Lingering Items--Battle Royale Edition

When it comes to the NFL, the only thing Cleveland Browns fans want to worry about is whether or not this team will ever win more than 5 games in a season again. But if you want a fun NFL-related distraction that is more competitive than the Browns have been in years, keep watch on the battle royale shaping up between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith.

Smith has made almost a cottage industry out of trying to reshape the image of Goodell from guardian of the game to a power hungry dictator more concerned with his stature then the welfare of the game or its players. Goodell for his part treats Smith like the pest that he is.

Smith's strategy was borne from the moment he ran for and won his current role following the death of the previous executive director, Gene Upshaw. Smith took a strident approach to his campaign by implying not all the subtly that Upshaw’s relationship with Paul Tagliabue was bad for the players, never mind that Upshaw and Tagliabue presided over the greatest expansion of wealth ever of their sport.

Smith took this approach because he knew that new commissioner Goodell has won his job by reflecting the desires of a strong and vocal group of owners who felt about Tagliabue like some players felt about Upshaw—that he was selling them out. When Tagliabue pushed a settlement of the previous collective bargaining agreement on the owners, there were many that felt he went to far in terms of the guarantees that went to players.

It was hardly a secret that the owners wanted to blow up the last agreement as soon as it was legally possible and reclaim their economic footing. The recession of 2008 helped their argument.

So it made sense for Smith to play to the fears of the players that Goodell was nothing more than a bag man for the likes of Jerry Jones in Dallas and that strong, strident, combative leadership was needed as a counterbalance.

Most players are about as vested in the inner workings of their union as you’d expect, meaning not much at all. In truth, most would prefer not to have their paychecks lightened by union dues. But they’ll go along to get along and so when Smith’s siren song found voice with the few who pay attention, his hiring was almost a foregone conclusion. I wonder, though, if anyone ever checked his resume. Smith had absolutely no labor experience when he got his job and then went about proving how disastrous that could be.

The owners weren’t exactly private about their intentions with respect to getting out of the last labor agreement and Smith wasn’t exactly private about what he was going to do in response. Relying on his training as a trial lawyer and his lack of experience as a labor lawyer, Smith turned to litigation to get his way. It didn't work.

Smith seemed to be under the impression that he could get the courts to stop the owners from not just exercising their legal right to get out of the contract, but also get them to force new terms and conditions on the owners that they wouldn’t want to accept. It was always going to fail.

Labor laws strike a decent balance between the workers and the owners in virtually all industries. Those laws certainly provide needed protections to workers who ban together to bargain collectively (as well as needed protections to help them ban together in the first place). But they also acknowledge that business owners are the ones at risk and thus don’t require those owners to agree to any particular proposal put forth. Both sides have the legal right to ask for anything and both sides have the same right to always say no as long as all of this is done in good faith.

The owners had, in their view, plenty of economic incentive behind their proposals. It could hardly be said they weren’t made in good faith. The players had good faith reasons for saying no. Eventually though the only place this could ever get settled was the bargaining table and not in court. No court or administrative agency can dictate the terms of anyone’s labor contract, simple as that.

Smith’s pushing the union into a legal battle delayed bargaining for months without meaningfully increasingly the union’s leverage. The owners were willing to lose the season if necessary to take back control of their economic future and the players, whose careers are fleeting, were always going to cave. A more reasoned leader would have seen this from the outset and set about to find the best bargain available in a bad situation. As it turns out, the deal Smith did sign was not appreciably different or better then what he could have had before he let his members get locked out.

So Smith has been smarting from this embarrassment ever since and has gone after Goodell at every turn. Hardly a day goes by when the NFLPA isn’t challenging one issue or another or reneging on one agreement or another.

Consider, three recent examples.

First, Smith agreed to HGH testing in the latest collective bargaining agreement and has since been walking back that commitment and it still isn’t resolved.

Second, the owners voted to make it mandatory that all players wear thigh and knee pads, which is well within their rights to unilaterally make that call under the collective bargaining agreement. It shouldn’t be particularly controversial given all the attention that player safety is getting these days. Not surprisingly the union is contesting the owners’ right to force players to wear this protection. Remind me again who cares more about safety?

Third, the union filed a complaint this week alleging collusion by the owners in the uncapped 2010 season. Whatever claim the union had over that matter they waived when they signed the new collective bargaining agreement. Both sides waived all claims, known and unknown, that either had or could have had about any issues under the old collective bargaining agreement, the uncapped year, or the negotiations for a new agreement. Despite this waiver, which Smith signed, he’s suing anyway buttressed by a failed legal strategy which depends on the union's direct disavowal of the agreement it signed—again.

In each case, and irrespective of what the NFLPA might say publicly, these actions are about Smith trying to build his stature on the back of Goodell. A more reasoned leader would find a more reasoned approach but that hasn't been Smith's style.

The owners and the players are under a long term labor contract at the moment so an all out labor war isn't in the offing. But these constant firefights aren't helping the game and they aren't helping the players. They aren't even helping Smith. The union should have strong leadership. Goodell does need a foil and a counterbalance. But Smith at the moment isn't helping his stature or the union's by constantly reneging on the agreements he's signed.

**

When did Jim Brown turn into Bob Feller?

People who never saw Feller pitch tend to know about him through old photos and newsreels or, prior to his death, from his gig as a so-called goodwill ambassador for the Indians. He pull on a uniform occasionally and throw the ball around. He'd also wax cranky on just about everything and everyone. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the cartoon character Crankshaft was based on Feller.

But Feller had a certain charm anyway. Jim Brown? Not so much.

Arguably the greatest running back ever and certainly the best player to ever play for the Browns, Jim Brown used to serve the role with the Browns that Feller did with the Indians. But then Mike Holmgren was hired and for reasons that have never been explained, adequately or otherwise, Holmgren jettisoned Brown and his $500,000 salary from the Stadium while owner Randy Lerner wasn't looking.

Since that parting, Brown has turned into the cranky old guy. He raised a few eyebrows when the Browns drafted Trent Richardson by calling Richardson ordinary. And he still tweaking his old employer, Richardson and Holmgren, per an interview Tony Grossi conducted with him recently for ESPN Cleveland.

Brown stuck by his assessment of Richardson, calling him efficient. Brown just doesn't see greatness. Fair enough since Richardson hasn't even played a down in the NFL. But Brown did take another shot at Holmgren. He said the Browns are still a mess and it is due in large part to what he feels is Holmgren's lack of commitment to the team or the area.

Brown certainly is coming across as embittered. Losing a half million dollar salary will do that to a guy. But it's not as if Brown's comments lack a basis.

He explained in detail why he feels Richardson is ordinary, mainly due to what Brown feels is a lack of speed and quickness. Brown says Richardson has the opportunity to be a good workhorse type back but fans shouldn't be expecting the second coming of Emmitt Smith. On Holmgren, Brown rightfully points out his penchant for giving revealing interviews to Seattle radio stations while being mostly invisible to the Cleveland media.

The Browns have been a strange organization for so long that it's hard to tell what Holmgren is causing vs. what Holmgren is continuing. But alienating Brown was one of Holmgren's dumbest ideas. Maybe it was a money saver but that probably wouldn't have been necessary if Holmgren has not exercised his dumbest decision to date, wasting a year in this franchise's life by keeping Eric Mangini around for another year.

**

There seems to be a growing consensus that Browns head coach Pat Shurmur isn't very good at his job, based mostly on the team's performance last season.

It's an unfair conclusion to draw.

Shurmur was hamstrung from the moment he got the job. First, he was hired a year too late because of Holmgren's aforesaid dumb idea of retaining Mangini and his system for an extra year. Then Shurmur was hamstrung by the NFL's labor situation which prevented him from having any contact with any players in the off season. That set Shurmur back and set the players back. At most, the offensive scheme he was implementing wasn't fully in place until late in the season.

Finally, Shurmur was handcuffed by the front office's refusal to provide Shurmur with one credible receiver, which is a kind of important position in the West Coast offense. Sure, they drafted Greg Little, but he hadn't even played in a year and when drafted he was immediately their best threat. That's how bad it was.

Shurmur's now had a full off season. The front office still hasn't helped him by again refusing to provide him with credible receivers, but at least he now has a good running back and a quarterback in whom he's more fully vested. This doesn't represent a make or break year by any means for Shurmur but it will tell us far more about what kind of head coach he might ultimately be.

**

The Indians' sweep of the Tigers leads to this week's question to ponder: What's more surprising, the play of the Indians or the play of the Tigers?

Lingering Items--Winter Doldrums Edition

 When the Super Bowl ends sometime around 10 p.m. EDT this Sunday it will mark not just the end of a very curious but interesting football season. It is also will mark the beginning of the dullest period of the sports season.

Fortunately, the dull times don’t last too long as it’s at most a few weeks until major league teams report to spring training. Until then, though, you have time to catch up on Mad Men before the next season starts in March or waste your time with meaningless games in whatever sport you follow.

The Ohio State Buckeyes men’s basketball team, talented and athletic and a real contender for a national championship, have a difficult schedule ahead over the last half of their regular season, but the presence of a Big Ten tournament and the knowledge that the Buckeyes will be in the NCAA tournament come March render these upcoming games mildly interesting and overwhelmingly irrelevant, like the Plain Dealer on a good day.

Far worse, though, is the NBA season and not just because the Cavaliers are still in the early stages of a major rebuild which, if history is any indication, is a minimum 8 year process. If there are any NHL fans in this area, and I suppose there probably are a few, nothing much interesting happens this time of year, either. Like the NBA, more teams make the playoffs then should and only a few teams really have a chance of taking the crown. That much was known months ago and not much has changed in the interim.

So what we’re left with for the next few weeks is to engage in postseason speculation when it comes to the Browns, preseason bitching when it comes to the Indians and in season indifference when it comes to the Cavs.

**

Let’s start with the Cavs. With them, the current mostly boring debate surrounds whether or not the team should just continue on a losing path for the rest of the season in order to secure a better draft pick. Right now, the Cavs would make the playoffs and wouldn’t make the lottery. It’s a situation known as NBA purgatory. There are only a few teams with a legitimate chance to make the NBA Finals. There are a few others that are close to that level and thus would likely benefit from the seasoning that the NBA playoffs bring. The rest of the teams though are just spinning their wheels in the most unproductive manner possible in purgatory.

There is no good that could come from the Cavs making the playoffs this season. They are simply too far away to reap any tangible benefit from playing in the postseason. If/when the Cavs are able to cobble together enough pieces and parts to make a far more legitimate run, most of the players on the current team will be playing elsewhere. In other words, getting playoff experience under their belts, to the extent that matters, won’t benefit the Cavs anyway.

All that said, of course, it’s ridiculous to think about tanking an entire NBA season. Professional athletes for the most part are imbued with a strong sense of pride and competitiveness. They may know their team sucks, but when the whistle blows they still tend to play hard if only because they don’t want to be embarrassed.

There are notable exceptions to this of course. The Cavs, for example, have had rosters full of players that mailed it in for millions a year. But this Cavs roster isn’t of that ilk. They aren’t talented enough to compete at the highest levels but neither are they jaded enough to spend the rest of the season going through the motions.

I don’t think that fans need to worry anyway. Water finds its level and for this Cavs team, that’s somewhere far closer to the ceiling then the upper floors. The lottery looks secure for another season.

**

The Indians, on the other hand, are about to embark on another gun fight once again wielding a dull knife. They spent another offseason gathering spare parts and broken hearts through barter while the key competition around them acquired assets with cash.

It’s to their detriment but not their fault that they didn’t acquire Prince Fielder and his expanding waist line. It was an ill advised move by the Detroit Tigers. But it does emphasize why the Indians will always fall short of filling the gaps they need. They are essentially playing in a different league when it comes to better financed teams.

The acquisition of Fielder by the Tigers is interesting because it somewhat dispels the notion of small market vs. big market teams. I don’t think of Detroit as a big market anymore although that tide could be turning along with the fortunes of the auto industry. They're just a small market with a big market thinking owner.

That said, I don’t recommend that any team, least of all the Indians, overpay someone like Fielder who looks like he took training tips from an online consortium run by CC Sabathia and Dinner Bell Mel Turpin. The contract the Tigers committed to for Fielder will be a bigger millstone around their neck then the Travis Hafner contract has been around the Indians’.

I fully expect that Fielder will have some good numbers for the next year or two and some of that will come at the expense of the Indians as they try to claw back into relevance. But come years 6, 7, 8 and 9, if not years 3, 4 and 5, someone in Detroit is going to lose his job for green lighting Project Fielder for $200+ million.

Meanwhile, back at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario, the Indians are putting on their usual offseason flourish designed to systematically lower expectations as part of their overriding goal each year to under promise and over deliver.

Indeed that’s why last season felt like such a revelation. With nothing promised, the Indians easily exceeded expectations. The problem is that with the limited bit of a success comes the implied obligation to further upgrade. Instead fans received the same warmed over players that can be had on the cheap as they rehab from injuries. About the only thing different from any number of seasons past is that the Indians applied that same criteria to one of their own, Grady Sizemore.

The key word in every Indians’ offseason is “if,” as in, “if Grady Sizemore can stay healthy” or “if Kevin Slowey can stay healthy” or, well, you get the picture. But as we know full well by not, most of the “ifs” become “buts” and the Indians, by virtue of their inaction, will again be scrambling to develop other revenue sources besides the more traditional route of good play-inspired attendance. And the circle goes unbroken.

**

The Browns have underwhelmed thus far in the off season, but it’s early. They're is still time to massively disappoint. The only move of consequence was the addition of failed former head coach Brad Childress as the offensive coordinator.

But like most things that happen in Berea, it looks like it will come with the odd condition in the form of not allowing Childress to exercise the full benefits of his title by being the team’s play caller. But perhaps Childress was chosen exactly for that reason. As Andy Reid's offensive coordinator in Philadelphia, Childress didn't call plays then either.

Still, it smacks of a compromise reached between head coach Pat Shurmur and his boss, team president Mike Holmgren. Shurmur doesn’t appear to want to relinquish what little power he has and Holmgren needs to quell a fan insurrection over the awful state of the offense. Who better to step in and play the part of a well paid patsy then another client of both Shurmur’s and Holmgren’s and Tom Heckert's agent, Bob Lamonte, the out of work Childress?

Like most compromises of this nature, its structure suggests failure and not success. If the Browns need an offensive coordinator, and they do, then hire one and let him do the job. The last thing this team needs is another consultant, which is what Childress essentially has signed on for.

This is the kind of thing that really is starting to grate on the nerves of fans when it comes to Holmgren. Brought in to make tough decisions, he continuously backs away at the sign of any internal resistance. He kept Eric Mangini on for a year because Mangini literally pleaded to Holmgren to spare him the ax. It was nice for Mangini but awful for the fans and the progress of the franchise.

When he brought in Shurmur, who hadn’t been a head coach at any level, Holmgren allowed Shurmur to control the narrative by suggesting that he could handle both head coaching duties and the job of first assistant. It only sounds reasonable if the Browns were trying to cut costs on the number of assistants, but then when have the Browns ever been on that kind of austerity plan? They trend in the opposite direction, doling out money to meaningless coaches long since gone.

Armed with empirical proof that Shurmur (or any head coach) is ill suited to do the job of two coaches at once, Holmgren nonetheless again backed away from forcing Shurmur to relinquish some control. This can only mean more of the same for next year. If Childress lasts the entire season under this construct I’ll be amazed.

As for upgrading the roster, the first thing the Browns need to decide is which of their free agents they want to pursue. It would seem like D’Qwell Jackson and Phil Dawson are layups. More interesting is running back Peyton Hillis. Heckert is now leaking it to the media that the Browns do want Hillis back.

Hillis, when healthy, is exactly the kind of running back most teams need these days. While the presence of a running game is still important to the overall effectiveness of an offense, attitudes have changed on exactly what a presence means. There can be no doubt, for example, that a team does not need a Walter Peyton or a Barry Sanders to be successful. Quick, name me the starting running backs for the New England Patriots and the New York Giants.

Hillis is exactly the kind of effective no-name player that most teams look to have on board, as long as he doesn't cost too much. His problem is that he is injury-prone. He plays football like Grady Sizemore plays baseball and it leads to more injuries and less effectiveness.

The injuries have hurt Hillis’ bargaining power, but not in the same way they hurt Sizemore’s. Because there’s very little guaranteed money in the NFL, the chances are much better that a team would be willing to sign Hillis to a long-term contract. Sizemore couldn’t sniff anything more than the one-year deal the Indians offered him.

If Hillis is lost to free agency, it won’t be a major blow. I like his game, but he’s fungible with backs like Chris Ogbonnaya, a point that will become more evident when the Browns develop a better right side of the offensive line and employ credible receivers. At that point they’ll become far more pass oriented, like the rest of the league, with just a dash of running thrown in to keep teams honest.

**

The other Browns story that remains in the background concerns the fate of former Plain Dealer beat reporter Tony Grossi. The PD’s public editor, Ted Diadiun, gave a rather farcical account of what he termed a painful but necessary decision to demote Grossi, as I anticipated in my earlier column on this subject.

Diadiun pulled out the old “standards” card and essentially suggested that it wasn’t Grossi’s views of Browns owner Randy Lerner that got him in trouble but the fact that he expressed them publicly. Apparently the Plain Dealer discourages its sports reporters from having opinions.

Diadiun is making a distinction without a difference. Irrespective of whether Grossi expressed the opinion publicly, the fact of the matter is that he didn’t respect Lerner and that didn’t seem to matter to the PD until Grossi said it out loud.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not buying the whole “inadvertent tweet” defense Grossi offered in order to save his job. Maybe Grossi did mean to respond only privately but the fact remains that he didn’t and it doesn’t matter anyway. Whether he made his views of Lerner known publicly or privately is irrelevant. He held the opinion and it did impact in some fashion on his coverage. That isn’t a sin because every reporter has an opinion on his subject matter and many times it isn’t favorable. So be it.

Indeed, I think it’s cowardly for Grossi to try and hide behind a defense that relies on the phrase “inadvertent tweet”, two words that shouldn’t ever be uttered consecutively, by the way. He feels that way, he said it, end of story. But even more cowardly is the journalistic yarn the PD is hiding behind in order to assuage the feelings of a pathetic and irrelevant billionaire and his ineffective and weak first lieutenant.

The Plain Dealer demonstrated, to the detriment of the rest of its staff, that when the going gets tough, the reporters get tossed.

**

With the Super Bowl upcoming and Bill Belichick further affirming his status as one of the all time great head coaches in NFL history comes this week’s question to ponder: When Art Modell hired Belichick, he said it would be the last head coach he’d ever hire. If Modell has stuck to it, would he now be in the Hall of Fame?

Pathetic and Irrelevant

When the obituary of the Cleveland Plain Dealer is written, and it will be sooner rather than later, don’t be surprised if the words “pathetic” and “irrelevant” appear somewhere in the first 10 words or so to describe the reasoning behind its demise.

Already a shadow of its former glorious self, the Plain Dealer will be done in by no shortage of irony and perhaps the tipping point will turn out to be their pathetic but hardly irrelevant response to the apparently former PD Browns beat reporter Tony Grossi's tweet about Browns owner Randy Lerner.

The back story here is that Lerner, who gives interviews about as often as the Browns have winning seasons, did grant one to the fawning, preening troll-like blowhard who occupies the afternoon drive-time slot for the Browns’ flag ship station, WTAM. As interviews go, it was, to borrow a few choice words, pathetic and irrelevant.

Lerner wasn’t asked anything remotely challenging or controversial and he complied spectacularly by not saying say much interesting, he never does. His tone was mostly flat-lined, matching note for note his stewardship of a franchise that, to borrow a few choice words, has been pathetic and irrelevant for more than a decade. In short, Lerner’s coming out was the non-event of this year's Berea social scene. So be it.

Grossi, likely frustrated that his status as the longest tenured Browns beat reporter didn’t give him the same access to Lerner and hence the opportunity to actually ask questions and demand answers, tweeted that Lerner is a “pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.”

This, of course, probably angered someone inside of Berea, though I doubt Lerner much paid attention. My guess is that it was the public relations director. Maybe it was Mike Holmgren, who just weeks ago railed against the negative attitude of the media and essentially vowed to do something about it.

It doesn’t matter. Someone got the word back to the Plain Dealer about Grossi’s tweet and the editors there jumped into panic mode. Grossi was forced to remove the tweet, apologize to Lerner and await his fate like a petulant child who just spray painted the cat and was now waiting for dad to come home and mete out the punishment.

Well that punishment came in the form of his removal from the Browns’ beat, according to multiple sources. No one at the Plain Dealer is saying much about it, hiding for now behind the kind of “no comment” comment that they detest from others with something to hide. If/when they do say something, it will be along the lines of what they already said when they discovered the tweet, that his actions were inappropriate as they then utter vague references about compromised integrity or some other such horseshit.

There’s something very peculiar about newspapers, the so-called champions of free speech everywhere. For voracious First Amendment advocates, they have awfully thin skins. Maybe they’re just jittery about their business prospects.

It’s actually odd for me to take up the banner for Grossi because I never felt like he was all that good of a beat writer to begin with. At this point in his career, and perhaps jaded by years of watching, to borrow a few choice words, pathetic and irrelevant football being played on the lakefront, Grossi became satisfied with perfunctory analysis and lazy reporting. His editors and audience alike yawned their indifference.

He was repeatedly scooped, like many Plain Dealer sports writers tend to be, by harder working reporters at smaller newspapers or, God forbid, bloggers. Perhaps his biggest flaw, though, was that he never had much interesting to say. My sense always was that he had readers because of his platform and not because of his talent.

Any of those would have been good enough reasons to can Grossi and you wouldn’t have heard a peep out of me. But the Plain Dealer, having tolerated his mediocrity for years, has long since lost the argument that Grossi should be fired now because he was lousy at his job.

Instead, they took a much more interesting approach, claiming essentially that it was the freestyling ways of the internets and social media that made it impossible for Grossi to do his job effectively anymore. Why? Because he had the temerity to call it as he saw it when it came to Lerner? What happened to truth as a defense?

Lerner, frankly, is a pathetic figure and an irrelevant billionaire. Whether he’s the most irrelevant billionaire in the world can’t be measured empirically but let’s grant Grossi the latitude that Lerner is in the top 10. The point, though, is that none of this is news anyway, except maybe to the owners or editors of the Plain Dealer who apparently have been too busy trying to scour up advertisers and subscribers to pay attention to such small matters as the disintegration of a key economic driver of the city that the Browns are or at least should be.

Lerner’s ownership of the Browns has been a disaster. He’s treated the Browns like some sort of aquatic experiment where he keeps buying various kinds of exotic fish and throwing them in the tank together to see if they can survive together. About every two years or so, he’s forced to buy more fish when his last experiment didn't work. The next time he shows even a modicum of leadership of the franchise will be the first.

If this hurts his feelings, or if someone pointing this out hurts his feelings, then he should get out of the game. By holding on to the franchise he voluntarily put himself in a position to be criticized. Yet I really doubt that it did hurt his feelings. First of all, he’d have to demonstrate he has any. Secondly, he’d have to demonstrate that he even read Grossi’s tweet, which I doubt, or cared enough about Grossi's opinion to even voice his displeasure.

It’s important to the underpinnings of this story to harp on what a lousy owner Lerner has been because it completely eviscerates any argument the brass at the Plain Dealer could conger that Grossi’s integrity as a journalist was somehow compromised by a supposedly inappropriate tweet.

Are they mad that Grossi feels the way he does about Lerner or just the fact that he said it publicly? For these purposes, the answer doesn’t matter. If Grossi’s integrity was compromised it was done so long before he made the supposedly offending tweet and yet he’s remained on the beat for years.

But I doubt that Grossi’s integrity was compromised anyway. He’s been on the Browns beat since 1984 and has seen the same things we’ve all seen, but from a much better view. Lerner’s pathetic and irrelevant ownership of the Browns provides the significant context to why the team itself has been pathetic and irrelevant for so long. It’s part of each and every crappy coaching hire, each and every crappy draft and each and every crappy loss. It's the story that he was paid to write in the first place.

Let’s also not forget that this is sports and not politics, though the fossils that teach journalism on college campuses, assuming it’s even still offered as a curriculum, would argue that the standards are the same. Maybe they should be, but they most certainly are not. Sports reporters, particularly those covering the teams on a daily basis for any media outlet, have always been given a much wider berth by their editors to mix fact and opinion in a story then the reporter covering city hall. It’s only when those editors become embarrassed by the children they let run loose on the sports beat embarrass them at cocktail parties that they decide to act as if the same rules apply.

But it’s also a measure of what these same internets have brought us that the landscape of journalism has changed. There’s a reason that this web site, and many like it, get so many visitors each day. People are clamoring for a different, fresher perspective, one that isn’t afraid to mix fact and opinion or that is otherwise not bound by some of the conventions of an aging print media.

Grossi's little foray into Twitter, with the ongoing approval of his editors, was the equivalent of dipping a pinky toe in the Atlantic. If the Plain Dealer had been smart, they would have answered the call from whatever faceless Browns official complained and said “welcome to 2012. This is not your father's Plain Dealer.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t standards, but it does mean those standards have evolved. The only ones that haven’t seemed to notice are the editors of the Plain Dealer, which they amply demonstrated here.

It’s funny. The Plain Dealer will survive the demotion of Grossi but they won’t survive overall. because they never could recognize that the same thought process that brought them to making the decision on Grossi is the same thought process that is making their newspaper increasingly more pathetic and irrelevant.

Lingering Items--Where Every "If" Comes True Edition

The Cleveland Cavaliers got a bit of convenient redemption when they won the NBA’s draft lottery last week. It wasn’t even close to the top sports thought on the minds of Cleveland fans. The top thought, and spots 2 through 7 as well, was the Cleveland Indians.

I was talking with a friend on Sunday who theorized that the rapture did happen, perhaps earlier than planned, and that the town had collectively died and all entered the same room in heaven—a room that gets one channel, SportsTime Ohio, and the Indians play on a continuous loop and win each and every time.

It certainly seems that way at the moment. The Indians, a far less talented team, at least on paper, then probably half the league are more than 40 games into the season and still have the best record in baseball. More to the point, though, they’ve given no hint that they won’t be able to sustain this level of play for the rest of the season.

Which gets me back to my friend’s theory. This is kind of what heaven must feel like for an Indians’ fan. It’s a place where all your “ifs” come true, as in “if Justin Masterson can pick up where he left off at the end of last season…” or “if Asdrubal Cabrera can return to a higher level of play promised by his rookie season…” or “if Josh Tomlin can baffle hitters like few other young pitchers…” or “if Grady Sizemore can finally stay healthy….” Ok, not every “if” is falling the way it should, but you get the point.

The Indians are a fascinating team by any measure you want to take. The roster is a patchwork of young, old, has beens and never quites. It’s incredibly thin, which most rosters of teams with budgets like the Indians tend to be.

And yet, and yet, game after game, week after week this team keeps moving forward, playing with nearly unbridled confidence even as the usual bumps and grinds of every team’s season approach.

Fausto Carmona, perhaps the team’s best if not most mercurial pitcher, is having a mostly mediocre year and no one even notices. Carlos Santana, counted on for so much at such a young age, is barely hitting his weight. The Indians’ one free agent signee, Austin Kearns, is hitting about as well as Austin Powers.

Still, the Indians are tied with the Boston Red Sox for the American League’s best batting average and they trail only the Yankees in runs scored. All that could change if Sizemore and Travis Hafner, two players who have been key to both stats, don’t return soon. You have to think those results would show up somewhere.

But perhaps that won’t matter. This is the season where every “if” comes true and that means that Shin-Soo Choo is about due to go on a tear and even Santana and Matt LaPorta should soon climb back to respectability.

The Indians’ offense has been great thus far as important to its success has been pitching. For proof, consider that the Indians are second only to Oakland in ERA but Oakland is two games below .500 while the Indians are enjoying life in the clouds.

The two worst regular pitchers on this roster have been Carmona and Chad Durbin. The former is a bit of a surprise, the latter not so much. Every one else above them has basically been unhittable. As good as the starting pitching has been, the bullpen has been even better. Chris Perez has the worst ERA of the group but it’s still below 3.00 and he does have those 12 saves. His walks tend to shake the ghosts of Joe Borowski but they really aren’t getting him into much trouble.

When you see all these great statistics about the Indians in print, the fact that they have the best record in baseball is obvious. But it still takes a heavy case of eye wiping to actually believe what you’re reading. You’d be hard pressed to find a team less spectacularly constructed playing so spectacularly well, in any sport.

The Indians are still about 50-60 games away from having to make some tough decisions about the direction to take this club in the season’s latter stages. And it is still difficult to imagine this level of play being sustained through the mid-summer heat.

But this is the season where every “if” seems to be coming true so who can really say what comes next. Perhaps the Indians will falter as the thinness of its roster runs head long into a season that is, after all, 162 games long. At this point though it seems just as likely that the Indians will continue its steamrolling of the American League unabated because this seems to be the year when every “if” comes true.

And for once, the Indians marketing department got it right. What if indeed.

**

The Plain Dealer’s Tony Grossi drew an unintentional chuckle in his weekly “Ask Tony” segment this past Sunday. A reader asked Grossi why, in the face of the lockout, he was even bothering to write about potential free agent signees. Grossi said that he was struggling to find something to write about other than the labor dispute.

See, this is funny because rather than write about news, Grossi would rather right about conjecture. It’s a shame, really, when he along with Mary Kay Cabot, the Plain Dealer’s two main football writers, all but ignore the lockout as if it is higher level calculus that they’re never going to understand.

But on the other hand maybe it’s a good thing they know their limitations. They could be like Mike Freeman at CBS Sports who recently wrote that Peyton Manning’s silence on the whole thing was benefitting the owners and not the players.

Manning, along with Tom Brady and Drew Brees, are the most prominent plaintiffs on the NFLPA-sponsored lawsuit against the owners in which they allege that virtually every activity undertaken by that cartel (their words, not mine) is illegal.

Freeman says that “the only” explanation for Manning’s silence in this battle royale is to keep his image and his commercial earning ability in tact. Freeman essentially accuses Manning of being a shill for the owners and paying lip service at best to the players.

It’s an explanation, but hardly the only one. You could start with the idea that the lawsuit, indeed the entire strategy employed by the NFLPA, was ill conceived from the outset. That Manning would put his name on the pleadings is actually more of an act of courage in this light.

Brees, certainly, has been the most visible player during this dispute and certainly acts as if this is a cause in which he believes. Brady, like Manning, has mostly been hanging out at home.

But this isn’t about any particular players anyway and for Freeman to act as if any one of these three or any of the others for that matter are at the forefront of some groundbreaking struggle is ridiculous.

Like everything else that takes place on the business side of professional sports, this is an argument about money. The tactics employed in this case are extreme and incredibly polarizing but they’re just that, tactics. It’s about finding leverage in order to extract the best deal.

Brady, Manning and Brees are mere scenery to this operetta. They could be as overbearing as Chelsea Handler after a few drinks and no one would notice. They aren’t being counted on to lead the charge. That would be the lawyers and the other fools who concocted this slow march to Bolivia, as Mike Tyson might say.

What Freeman and his ilk really need to see is that Manning is just being Manning. That he may be acting out of self-interest is hardly surprising. The first person on either side of this dispute that isn’t acting out of self-interest will be the first.

**

Right now, Josh Tomlin and Justin Masterson are a combined 11-3 and gave given up 35 runs collectively. CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee are a combined 7-7 and have given up 55 runs. This week’s question to ponder: Huh?

Lingering Items--Cautionary Tale Edition

The NFL draft is still nearly 3 weeks away, which can only mean one thing: 100 more iterations Tony Grossi's mock draft. Catch the excitement.

Not to pick on Grossi too much, but this really is the problem with the NFL offseason at the moment. The labor issues are complex and the only thing really happening at the moment. Most beat writers like Grossi don't have the inclination to understand them and use the excuse that the public doesn’t care as a way of masking their own laziness.

They just repeat the line about billionaires fighting with millionaires to shorthand the entire discussion without every pausing to think that the more money at stake the more complex the issues.

So they just shy away from the difficult and give us any number of mind numbing mock drafts, some copy editor slaps a headline on it and voila!, news.

Just Friday morning, Grossi submitted his 7th (7th!) mock draft on an unsuspecting public. Because I tend to have the attention span of a puppy when it comes to this sort of thing, I give it all the attention it deserves, which is very little.

First of all, this is just crystal ball gazing taken to high art. The fact that someone like Mel Kiper, Jr. chose to make a living out of it doesn’t somehow elevate it from alchemy to chemistry nor does it mean that every beat reporter with an internet connection suddenly because a quasi-expert like Kiper.

Second, did I mention it’s Grossi’s 7th (7th!) iteration of a mock draft? That means that when he has a hole to fill in the PD’s ever shrinking sports section in the next several days, out will come mock drafts versions 8 and 9. Sooner or later he’s bound to get something right.

On the scale of problems plaguing just the sports world, the proliferation of meaningless NFL mock drafts ranks just below Gloria James’ temper. In other words, the fact that the PD uses such things as a proxy for real news or analysis is relatively harmless, at least in the short term.

But the problem is exactly that: the PD and newspapers like it use such things as a proxy for real news. They are cost conscious, like every employer these days, but they have completely abdicated any responsibility for covering the real stories of the NFL to those on the national scene that apparently do it better in favor of having their local hack twiddle his thumbs, read a few magazines, and draw up mock drafts.

Maybe it doesn't occur to those running the PD and other newspapers why they continue to fall short in the public's imagination, but perhaps it has something to do with no longer being an outlet for actual sports news, at least the kind of actual sports news that's been ferreted out organically.

Reporters like Grossi can only give the newspaper what they’re willing to pay for and at this juncture it looks like they aren’t willing to pay for much, so in some sense he may not be at fault. But in other ways, he and his ilk are part of the problem because they shy away from the more complex in favor of the inane. Just because his employers are tight with a buck isn't an excuse for being tight with one's own creativity.

**
Speaking of the media, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban took to his blog (blogmarverick.com) recently to advocate for a new world order when it comes to media access to his and other teams. He won't get away with it in the short term, but the object of his ire are internet reporters who get bonuses from their employers based on page views for their stories. In a completely related development, USA Today announced this past week that it will start paying its reporters those bonuses.

Cuban's point is that at this juncture the electronic media in particular has taken on a paparazzi-like persona. No longer satisfied to ask the usual boring questions to athletes who give the same boring answers to questions like “how do you feel about losing this game?”, these reporters, Cuban claims, lie in wait in the locker room hoping to get a player in a vulnerable moment and then ask an embarrassing question or respond to a rumor. The intent is to get the player to adversely react, make that the story, throw it up on a web site immediately and bang the page views on the internet site increase exponentially. Advertisers pay based on page views, so it all makes sense.

I have no doubt that this kind of thing happens all the time. And while Cuban, an early adopter of almost any technology, rightly sees the trend that's developing, his inability to put it into historical perspective is clouding his judgment.

Any form of paid media, whether it's newspapers, television stations, radios or internet sites, needs readers to survive. The good outlets try to gain an economic advantage by employing good journalists. Others try to gain their advantage by employing the outrageous. Al Gore and the internet certainly didn't invent that or their employers' compensation systems.

Cuban's solution is to keep all of the local media around and limit or deny access to those purely internet reporters who are incented toward the outrageous in order to enhance page views and get their bonuses. What Cuban fails to understand is that the local media is similarly incented. The local print reporters see their material land on their newspapers' internet sites where the value of their work is likewise judged by page views. Same for local television reporters.

Cuban's barely disguised motive is to limit access to his team, theorizing that the team and each player has access to things like Twitter and Facebook and thus can get their own story out without the need for reporters. That's true in the same way the government has access to the same outlets and likewise could make the case that it could more easy get out its message without interference from the press.

But limiting access is never the answer. There are always stories to be told and leads to pursue and if a few obnoxious jerks posing as reporters make players, coaches and management a little uncomfortable at times, well that's the price to be paid for a free society.

**
The sad end to the transcendent career of Manny Ramirez is now at hand and while he was one of the best pure hitters in the game, his legacy will be that of a drug-using enigma.

It's really not a surprise that Ramirez would have violated baseball's drug policy again because Ramirez has proven several times over that he doesn't even have the sense that God gave a light bulb. I have this image of some shady drug dealing “trainer” telling Ramirez that he won't get caught and Ramirez swallowing that line like a dog swallows kibble, three times over.

What's so disappointing though is that Ramirez at some point several years ago reached the conclusion that he couldn't survive on his natural hitting skills any longer and that he needed artificial enhancements to stay in the game. That's simply a thought process I'll never understand.

I know that Ramirez is a fool whose deepest thought may be whether to get the steak or the salmon at dinner but his case still stands for the proposition of why steroids and other performance enhancing drugs remain part of the national conversation.

To watch Ramirez in his youth take the sweetest swing in the major leagues and consistently hit for average and power was a sight to behold. To watch Ramirez in his later years stroll through baseball as a clueless beach bum with a swing long since unhinged from its moorings was pathetic. If nothing else, it was the drugs more than age that took its toll on Ramirez and probably far sooner than it should have.

It's hard to know exactly why Ramirez, in his mid to late 30s, turned to steroids to get himself back on track. The chance of him talking about it publicly is nil. And though he did get caught, three times, I suspect that he'll still serve as a role model for every other player looking to get an edge. They'll surmise that all they need to do differently is be more careful than Ramirez. And given how Ramirez carries himself, there isn't a person alive who doesn't think he could be more careful or clever than Ramirez.

I have no idea whether Ramirez will ever get to the Hall of Fame, I just know he shouldn't. He certainly has the numbers. But when his name comes up for the first time on a Hall of Fame ballot 5 years from now, he'll be just as radioactive as Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire and will deserve to be. There's just no way of knowing how much of Ramirez's career accomplishments were the result of the artificial enhancements he used. Since that will never change, here's hoping that he never does garner enough support for election to the Hall of Fame and that in time he just becomes another footnote, a once potentially great player who threw it all away.

The Three-Cone Shuffle

For any sports fan looking to be vexed, this would be the time. For unless you are an abject college hoops bracketologist (which, by the way, is one of the dumbest made up words ever) there is so little to inform or entertain you at the moment in the world of sports. The NFL, of course, knows this and that’s why the Combine, wrapping up Tuesday, seems like such big news.

I hate the NFL Combine because it’s a mostly worthless endeavor that’s taken more seriously these days than pediatric AIDS. The NFL, of course, is at the center of this farce by staging it in a way that heightens its importance while hiding its irrelevance. This annual festival devoted to all manner of poking, prodding, measuring and ciphering is the kind of fraud that in another context might get someone arrested.

Many of these participating players, mostly students in name only, are put through a battery of mental and physical challenges as a kind of hazing ritual designed to test whether or not they are NFL worthy. Most of them aren’t, at least for the long term. Statistics back it up. At most, only a handful are staring a potentially long-term NFL careers, just don’t tell them that.

When the Combine was a sleepy little endeavor of general managers and scouts and a few bored sports writers, it was harmless and easily ignored, like Dancing with the Stars. But now it’s an Event, a carryover of sorts from the Super Bowl, with 24/7 coverage by the NFL Network. I’ve never been so glad to be a Time Warner customer because they wisely haven’t succumbed to the outsized demands of the NFL noodniks pricing their cable-only product. As a result, I’m never even tempted to flip over to see Group 3 of the offensive linemen do bench presses followed by the vertical jump.

The other problem with the Combine is that makes every Bill from Brunswick think they are draft expert, although in fairness to every Bill from Brunswick, Mel Kiper, Jr. used to be you. The reason this is frustrating has everything to do with altering a person’s expectations when it comes to the draft.

Suddenly they become experts on who the Browns should draft in the third round because they saw this player or that run a 4.2 40-yard dash on the telly-vision. Then when that player isn’t drafted, all manner of disappointment ensues.

And yet these folks aren’t even the worst offenders. That’s reserved for the local media types that trek to Indianapolis in search of The Truth. No particular offense to Tony Grossi of the Plain Dealer, but about the only thing he and his ilk know about any of these college players is what they’ve read in a magazine, heard on ESPN and gleaned from the Combine.

If these sports writers are doing their jobs properly, then they wouldn’t have had time until recently to even begin to contemplate the college game. The odds that any of them have followed college football closely enough to offer an informed impression on the differences between Nick Fairly vs. Marcell Dareus are slight.

Yet from the Grossis of the world we are offered any number of iterations of their mock drafts based on nothing more their casual fan’s knowledge of the college game and its players.

What’s even more amusing is their use of the empirical to back up what are essentially curbside opinions. Grossi offered up the results of various drills that defensive linemen ran at the Combine on Monday. It says, for example, that Fairley finished 14th in the 3-cone drill with a time of 7.14 seconds. I assume that says something about Fairley’s agility in the same way it says something about a dog’s agility when he runs through a line of pylons at a show. But until they put 3 cones on a football field and award points for who runs around them the fastest, it offers virtually nothing for the average fan to suggest why Fairley would be the right choice for the Browns with the 6th pick in the draft.

I’ll take it as a given that the annual meat market that is the Combine is something that NFL scouts and general managers find useful come draft day, though at this point it’s a premise worth challenging. For starters, it’s not an open cattle call. Players are invited based on their reputations. Even then some players don’t fully work out on the advice of their agents, preferring to work out for teams privately under better controlled conditions. Then of course there are those players nursing injuries that can’t perform fully at the moment. As a result, even the comparisons that come out of the Combine are essentially meaningless.

When you put that all together, it’s hard to see how useful the Combine really is in the overall player picking exercise. At this point it’s almost as if it’s conducted not because it’s meaningful but because it keeps the NFL brand in front of fans during a lengthy off-season. And because we have a compliant local and national media starved for any NFL-based news, we’re socialized to the notion that what happens at the Combine is directly related to whether or not a team has a successful draft.

Let’s return to the real world for a moment. If any team is using it as anything more than supplemental material to the more useful information gathered from watching a player perform on the field, then that team is probably failing at the draft. I’m looking at you, Cleveland Browns.

The Browns have made any number of draft mistakes in the last 10 years. By almost any measure, they aren’t very good at it. Perhaps some of that may have been caused by an overreliance of what took place at the Combine, but I suspect it’s more related to the simple fact that they have had a series of boobs making personnel judgments.

Who in their right mind would draft both Brian Robiskie and Mohamed Massaquoi in the second round? Whatever contributions those two have made thus far and whatever else they may make down the road, nothing will obscure the fact that neither was worthy of a second round pick. There are receivers on the roster that Mangini mostly buried who likely could have contributed at about the same level (which isn’t much) just as there are probably at least a dozen others, from undrafted free agents to relatively accomplished veterans looking to hang on for another season or two, that also could have accomplished the same thing.

But let’s not pick on Mangini exclusively. Phil Savage, his predecessor in the personnel picking business, was almost just as bad. Savage traded for and then squandered a first round pick by drafting Brady Quinn. Then virtually every player he drafted in the second round was a bust. And let’s not pick on just Mangini and Savage either. Starting with Dwight Clark and continuing through Mangini, the Browns have been notable for what amounts to the stock market equivalent of buying high and selling low.

Yet I’m more optimistic about the current regime’s ability to pick players and that’s because of Colt McCoy. He’s exactly the kind of player that creates a bunch of negativity at the Combine and causes teams to take a pass. But Mike Holmgren and Tom Heckert looked beyond that exercise in misinformation and saw a player who, you know, actually performed incredibly well over a long college career with a big-time program. Indeed, it’s a measure of their ability as evaluators that they could actually commit to McCoy as their starter next season and no one is much questioning the wisdom of that decision.

If you’re bored and the Combine scratches some sort of itch, then fine. But what’s happening there won’t make any difference to whether or not the Browns get better. The only way they get better is finding players who can actually perform on the field and not just in the 3-cone drill.