.

Maybe this isn't the most depressing stretch of baseball Cleveland has ever experienced but that's only because this has been a franchise that's been historically depressing. There's simply too much bad baseball in its bloodstream to get all worked up about the current state of affairs.

You could say that the Indians of today are at least better positioned to emerge sooner than their counterparts of the 1970s because at least this team seems to have an overriding plan. But what's really the difference between a good plan poorly executed and a poor plan well executed? To the fans, not much.

Status Quo Ante

There’s been little if any buzz about the recent announcements by the Cleveland Indians regarding current general manager Mark Shapiro and his assistant, Chris Antonetti. But then again maybe that’s because there’s been little if any buzz about the team they plan to put on the field this season.

For those of you too bored to either care or pay attention, at season’s end Shapiro will be leaving the daily grind of general manager duties and the two or three cell phones that job requires at all times for the relatively tranquil environs inside the team’s presidential suite. Antonetti, meanwhile, gets his wish and becomes the new Shapiro.

In corporate terms, this is what’s known as an orderly transition. Larry and Paul Dolan obviously are well pleased with what the team of Shapiro and Antonetti have brought them to date. What all this means then is pretty obvious. As we say in the legal business, status quo ante.

According to Shapiro, Antonetti has been almost functioning as the general manager anyway as he was the key decision-maker in hiring new manager Manny Acta. I’ve always liked Shapiro’s relative honesty, particularly as it contrasts with his brother-in-law Eric Mangini, who treats his lunch order as a state secret. But Shapiro has always fudged things just a little and I suspect that’s true in this case as well. Acta is his hire but the intention of associating him with Antonetti is to avoid any questions that Antonetti might get later about whether or not he desires to put his own guy in place.

In associating Acta with Antonetti, Shapiro is merely trying to avoid the itch he got when he took over the Indians and inherited Mike Hargrove. Shapiro for reasons that still have never been fully explained, didn’t much care for Hargrove and as soon as he got his sea legs in the general manager’s job, pushed Hargrove overboard. At the time and even now, the canning of Hargrove seemed like a move of a newbie general manager just itching to branch out on his own, which is what Shapiro ultimately did when he hired and fired both Charlie Manuel and Eric Wedge. But no such branching out will take place in the near term. Acta is Antonetti’s guy, at least for public consumption.

But back to the real point of all this and that’s the fact that these front office moves have elicited nothing stronger than a yawn from anyone and that includes the usual suspects from our local print media. Not a contrarian among them. Maybe they just see no news value in Shapiro replacing himself with Shapiro, Jr..

This isn’t a knock on Antonetti. By all accounts, he’s a bright guy, just like Shapiro. He operates from the exact same vantage point as Shapiro. With money lacking, they use all manner of statistical analysis to give themselves an edge in finding the right amateurs to draft and the right bottom-feeder free agents to sign.

I suppose you can get picky and point out that the Indians’ self-acknowledged biggest weakness has been its amateur draft and that Antonetti has been overseeing it, but that’s quibbling. No one was going to much argue about Antonetti’s promotion because, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. To say that somehow the Dolans are making some grievous error in keeping things as is would be to ignore all that we already know about how this franchise will be run for the duration of their ownership.

It’s not that the Dolans are cheap, per se. I’ve seen the case made about all the money they’ve spent and while I can argue forcefully to the contrary, the point is that, well, it’s a circular argument. The Indians have been sliding down the payroll ladder for years and the business model firmly in place isn’t going to change until there’s an ownership change.

Besides, with the shadow of Shapiro presiding over everything anyway, it really doesn’t much matter who will sit in the general manager’s chair. It remains Shapiro’s team to run.

In that context, there really is no news in last week’s announcement except that Indians fans don’t have much to look forward to for a long while. Both Shapiro and Antonetti can say with a straight face that they remain committed to bringing this town a championship just like the guy in front of you at the beverage store with a fistful of numbers is just as committed to winning the lottery. You know it isn’t going to happen just as he knows it isn’t going to happen. And yet, if the stars align just right and the ping pong balls come out in just the right order, then it’s Easy Street.

Both Shapiro and Antonetti (not to mention the Dolans) have to know by now that this team is entrenched in a do-loop of mediocrity. Whatever advantage they think they gain from the sophisticated computer programs they run, they still operate in a league that’s economically broken and without nearly the funds to field a team that can compete with the New York Yankees on a regular basis. In other words, the Indians chances each season depend on a 1,000,000,000-1 alignment of the planets, the stars and the galaxies. It could happen, certainly, just as it could happen that Carrie Underwood will show up at your doorstep and proclaim you the man of her dreams, but neither is all that likely.

Put it this way: All of the young talent is nice, but when a team’s major off-season acquisition is Russell Branyan (yes, him again) and that can’t even be officially announced until he passes a physical, what real hope do you have to compete for a World Series?

The evidence of a proud franchise on the fast decline is all around. According to reports, only half of the loges at Progressive Field are rented for the season. Sure, that’s a reflection of the economy, but it’s an even bigger measure of corporate and fan indifference. There’s just no great entertainment value in taking a client to an Indians game these days.

Meanwhile, just across the plaza are the Cavaliers who, operating in the exact same economy, have no trouble selling out at significantly higher prices. It’s easy to attribute it to LeBron James, but that’s just half the story. Danny Ferry has used the resources of a well-heeled owner to field an elite team while Dan Gilbert has ensured a game day experience that makes each home date an event.

Sure, if LeBron James leaves Cleveland the Cavs economics will change dramatically. But something tells me that if that happens Gilbert and Ferry will find a way to field a highly competitive team and keep the fans entertained so that the money will still flow.

At Progressive Field, the Indians have all manner of promotions and sell every kind of food imaginable, but there isn’t really much that has changed about any of it over the years. The Indians’ game day experience still consists of giving away a trinket as a way to divert the fans attention from some really average baseball. When was the last time anything really interesting happened?

But don’t take my word for it. If you want to appreciate the full level of fan indifference, consider this item from this week’s Crain’s Cleveland Business. The Indians apparently have been running a promotion (who knew?) that asks fans to explain their economic circumstances in the form of an essay for the chance to win a 12-pack of tickets. To date, the contest has yielded “nearly” 500 entries.

That doesn’t exactly strike me as a landslide of interest. If the economy was really keeping fans away, wouldn’t something like 5,000 entries have been received by now?

What this all says is that right now there aren’t even a healthy number of people willing to scrawl a few words on a piece of paper in order to get free tickets. If the Indians were smart, they’d just give every entry so far a 12-pack of tickets and call it a day. It may be the only way to get an extra 500 people at the games.

Late Season Distractions

It may not go down as one of the great questions of the universe and the answer may not actually matter all that much, but why is it that the Cleveland Indians can win late in the season with lesser players and not earlier when it matters more?

That’s a question on every Indians’ fan mind, or at least the mind of every Indians’ fan that hasn’t forgotten that the team is still playing. It also has to be near the top of the list of questions that Indians’ owners Larry and Paul Doland and Indians general manager Mark Shapiro have to be asking themselves as well.

For the Dolans and Shapiro, the question isn’t academic. Getting to the heart of this conundrum will, as much as anything else, determine whether manager Eric Wedge needs to find a different coaching gig over the winter.

If you were Wedge’s agent, you’d certainly use the team’s 20-15 record since the All Star break as reason number 1 why Wedge needs to be retained. That argument is easily crafted. Wedge has taken a lineup that’s been almost completely overhauled during the middle of the season and found a way to make a little chicken salad with it. The team as it exists today will be close to the team that steps on the field next spring and thus, the logic goes, there’s no reason to think that Wedge can’t get the same results then that he’s getting now.

Actually, there is a reason to think otherwise. But let’s not get hung up in the weeds.

All the Indians’ mini post-All Star surge has proven at best is that Wedge can’t manage a team with lofty ambitions. It’s not particularly relevant that the national media anointed the Indians as a contender going into the season as much as it’s relevant that Wedge’s bosses felt the same way. In response, Wedge ran another in a series of lousy spring trainings that did little to prepare the team for what was to come. Entering the season ill-prepared, Wedge’s incessant tinkering and inability to set a lineup only contributed to the problem. As Wedge fiddled, the team began to collapse around itself as the losses mounted. It was only after the pressure and burden of expectations was lifted did the team finally relax. It doesn’t sound like something you’d want to put on your resume.

That’s the overview. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. There are a number of fingers in this pie, some of which are those of the people asking the questions about Wedge in the first place.

Let’s start with the Dolans. Dispensing with the argument about whether or not they’ve properly funded this team, it’s enough to admit for these purposes that they sufficiently funded it for this season. The Indians entered the season with a payroll of around $81 million, according to the USA Today salary database. That put them in the top half of the league, although behind, well behind, both Detroit and Chicago.

Although the correlation between spending and success in baseball is undeniable, the Indians, at least this season, were in that comfortable middle ground where this season, at least for them, wouldn’t be decided by a relative lack of funds.

Where the Dolans need to be held more accountable is in their abject faith in Shapiro. Certainly not publicly and unlikely privately, the Dolans haven’t much questioned Shapiro and his approach until very recently. This has been unfortunate.

Shapiro isn’t the sum total of all that ails but his history over the last several years has been dotted with enough mistakes and missed opportunities, if not outright red flags, that it’s surprising he’s not been held more accountable. This team has drafted poorly. Its free agent signings have been very spotty. Its connection with the fans has been at its convenience. Budget constraints are a factor, certainly, but other teams have done more with less. The Florida Marlin and Tampa Bay Rays come immediately to mind.

Shapiro also has acted as the mother-protector for Wedge even when the circumstances didn’t warrant it. It’s not as if Wedge’s main flaws developed suddenly and unexpectedly. He’s never been able to settle on a lineup and he’s never run a particularly efficient spring training camp. His in-game decisions are often questionable. Yet it’s apparent that these weren’t of sufficient concern to Shapiro. If they had been perhaps those problems would have been fixed long ago.

Shapiro may have deserved the support of the Dolans and may still, but if the Dolans are going to be successful running this franchise on the cheap, they are going to have to do a better job of holding Shapiro accountable for the team’s shortcomings. Blame Wedge as much as you want, and we’ll get to him in a moment, but the days of blind faith in how this franchise is run on a day to day basis is the first step on the road to whatever recovery there may be.

Similarly, the days have long since passed for Shapiro to still consider himself joined at the hip with Wedge. For too long, Shapiro has treated Wedge like a long lost brother from another mother. When Shapiro had his last contract extended he in turn gave a similar extension to Wedge. It’s as if they were still little boys on a camp out, cutting their index fingers, swearing allegiance to each other; blood brothers.

This symbiotic relationship, somewhat the reverse of the relationship between Browns’ head coach Eric Mangini and general manager George Kokinis, looks like one of those great ideas until it isn’t. Unquestionably it’s better for the manager and the general manager to be on the same page. But there’s a world of difference between being on the same page and being of the same mind.

The problem with the Shapiro/Wedge dynamic is that it’s all just yin and yin. Neither seems to challenge the other and no one is the better for it. The only thing harder to fathom right now than an Indians World Series victory is Shapiro and Wedge going toe to toe over anything.

Does anyone seriously think that Wedge, for example, ever went into Shapiro’s office and said “we’ve got to do something about Jhonny Peralta” or Shapiro ever demanded Wedge in his office to find out why Grady Sizemore’s plate discipline has declined each year instead of improved?

Instead, each does the other’s bidding in an effort to keep the boat steady. Meanwhile neither noticed how much water the boat was taking on, at least until it was nearly too late.

As the Dolans have with Shapiro, it may be that Wedge deserves the support he’s gotten from Shapiro. Maybe he deserves it still. But if he does it has to be under a much different paradigm. Wedge’s shortcomings are too many and too obvious for Shapiro to continue to ignore.

The lesson of this season is that more than anything else it was an institutional failure. The Indians didn’t suddenly get bad because Shapiro had an off year finding cheap talent. They didn’t fail because Wedge suddenly got complacent. It’s the little acts of negligence that occurred and went unnoticed for too long that ultimately did this team in.

That’s why if this team is ever going to get out of its interminable purgatory it has to look far beyond the fool’s gold of a late season surge that still has left it one of the worst teams in the league. The road to recovery is long. It’s impossible to navigate if you won’t admit you’re lost in the first place.

Lingering Items--Water Over the Dam Edition

There isn’t much utility or fun in continuing to turn over the same shovel of dirt. But when it comes to the Cleveland Indians sometimes they just beg you to make the effort.

Indians’ co-owner Paul Dolan met with the media the other day to essentially lay out his case for the team’s recent upheaval. While not exactly contradicting general manager Mark Shapiro on the very fine points, he let it be known that without the changes the Indians were on track to lose millions; many, many millions. As it is, even with the recent strip-mining, the team is on track to lose $16 million.

Ok, so Shapiro wasn’t under a specific edict to dump salary. He was just told that the owners were on track to lose multi-millions and weren’t going to be all that pleased with it. And in case Shapiro was being particularly dense, they told him that if he maintained the status quo ante under the misguided notion that the team could compete next year, the chance that there would be any money to play with in the next five or so years under these circumstances were about the same as the team trading for CC Sabathia.

I’m not suggesting that the Dolans should take losing any amount of money, let alone double-digit millions, lightly. I get cranky over far less money. But this is the business they chose and no one promised it would be all rainbows and gum drops.

What’s telling and what portends for things to come is how Dolan said the losses would be covered—through loans and an infusion of family cash. That’s a red flag. While presumably the cash infused from the Dolans is more in the nature of a gift, a loan has to be paid back or at least they used to under the old economy. And if you remember from your Business Administration 101 class, any service on a loan adds to the operating costs of a franchise that already is struggling. The direct impact from a fan’s perspective is two-fold: increased prices to and lowered payroll costs. Presumably most fans would rather embrace the exact opposite scenario.

Dolan was emphatic that his family has no intention on selling the club but then again Art Modell had no intention of selling the Browns. As losses mount, the dynamics change. This, ultimately, will determine Shapiro’s fate with the team. Before the Dolans let the team drive them into personal bankruptcy, they will try everything short of a sale first. If Shapiro can’t deliver a team that can make money, or at least not lose multi-millions, they will find someone different. That’s collateral you can take to a bank.

In that context, Shapiro’s maneuvers are completely understandable, but only in the larger sense. Payroll had to be trimmed. The trick is in trimming the right payroll. Shapiro may have had no choice in dumping Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez, but that’s only because less valuable assets but far bigger drags on the team’s budget, like Travis Hafner and Jake Westbrook, were untradeable.

Defaulting to the most available targets is not at all the same thing as choosing the right targets. For example, the Indians 0f 2010 could still have Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez and still be $10 million ahead if they could have dumped Hafner and Westbrook instead. Of course the Indians wouldn’t have the gaggle of Single A prospects they got in return, but something has to be sacrificed.

The reason this makes a difference is that a team with Lee and Martinez and an extra $10 million of payroll has a better chance of being successful in 2010 than a team without them but with Hafner and Westbrook. If it had success that would translate into higher attendance or at least reverse the loss of attendance and with that the financial losses, if any, to the Dolans are minimized. Suddenly the future doesn’t look so iffy.

But of course Shapiro couldn’t trade a fading Hafner and an injured Westbrook. But by getting caught in the box where such large contracts crippled this team and forced him into making far more dangerous trades of more effective players, Shapiro set the franchise back years if not decades. That may be water over the dam but it’s water that’s leaving the fans soaked for years to come.

**

Dolan couldn’t have made a better case for a salary cap in baseball than this quote: “If every four or five years we can have a shot at the World Series and contend for the playoffs at other times, that’s as good as it gets for a team in this type of market.”

The fact that his assessment is so dead-on accurate is a crushing reality for the fans. One wonders, then, why doesn’t the problem get fixed?

Dolan went on to illustrate how the reality of baseball’s fundamental economic model impacts a team’s entire operations in ways most fans might not even realize. By example he noted that large-market clubs aren’t just getting all the prime free agents, but they are using their money to manipulate the amateur draft as well to ensure the best young talent.

Without delving into too much detail on this, and my colleague Tony Lastoria is a far better resource than me, but the byzantine-like system the major leagues use in the draft is directly responsible for this happening. Basically, large-market teams can assure that the top prospects they draft get signed instead of going to college by throwing more money at them. The world-wide amateur free agent market is like a supermarket where they are the only ones that can get through the doors.

Teams like the Indians, on the other hand, often compromise on draft picks and amateur free agents because signability is a huge factor in the decision-making process. If the Indians know that the player is represented by, for example, Scott Boras, an agent that demands top dollar, they’ll likely take a pass and gravitate toward a lesser skilled but more signable player. Meanwhile, the better prospect eventually drifts to a large market team that will meet his demands.

The concept of small and mid-size markets basically doesn’t exist in either the NBA or the NFL and the common denominator is a salary cap. Out of either foresight or desperation both sports embraced the concept of having all of its partners on a level playing field. Baseball on the other hand doesn’t even see it as a worthy goal.

Likewise, in the NFL teams typically don’t avoid players on the basis that they are un-signable. Occasionally you’ll see a team with a high first round draft pick go in a slightly different direction because it feels it can get the player under contract more quickly, but that is the exception. In the NBA, the concept doesn’t exist. A rookie salary scale, more liberal free agent rules and a salary cap that favors the incumbent team all work to keep the playing field the most level in all of professional sports.

The Indians’ problems are baseball problems and don’t look for any substantive resolution of the former until there are fundamental resolutions to the latter.

**

Moving over to the Browns and their own odyssey toward respectability, receiver Braylon Edwards finally returned to practice and we now know, but not through the team, that he was sitting out because of an ankle injury. And we now know, but not through the team, that Edwards was absolutely brilliant during his first practice. We know it because the local media, without absolutely anything better to do, have taken to literally following training camp on a pass-by-pass basis.

Maybe it’s due to the restrictions the team has placed on the media or the general distrust that head coach Eric Mangini has toward it, but this season’s coverage of training camp by our friends at the Plain Dealer, the News-Herald, the Canton Repository and the Akron Beacon Journal is so mind-numbingly mundane it makes the directions for applying Chap Stick seem positively riveting by comparison.

If case you didn’t know, there is a quarterback competition taking place between Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn. In honor of it, readers of our faithful printed newspapers are given the intimate details of just how many passes were completed in the 7-on-7 drills and to whom. If you think this at all matters, well, that’s where you’d be wrong.

Mangini says something interesting or insightful publicly only by accident. But yet I actually think that when he told the media that it is not so much a day-by-day analysis as much as it is an overall assessment, he was telling the truth. The fact is that if Mangini is so random as to base the outcome of the starting quarterback decision on who went 5-6 on Thursday morning nd who went 4-7, then he is abjectly unqualified to be anything more than the ball boy he used to be.

Maybe it is important how Quinn looked on Tuesday and how Anderson looked on Wednesday morning. Maybe, but I doubt it. Ken Dorsey can look good in a scrimmage. Quarterbacks are made or broken on the actual playing field, which is why this Sunday’s scrimmage, more than anything that’s happened so far, will go a long way toward determining each quarterback’s fate.

**

The Indians have certainly put me in an existential mood. Thus this week’s question to ponder: If the Indians trade Carl Pavano to the Minnesota Twins and no one cares, did the trade really happen?

Job Security, Cleveland Style

The economy may be the reason that all those jobs are being shed in northeast Ohio, but it’s not the reason for all the job insecurity with Cleveland’s three major sports teams.

In just this last year, the Browns dumped a head coach that never deserved the job anyway. The Cavs’ Mike Brown was rumored to be in trouble because he couldn’t get his team past Orlando in this year’s Eastern Conference finals and now the Indians’ Eric Wedge’s head is on the chopping block and the Dolans are sharpening the axe.

Yes, kids, it’s been that kind of year on the lakefront.

It must be absolutely killing Indians’ general manager Mark Shapiro to see that the man he groomed, the man to whom he basically tied his own fate, presiding over a season so wrapped in awfulness that the stench is likely to linger long past season’s end, which, by the way, was officially declared Sunday with the third straight loss to the Cubs.

With Wedge literally dangling by the short hairs, everyone’s got an opinion. Let’s dispense with the easiest and work our way down.

The argument that merely changing managers isn’t going to change the fortunes of this team is true, at least for this season. The Indians right now more resemble the Columbus Clippers than any semblance of a comprehensive big-league team. It’s due to a combination of injuries, poor decisions by Shapiro and another season when hope once again was the company’s strategic plan.

No better example of these latter two attributes exists than in the body of Ben Francisco. He’s the kind of player that gets a spot on the roster by virtue of his youth and the theory that the hint of promise he’s shown previously magically translates to consistent, high-level performance by virtue of the old “another year of experience.” Right now, Francisco isn’t even a legitimate major league player.

In the 9th inning of Sunday’s game, Francisco let three straight fastballs blow right past him and never ever bothered to swing. Having a bat in your hand in a major league game doesn’t make you a major leaguer. Doing something with it does. Francisco couldn’t be more out of his element if he was a piano player in a marching band.

Using Francisco as the prototype and extrapolating from there, it’s easy to see why changing the manager doesn’t change the fortunes of the team. A roster of Franciscos would challenge Whitey Herzog. But that’s only part of the story.

The more difficult opinion to deflect is the one where it’s asked, if not Wedge then who? The point, I think, is that the season already is lost and there’s not much an interim manager can do except put the team further behind the development curve. The odds are that the Indians won’t find the right next manager until this season ends so they’re better off waiting anyway.

That’s probably true. But the flipside of all that is what good does it do to keep a lame duck in office? It’s been said that the players haven’t yet quit on Wedge but that’s just a final hurdle to navigate. Once it becomes clear that his future is behind him, the players won’t so much quit as tune him out. Indeed, a compelling case can already be made that Wedge is an analog broadcast in a digital world and there aren’t any more conversion boxes available.

Some (many?) still see great value in Wedge and thus argue that dumping him now scratches an immediate itch but ultimately will leave a rash. That’s probably the most difficult argument to confront because it’s not factually based. It’s opinion with a healthy dose of baggage and without any right answer to boot.

No one has a corner on the rightness of their views. But some, by virtue of the job they hold have more weight attached to them. In this case, Shapiro still appears to be a Wedge fan so that goes a wee bit further than the rest of the unwashed. Moreover, as a general manager, Shapiro is paid to have a long-term approach and not operate through just a series of resolutions to short-term crises. Shapiro absolutely has to think in terms of the team’s overall best interests not just today, but tomorrow and the thousands of other tomorrows.

That being the case, Shapiro owes it to the fans to explain exactly what continuing value he sees in Wedge long-term. That’s the case he’ll be making to the Dolans anyway if he wants to save him from so why not make it to the public as well? All Shapiro has done thus far is fall on his own sword while absolving Wedge of any crimes.

From where most fans sit, the most distinguishing thing about Wedge is his lack of distinction. You can’t really say objectively that he’s bad at anything just as you can’t really say objectively that he’s great at anything. He kind of hovers around the surface maintaining an even keel. Every once in awhile he let’s his facial hair grow out.

In a vacuum, those don’t exactly constitute dischargeable offenses. In context, they are but a few of the many symptoms of a far larger problem.

If Shapiro is being honest with himself, the case against Wedge is far more compelling than the transient concerns of another lost season. Simply put, it comes down to this: seven years into his career Wedge hasn’t grown much as a manager. The same annoying habits then are the same annoying habits now.

He rarely keeps a set lineup and that was in the good times, not just now. For a man who counsels patience in others he’s an inveterate tinkerer himself. He also has a tendency to favor the many mediocre veteran roster-fillers that Shapiro shoves his way each season. You almost get the sense that Shapiro had to pry David Dellucci from Wedge’s cold, dead hand.

The more damning evidence though is in the form of players like Jhonny Peralta and Grady Sizemore. While Wedge is busy neither succeeding wildly nor cratering magnificently, players like Peralta and Sizemore find themselves on the precipice of failing major league careers.

Peralta may very well be a head case, but the job of a manager is to find a way to reach him. Wedge has tried a number of different approaches but nothing has resonated yet. That may be as much on Peralta as it is on Wedge, but as the leader it’s more Wedge’s failure than anyone’s. The ability to resonate with your players is at the very top of the long list of qualifications for any manager.

The same story is unfolding with Sizemore. At this point is there anyone out there that still believes that Sizemore is even close to delivering on the promise of his talent? Sizemore’s lack of development really mirrors that of Wedge and the picture isn’t pretty. Sizemore is a pretty decent defensive centerfielder and is developing decent power at the plate. But he hasn’t found a way to consistently make contact at the plate and, as a result, strikes out far too often for a player that’s supposed to be a table setter.

Wedge has had conversation after conversation with him. It hasn’t worked. Sizemore is still a young player but the fear is that his development is being, at the very least, stunted under the direction of Wedge. At most, it’s being ruined. That’s a circumstance that Shapiro simply cannot allow to linger.

It may be a mystery as to why Wedge consistently fails to develop the talent he’s given, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Who knows what he’s lost Fausto Carmona? But how many more prospects have to have their careers stuck in permanent neutral before Shapiro sees the trend? That’s the reality that Shapiro must confront more so than the current losing streak.

For Shapiro to be true to his own calling and job description he’s going to have to let go of his emotional attachment to Wedge and put him under the same exacting microscope he uses for the hundreds of players he looks at each season. Wedge can’t stand up to that scrutiny and Shapiro will realize it sooner rather than later. For his sake, not to mention his own job security, it probably better be before his bosses are forced to intervene.

Payroll Apologists

The headline was promising too bad the story didn’t live up to it.

In Sunday’s Akron Beacon Journal, an enterprising copy editor must have read only the first few paragraphs of Sheldon Ocker’s story about the Indians pathetic payroll and decided that the gist of the story was “If money talks, Indians are mute.” Unfortunately for that poor copy editor, he or she missed Ocker’s point. Beat writer turned team apologist Ocker essentially defended what has become nearly indefensible—the fact that the Dolans continue to drift further and further from funding the team at a competitive level.

Ocker’s story was on the heels of Terry Pluto’s column earlier in the week in which team president Paul Dolan suggested that the team is in a “win now” mode, has money to spend and that General Manager Mark Shapiro has the payroll flexibility he needs to make a deal he likes.

Pluto’s column was more or less an interview with Dolan and was presented simply as Dolan’s viewpoint. Fine. But it doesn’t appear as though Pluto really challenged much of Dolan’s assertions. But more on the Pluto/Dolan interview in a moment because more offensive was the column by Ocker who has gone from an enterprising, insightful beat reporter to a cranky, lazy team shill who probably should either be removed from the beat or start getting his paychecks directly from the team.

It is true, as Ocker notes, that teams with a lesser payroll can be more successful than teams that spend more. In making this rather pedestrian observation, Ocker mocks those who think otherwise, referring to his “e-mails and the learned opinions of talk-show callers” who believe that if the Dolans would spend more the Indians would be perennial competitors in the World Series.

What Ocker, and by proxy, the Dolans, doesn’t want to acknowledge is that it’s also true that when lesser spending teams are successful, it’s fleeting and still the exception and not the rule. Teams that consistently spend like the Yankess are consistently in the hunt, plain and simple. The Yankess might not win it all every year or any year, but they are always in the mix. Kansas City, on the other hand, never spends and is rarely competitive. In the last 17 years, they’ve had a winning record just four times. Even then, their high water mark was 84-78 in 1993.

Tampa Bay, another team that never spends, has never won more than 70 games since they entered the league in 1998. But since ending a four-year sub .500 streak that began in 1989, the Yankees haven’t come close to a having a losing record. In that time span, however, they’ve won 100 games four times, and between 95-99 games five times. Even the one team that seems to defy the odds on a regular basis, the Oakland As, have not won 100 games during that period. Ocker’s right, the fans are idiots. There is no correlation between spend and result.

But far more offensive than Ocker’s slam at fans who rightly question the Dolans commitment to consistently producing a competitive team is the exercise he went through to try to prove his point. He compiled a list of former Tribe players “many” he claims, were traded because they “made more money than the Cleveland market could sustain.” The problem with his list is that it is wildly inaccurate and in most cases doesn’t support his underlying premise.

The “fantasy roster” as he dubs it is the highest-salaried former Indians player at each position who, again, were discarded by the Dolans for money reasons. Of the former pitchers, only a handful meets those criteria. Most were unsigned free agents. And of those unsigned free agents, salary wasn’t the issue, effectiveness was. The salary casualties were clearly Bartolo Colon, Kevin Millwood, Bob Wickman, Danys Baez and Bob Howry. The suggestion that injured Jaret Wright, barely effective Scott Elarton, Julian Tavarez, Justin Speier, Jose Mesa, Alan Embree and Rheal Cormier weren’t signed because “the made more money than the Cleveland market could sustain” is laughable. The Dolans may be cheapskates, but this is hardly the list one would compile as evidence.

The same goes for the position players. Jeff Kent played exactly 39 games for the Indians in 1996. That was four years before the Dolans even owned the club. Brian Giles left in 1998, two years before the Dolans took over. Sean Casey was traded in 1997 again well before the Dolans’ ownership. Josh Bard, Aaron Boone and Kenny Lofton salary casualties? Hardly. In fact, in almost every case, the player Ocker identifies fails to even minimally meet the criteria set forth.

That’s the problem with being a team apologist. It requires you to bend and stretch reality to fit the talking points. Having set up a ridiculous straw man of an argument, Ocker rightly concludes that this “fantasy” team would not be superior to the current Cleveland lineup. But far more useful is considering which of the actual salary casualties should not have been and then add them to the current roster and determine whether or not the Indians would be better off.

On this score, the results are far different. Colon is a legitimate number one starter, but his trade did yield two starters: Cliff Lee and Grady Sizemore. Moreover, if the Indians are in good shape anywhere, it’s starting pitching so that salary dump, while painful, has worked out fine and shouldn’t be revisited. Millwood is a different story. He wasn’t a salary dump but the Indians decided not to pursue him out of salary considerations solely. Keeping him would only have cost the Dolans money, $9.8 million to be exact. While starting pitching is strength, a rotation with Millwood would make the Indians even stronger. Of the relievers Ocker chose, the three that were salary casualties, Wickman, Baez and Howry, all would make the Indians much stronger. Of the position players Ocker names, only Omar Vizquel was really a salary casualty. The jury is still out on Jhonny Peralta, his replacement. Certainly the Indians would have been much better off last year with Vizquel at short. In fact, Vizquel’s presence would have solidified a shaky defense that cost the Indians a winning record.

Thus, assuming Millwood, Wickman, Howry, Baez, and Vizquel had been signed, it would add about $30 million to the current payroll. However, the net addition to payroll would be about half that when you lop off the players on the current roster they’d replace, such as Jhonny Peralta, Joe Borowski, Roberto Hernandez, Aaron Foltz, Jake Westbrook or Paul Byrd. Thus, that would put the Indians 2007 payroll at, roughly, $75 million, which would place them 17th in the league and third in the AL Central, well behind Detroit and Chicago and just slightly ahead of Minnesota. You could take this exercise a step or two further by throwing in Jim Thome, but that would probably put the payroll in the top 15, which is too much to ask of current ownership.

No one is saying that the Indians should have the highest payroll in the league. But they shouldn’t have among the lowest, either. But the frugality of the Dolans, to put it generously, is why the Indians find themselves these days on the outside looking in.

As for Pluto’s interview with Paul Dolan, it’s easy for Dolan to say that the Indians are in a win-now mode and have payroll flexibility when the season is young and there are no trades to make. The real test, which the Dolans have failed in each year of their ownership, comes in late July when the trading deadline approaches. But while Pluto didn’t take a similar disdainful view of the fans in favor of an ownership that has failed these fans, neither did he do much to challenge the assertions of Dolan on behalf of the fans.

For example, Pluto didn’t seem to push Dolan on his claim of a $69 million payroll when the true 25-man payroll is $8 million less, or about two Bobby Howrys. And while Pluto gave Dolan a forum for recounting all the coulda woulda trades and acquisitions that the team has tried to consummate but did not in the last few years, Pluto never asked the harder question of why it is that Shapiro can never seem to get the deal closed.

There is no question that any difficult issue is imbued with a variety of perspectives. Baseball economics certainly falls into that category. But the most telling aspect of the Pluto interview was Dolan’s admission that luxury suite sales are down, precipitously, as is attendance. In the end, that is the most visible evidence that the fans are fed up with the product and its prospects under this ownership. Simply spending more may not be the only answer, but if you’re compiling a list, it’s in the top two.