Lingering Items--Depth Edition

Bad games and bad weeks happen in baseball.  They are far more easily absorbed then in football.  So if your team is otherwise fundamentally strong and soundly built then a bad week simply represents the usual bumps and bruises along a very long 162-game season.

The Cleveland Indians certainly had a series of bad games culminating in a very bad week.  After an emotional, perhaps too emotional, 3-game sweep of the Detroit Tigers, the Indians laid 3 colossal eggs in Chicago, undoing pretty much all that was done against the Tigers.  It didn’t get much better against the usual punching bad, Kansas City, thereafter and they fell out of first place.

It’s not the losses that are troubling, occasioned as they were bad some lousy pitching.  It’s the injuries and what they reveal about this team.  It’s not deep, intentionally.

The Indians by design are mostly held together by players without a great deal of experience.  It’s cheaper to do it that way.  But when the front line players are barely experienced, what does it say about the replacements behind them?  You’ve seen the results, you make the call.

It’s also troubling that once again Travis Hafner is hurt.  Perhaps the least versatile player in the major leagues, if not major league history, Hafner probably doesn’t even own a glove at this point.  All he needs to do is keep himself relatively in shape, step into a batting cage occasionally while his teammates are in the field, and come to the plate 4 times a game.

If you ask the average person off the street to do that task, he might not get the same results at the plate as Hafner but he’d at least be available for the entire season.  The Indians require very little physically of Hafner and he still can’t stay healthy enough to play a full season.  He’s out for the next 4 to 6 weeks (!) after having arthroscopic surgery on his right knee.

You can’t really blame a player for getting injured, but you can stop rewarding him.  Grady Sizemore is collecting millions for doing exactly what everyone outside of Chris Antonetti and Mark Shapiro thought he’d be doing, spending time on the disabled list.  Hafner will collect millions this season for doing exactly what everyone outside of Antonetti and Shapiro thought he’d be doing, muddling through the final year of his contract with indifferent results while occasionally spending time on the disabled list.  There isn’t any chance whatsoever that either player could come close to performing at their contract’s worth and that was a given before the season started.

In the case of Hafner, you can argue that the Indians didn’t have much of a choice.  He’s in the last year of a contract and even if he had been cut the Indians would still be on the hook for his salary.  True, but the other side of that coin is that a deeper, better financed team would simply have cut its losses with Hafner and let him instead spend some time on some other team’s DL while the Indians developed a better alternative.

As it is, the Indians have not developed a better alternative and now have no real plan in place for how to cover the loss of Hafner, except the usual “by committee” approach that teams with a lack of depth tend to employ.  The committee approach is understandable when a team’s closer goes down.  It’s rather ludicrous when it’s a designated hitter.

The Indians’ offense was already an iffy proposition and that was with a supposedly healthy Hafner who was having a decent but not great year anyway.  It begs the question though of how much better off if at all the Indians would have been had they made alternate plans instead of continuing to rely on Hafner solely because of his millstone of a contract forces their hand.

It’s just this kind of thing that tends to reveal the fissures in a team that needs absolutely everything to go right if it’s going to compete.  For the initial part of the season that seemed to be happening.  The injuries, always the fear on a team this loosely constructed, have started and the holes they create underscore why the skeptics out there looking for reasons to not believe in this team have their Exhibit A.

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Not to continue to beat the dead horse over attendance too much more, there is an additional point that rarely gets mentioned in the debate as to why the Indians don’t draw better.  Virtually every game is on television. 

There’s always been an argument over how game attendance is impacted by the fact that the games are otherwise televised.  There’s no good way to do that study mainly because it relies on the opinions that may be earnest but inaccurate.

To most, attending a game is an event.  The cost is certainly a factor, but there is a certain hassle factor involved.  And one thing I’ve come to appreciate the older I’ve gotten is how much the hassle factor really does figure into whether or not I attend any particular event.

When you’re younger, the thrill of an event tends to outweigh any hassle factor.  You don’t mind parking far away from the venue because you’re young and can walk.  The late night isn’t that much of a problem because what’s a few lost hours of sleep anyway?

But as you get older, the hassle factor takes on a bigger role to the point where you weigh the thrill against the hassle.  And the older you get, the more the hassle factor dominates.

Indeed, that’s one of the reasons every game is broadcast in Cleveland and elsewhere.  Owners understand that the vast majority of the people can’t attend on a regular basis.  So they make their product available in another way—through a cable package that they control.  The Dolans own Sportstime Ohio, for example.  They get the revenue it generates through the sale of its programming to cable operators.  They also get a piece of the advertising revenue those games generate.

In other words, in the larger sense when you consider attendance you can’t just focus on butts in the seats at Progressive Field.  You have to take into account the eyeballs on the screens in all the households and bars in the greater Cleveland area.  If those ratings are down as well, then the Indians do have an attendance problem. 

I’ve not seen ratings yet for this season, but last season the Indians were 7^th in the major leagues in local ratings, up 105% from the previous year.  That’s impressive not just in theory but in practicality.  That gives the Dolans’ cable operations the ability to charge more for carriage of Sportstime  Ohio when it comes up for renewal and also makes the available advertising minutes more valuable.

The point though is that the Indians are still a popular draw locally when you take into account more than just those who watch from Progressive Field.  Certainly the team would be more profitable with higher attendance, but let’s not completely bemoan the lack  of support, mainly because it just isn’t true.

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There’s little doubt that the Miami Heat are headed back to the NBA Finals and when that happens Cavs fans can recharge anew their angst meters.  The thought of LeBron James hoisting a championship trophy and wearing a championship ring is a unifying measure of anger for most of the locals.

Sooner or later, though, this is just something that we’ll all have to face.  James will win a championship at some point in his career and it won’t be with Cleveland.  And whenever it occurs it will be before the Cavs make it back.  Those are pretty well givens at this point. 

Still it’s hard to see at the moment the Heat actually winning the championship this season.  Both Oklahoma and San Antonio look deeper and better coached, assuming the Heat get past Boston.  James may be the star that shines more brightly but it’s not like Tim Duncan or Kevin Durant are dim bulbs.  They have better supporting casts, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh notwithstanding.  (Indeed, Bosh is proving that he always was about the 93^rd best player in the NBA anyway.  He’s been gone now for several days and no one has much noticed.)

If this doesn’t end up being the Heat’s year, then look for the kind of off-season in Miami that Cavs fans used to know.  James and his confederates will work to get Erik Spoelstra  a new title, “ex-coach.”  Then there will be the usual positioning of grabbing other players that fit more with James’ vision of how the team should be constructed.

The only saving grace for Miami is that Pat Riley is a far stronger figure at the head of the franchise then Cleveland has ever had.  Having one several championships, Riley has a good working knowledge of difficult personalities and there’s every reason to believe he’ll be able to control the lunacy just enough to actually build the Heat into the kind of team that James really needs to win a championship.

I suspect that Riley will get it right eventually and James will win his championship.  If Cavs fans have any aspirations in this regard, it should be that the Heat doesn’t go on an extended run once they do get that first one under their belts.  The longer they wait, the less likely it will happen.

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As Indians’ closer Chris Perez becomes a more vocal and hence more controversial figure, this week’s question to ponder:  At what point will Perez’s act start to wear thin? (hint: it’s directly related to how many saves he blows).

Lingering Items--Laboring Edition

For those who hate the business side of professional sports, the news that the NBA owners are spoiling for a lockout as much as the NFL owners did probably isn’t all that welcome.

The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of this month and for now the players and the owners are getting nowhere fast. There are plenty of similarities between the NBA’s labor issues and those in the NFL, but central to it is the straw that always stirs the drink: money. Would you expect it to be about anything else?

According to a recent article about the negotiations from the Associated Press, the NBA owners are claiming losses for this season at $300 million and an anticipation of 22 of its 30 teams losing money. That’s pretty dramatic if true.

The players don’t necessarily agree with that assessment because they say that television ratings have increased along with ticket prices and merchandise sales. They don’t have any more access to the owners’ books than the NFL players and thus can only speculate on how much the league might be losing. As an aside, why isn’t anyone complaining that NBA owners won’t open their books?

In any event, like their brethren in the NFL, NBA players seem to understand that the economy has changed, at least for their fans, and are willing to make some compromises but it’s the scope of those compromises that are the sticking point. Again, would you expect it to be anything different?

The lynchpin to these negotiations is likewise similar to that in the NFL: the owners’ desire to get better cost certainty. In the NBA the chosen vehicle is the revision of their currently byzantine salary cap into a more straightforward version. But since it’s the NBA where exceptions dwarf nearly every rule, don’t be misled into thinking that it’s a hard cap the owners want in the same way that the NFL has a hard cap. That would be too radical of a change and, frankly, would make too much sense.

If you listen to the players, who claim they’re united just like any labor group claims unity among its troops, they’re willing to give some money back presumably in the hope of having a larger pie to divide down the road. The owners have scoffed, yes scoffed, at what they call the modest moves of the players to this point, but so much of that is just posturing anyway.

Still there is less than a week before the contract expires and while much can happen between now and then, in all likelihood not much will happen. This is the owners’ first real chance since the economy cratered to address their issues and they won’t let go of that opportunity lightly.

In other words, don’t be surprised when the NBA owners do lock out the players, possibly as early as July 1. Like the NFL’s lockout, it probably doesn’t mean much with the season months away but it means enough to label the situation serious, assuming you care whether there is another NBA season ever.

What’s far less certain is whether the NBA players will pursue a litigation strategy. It’s mostly been a failure for the NFL players in that it hasn’t given them the perceived leverage they thought they would have, but that doesn’t mean the NBA players are any brighter than their counterparts in the NFL.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if DeMaurice Smith is the worst head of a professional sports union then Billy Hunter, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, is a close second.

What makes Smith inept is his abject lack of experience. He’s a litigator by training and brought that mentality to the NFL players, hence the massive amount of litigation taking place that has bogged down negotiations. What makes Hunter inept is just a general lack of competence and gravitas.

But in fairness to Hunter, he probably understands that David Stern controls the NBA with an iron fist to the point that Hunter would never be willing or able to effectively challenge that authority anyway. Stern is more Kenesaw Mountain Landis and less Roger Goodell and as long as Stern’s in place the players are only going to get as far in these negotiations as he’ll let them.

Whatever union president Derek Fisher’s claims of unity among the players may be, they’ll never effectively challenge Stern’s control or break his will to shape the game as he sees fit.

You don’t have to be fully versed in tea leaf reading to conclude that unless the players knuckle under between now and June 30th, Stern will lock out the players. The only question is whether the players will be as pig-headed as their counterparts in the NHL and let a full season pass until they figure out that for however popular their sport might be in China, in the United States whatever fan uprising might occur will be drowned out by the otherwise massive fan indifference.

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As for a sport the fans really do care about, football, the good news is that the owners and the players are finally negotiating in earnest. For the most part the posturing that inevitably arises at contract expiration time has given way to the realities that whatever else the courts could do for either of them, the one thing they can’t do is the one thing they need the most: a new labor contract.

The lack of real substantive news coming out of these negotiations is actually a very positive sign. The less the principals talk publicly the more likely it is that they are getting things done behind the scenes.

The average fan, even the average fan who’s in a labor union, probably doesn’t fully appreciate the complexity that is the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement. Much of that complication comes from the provisions dealing with the division of revenue, but the contract is also so much more than that.

The other thing the average fan may not realize is that although the re-slicing of the financial pie is a major issue, there is a laundry list of other items the parties are working their way through, including retiree health care, injury pay and the like. These take time as well.

But the real complication stems from the nuclear approach the union took to these negotiations. It’s not just about reaching a new labor contract. It’s also about resolving the pending lawsuits, particularly the underlying class action lawsuit that was filed.

Without going into the rather mundane details of class action law, the resolution of that lawsuit is subject to both the approval of the court and the prospective class members. Then there is the not so small matter of the union re-certifying as the collective bargaining representative for the players. Although the NFLPA is calling itself a trade union and its attempt at decertification has been disputed by the owners, ultimately this issue needs to get resolved and the union needs to re-form as part of what will surely be a global settlement. Without the re-certification, the negotiated collective bargaining agreement cannot technically be approved by the players.

In short, the parties could reach a deal on the new contract but the process of approving it and living by it could take months to work through. That doesn’t mean that the lockout would need to remain in effect until that happens. But rest assured that unless the owners have very good assurances that everything will get resolved they will be reluctant to open the doors.

It seems like a very good chance that a tentative agreement will be in place in the next few weeks. Whether that means football will ultimately start on time is hard to say. But if it forces a delay in the season, the NFL probably won’t complain anyway. With the way they run the league, nothing would please them more than to play up until the day that baseball’s spring training starts in mid February.

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A few quick words about Travis Hafner and the Indians.

As frustrating as the Indians recent slump has been, what’s more frustrating is that their highest paid player literally cannot play a position other than designated hitter. For a team that has trouble generating offense, the fact that Hafner is irrelevant for the 9 games in National League cities is a cause for real concern.

Basically the Indians go into this stretch fielding a team with 7 legitimate bats, given that the pitcher will have to hit as well. Everyone saw how moribund the Indians’ offense looked when Hafner was on the DL. The likelihood now is that it will be worse for this stretch in large part because it’s as if Hafner is back on the DL.

It’s nice to see that Hafner has regained most of his batting eye after walking through the desert the last few years. But it’s not so nice that the Indians are paying the kind of money they are paying Hafner and have to endure similar stretches of their schedule when he simply can’t play.

Nine games may not seem like a lot given a 162 game schedule, but going 2-7 instead of 5-4 against the National League could very easily be the difference between making and not making the playoffs.

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With all the frenzy surrounding the Cavaliers’ just completed draft, this week’s question to ponder arises: How many of those fans either praising or bitching about the Cavs’ picks can honestly say they’ve seen Kyrie Irving or Tristan Thompson play enough to have an informed opinion?

Closing Another Book

At least you can’t accuse Mark Shapiro of not cleaning up his messes.

With the completion of last week’s annual July garage sale, Shapiro essentially closed the book on his role as general manager of the Indians, a job he took over in late 2001, by sweeping out most of the last remaining vestiges of his tenure as the Cleveland Indians’ general manager. .

It was hardly a rousing success. When his 9th year is completed, he will have posted exactly two winning seasons in a career that ultimately will be known more for bungled opportunities, bad decisions and misspent millions than anything else.

The good news, though, is that for the next few years general manager-in-waiting Chris Antonetti won’t have to preside over his own annual auction. Pretty much anything not nailed down already has been sold by Shapiro and all that remains in the cupboard that Antonetti inherits is an essentially minor league team with a mostly minor league budget.

Shapiro’s sale didn’t create much of a windfall for the team this year, assuming you define windfall as legitimate prospects. The good stuff had been picked over the past few years anyway and all that remained in the cut out bins were the likes of a sore-armed Jake Westbrook, an injury-prone Kerry Wood and an attention-challenged Jhonny Peralta. Indeed, in a few cases the Indians actually had to help pay the salaries of the departed. For their trouble the Indians received a few low level prospects who you’ll most likely never hear from again.

Given the voodoo economics of baseball and the draconian way in which Shapiro had the Indians participate, it’s hard to argue about any of these trades. Indeed, you really can’t argue much with any of his previous trades, either. The Indians under Shapiro were mostly desperate sellers because of their own financial issues and pretty much had to take what’s offered in order to meet their more immediate goals of fiscal prudence.

Under Shapiro’s careful direction, hammered out at the insistence of owners Larry and Paul Dolans, the Indians are officially s shoestring operation again, much as they used to be, with no business charging major league prices.

Shapiro’s teams made two runs at a championship and twice Shapiro wasn’t able to get the team over the hump. But those teams look like anomalies at this point because they had top-level talent making major league dollars. But as decisions Shapiro made didn’t pan out and age and impending free agency caught up with the players he mostly inherited the Indians have been on a slow, painful march to the bottom as they look to pare their budget to an absolute minimum.

Whether you think the team under Shapiro was shrewd or simply mismanaged depends on what you think about the contracts of the three players they just dumped. Along with Travis Hafner and his contract, they are at the core of why the Indians are struggling so mightily financially.

Let’s start with Westbrook. He’s under .500 for his career with an ERA of 4.34. Until his injury, his best attribute was as an inning eater, pitching over 200 innings in each of 2004-06. Those seasons led the Indians to sign him to a contract that’s paid him over $10 million in each of the last 3 seasons alone. It’s hard to know if Westbrook’s contract was market price or if Shapiro set the market by overpaying him in the first place. Suffice it to say though that more than a few people questioned Shapiro’s decision at that time to give Westbrook that kind of contract given his rather modest accomplishments.

Peralta is even more of a mystery. He’s a lifetime .264 hitter whose one decent season in 2005 convinced Shapiro to label him a core player. That led to Shapiro signing Peralta to a long-term above market contract to buy out of his arbitration years. Peralta never duplicated that 2005 season, coming relatively close just once in 2008. Meanwhile he proved to be a player who seemed oddly indifferent to his craft.

The signing of Kerry Wood still mystifies. Wood had been a closer for only one season with the Cubs when he was signed by Shapiro. While he did save 34 games, the Cubs didn’t seem particularly interested in re-signing him. Meanwhile it was difficult to understand Shapiro’s thinking giving the context of the Indians at that time.

Remember, the 2007 Indians went 96-66 with Joe Borowski saving 45 games. They beat the Yankees in the divisional series and were up 3-1 against Boston before losing 4 straight. But Borowski was a high-wire act and a better general manager would have made the move for another closer then.

But Shapiro stood pat and the team regressed in more ways than just on the mound. CC Sabathia, the reigning Cy Young award winner was traded. Thus by the time Wood was signed for the 2009 season, the team was a shadow of its former self. The Indians had far more fundamental problems that needed addressing and signing a player like Wood for just two years at that kind of money reeked of stop-gap. It’s money could have been much better spent.

Now back to Travis Hafner for a moment. The reason he’s still standing in an Indians uniform has nothing to do with either sentimental attachment or production. It’s simple dollars. His current salary is $11.5 million and there are still two seasons, plus a club option in a third, at $13 million per. There’s also a $2.75 million buyout if that club option isn’t exercised.

At that price, he’d have to be producing Albert Pujols numbers to move him, which if he were I still believe he’d be traded. But that’s a rather worthless debate. He’s been out of the lineup recently with a sore shoulder, though in fairness it’s kind of hard to tell. In July he hit 1 home run and had 4 RBI. He also had 21 strike outs and had more games with multiple strikeouts than in any other month of the season.

His is the contract that just keeps giving and giving. While there’s no reason to think that Shapiro wouldn’t have traded Peralta, Westbrook and Wood just for sport, in truth those trades are as much directed at Hafner’s unmovable contract as they were to conclude the process Shapiro started when he and the Dolans determined that they could never sign Sabathia.

In a sense, then, these recent trades provide a fitting conclusion to Shapiro’s career as a general manager. He was never able to climb the mountain with this team because for all his bluster and easy-going ways, he wasn’t a particularly good judge of talent. In making his one real run to a championship he consistently bet on the wrong horses and those bets ended up costing this franchise millions in unrealized value while inhibiting the real growth of legitimate prospects.

From this point forward, the team now is in the hands of Antonetti, someone who has been trained directly by Shapiro and who will be supervised by, wait for it, Shapiro. That means there’s no reason to believe that much will change, from the business model built on a one-word strategy “hope” to an endless cycle of trades and prospects.

So come season’s end, when Antonetti takes over for good and reboots the server, in all likelihood, there’s little chance it’s going to clear the error codes.

The Big Six

If the Cleveland Indians have a set of goals for the season scrawled on a piece of paper inside the mind of general manager Mark Shapiro, it probably says “when you don't know where you're going any road will get you there.”

Here's a test: on any night watch the Indians for as long as you can stand and then try to write down exactly what you think they were trying to accomplish. On the list of things you're likely to write down, “win games,” if it appears at all, will be down at the bottom. For a team rebuilding that's understandable. The real problem is that at the bottom also will be “developing a team that someday will win games.”

During this past off season Shapiro spent a lot of time talking about how this team needed to get a better start out of the gate than in seasons past. Shapiro all but painted the picture that the team's slow starts was the primary reason Eric Wedge now has “former Indians' manager” as part of his title.

To that end Shapiro and the brain trust that brought you this roster went about supposedly revamping the spring training experience as if the only thing that stood between this roster and on-field success was a better cut of steak at the training table. Manager Manny Acta placed more emphasis on winning preseason games than did his predecessor (as well as most of the other current managers) and indeed from that perspective the Indians' spring was a success.

But a distressed room doesn't suddenly get a makeover just because you move a few lamps around. When the season started this team was still the uneven mess it looked like on paper in the off season and thus it shouldn't have surprised anyone that April again was miserable. It was bound to be.

Then again, we're likely to be saying the same thing at the end of May, June, July and August as well. By September fans will be so focused on the Browns that they won't notice whatever fate awaits the Indians' then.

The Indians 9-13 record at the end of April projects to a 66 win season. Since most figure this team to win about 70 games anyway, it seems like they are right on pace.

It would be one thing if this team was built with the intent of taking its lumps early while it gels into a competitive unit late. That's just not the case. It's a team that seems to have been built with only one unifying theme: don't lose too much money.

Even that task isn't going to be easy, not with a lineup featuring the Big Six.

The Indians as constructed are mostly a mess. Of the seven players on the roster making over $1 million this season, 6 of them are among the least productive. Unfortunately, three of those six look to be around for a few more years. The Indians have no other choice.

What it all adds up to is a cringe-worthy lineup with only the occasional bright spot or, in mathematical terms, a team that deservedly is on pace to win 66 games, for years to come.

I've railed against Russell Branyan being on this team plenty of times so no need to turn over those shovels of dirt again. Nothing he's done since his return changes that assessment. The best that can be said is that he's not guaranteed any money for next year. All he's doing on this team is eating up space and inhibiting the development of players that might actually have a chance to be on this team a year from now. His $2 million dollar salary is essentially a gift that Branyan would be wise to put in a CD. I hope he sends a thank you note.

You could say the same thing about Travis Hafner, except that his salary is now in the multi-millions, 11.5 of them to be exact.

It's actually hard to watch Hafner these days because so much of what he isn't now is wrapped up in what he used to be. It may be that injuries have robbed him of his ability to be productive any longer. It also may be that his lack of productivity at the plate is exacerbated by his contract, with 3 years remaining, that has become the millstone around this franchise that prevents it from putting a more cohesive lineup on the field. Hafner not only is collecting $11.5 million this season, which equates to about $100 per bad swing at this point, but the Indians are also on the hook to pay him $13 million each of the next two seasons. Hafner is like that stock you bought at $85 a share and held on to even as the company went bankrupt. What else could you do?

The sad fact is that the Indians could be as productive with Andy Marte and pick a player making the minimum as they are with Branyan and Hafner in the same lineup at about 1/12th the cost. This alone goes a long way to explaining the mess that is this lineup.

Yet if these two were the only problems then maybe things would look brighter. But then I watch Jhonny Peralta slumber through his existence at third base like the kid in the back of your high school science class who, when he was there at all, was usually sleeping.

Peralta, with his $4.85 million salary, is like a trust fund baby just gliding through life hoping the money never runs out. Fortunately, it might. He's due $7 million next season, but that's a club option which, if exercised, means Peralta has some incriminating pictures of someone stored in a safety deposit box. If neither Shapiro nor his hand-picked successor Chris Antonetti can't find someone to be as productive as Peralta for 1/10th the price then the Dolans should sue for malpractice.

You could make the case, weakly, that Peralta is still pouting over being moved to third base. But really he wasn't any better at short, either. He has occasional streaks where he's semi-hot at the plate followed by long streaks where he looks like he'd rather be any place else. Mostly though he continues to occupy a spot in the heart of a very weak offensive lineup because his guaranteed salary makes it impossible for the Indians to put anyone else there.

Branyan, Hafner and Peralta are mostly old stories at this point. Unfortunately another player that's becoming an old story is Grady Sizemore. Like Hafner, Sizemore's high water mark was 2006. Since then he's been on a steady and mystifying decline.

That might be fine if Sizemore were still earning league minimum. Instead he's making $5.7 million this year and is scheduled to make $7.6 million next season. In fact Sizemore's salary and productivity make a perfect “X” on the chart with the crossover point being that 2006 season.

There's no question that Wedge had trouble grooming Sizemore in the same way that Wedge had trouble developing most players. Yet at this point the problems with Sizemore seem to be beyond the grasp of nearly everybody. Except for the occasional spectacular play in center field, he looks nothing like the player that was poised to become the Indians' next superstar to be traded. Right now he looks like just another spare part among the many cobbled together in order to field a line up each day.

You can blame Shapiro for giving Hafner an outsized contract and for placing too much faith in a player like Peralta who never quite deserved it. You can find a healthy number of baseball executives that would agree with you, too. When it comes to Sizemore, though, there probably isn't an executive in baseball that would yet turn his back on him. And yet, where he seems to be headed is for a career that mirrors that of Rick Manning. That isn't awful, but it you shouldn't pay nearly $8 million a year for it either.

Then there's the money being chewed up by Kerry Wood as he sits in the spot where he's apparently most comfortable, the disabled list. But his $11 million for next season is a club option which means that if he somehow survives the whole season in Cleveland he won't survive the off season.

The same applies to pitcher Jake Westbrook, with his $11 million salary. He is the last of the Big Six as he's a free agent next season. His injuries caused him to miss all of last season but let's be honest, before that he was a career .500 pitcher anyway with an ERA well over 4.00. His history indicates he would never have received full value from what they were paying him anyway.

Fausto Carmona is the last of the 7 players making at least $1 million this season. Of the group he's been far and away the most productive. He's also the most mercurial of the group and always on the verge of being a few pitches away from the mess he's been the last two seasons or, stated differently, on the verge of making the Big Six the Big Seven.

Which means, of course, that as long as the majority of this group stays in tact, and it will, for the next few seasons, there's really no reason to think that April 2011 or 2012 is going to be any better.

Cutting the Right Corners

Cleveland Indians’ general manager Mark Shapiro often comes across as the kind of guy that likes a good inspirational quip. It wouldn’t be a surprise if on the wall of his office were frames of pictures of hard working but generic-looking athletes with phrases underneath such as “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up” or “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” But the one phrase likely not on that wall but which probably should be is the one that seems to be guiding this year’s version of the Indians is “cut enough corners, sooner or later you’ll pay the price.”

Anyone following the arc of the Indians has seen an interesting, some would say disturbing, pattern in which the team is really good one year and really bad the next. It’s as if every time Shapiro gets his team to take one step forward, it rewards him by taking one step back the next. If this is a pattern, then 2009 should be a big year. Whether it will be or not will really depend on how well Shapiro has learned from his corner-cutting ways.

Toiling as the general manager for an undercapitalized team in a market as hit hard by the economy as any, Shapiro’s job has always been a challenge. He could continue to field one cheaply built team after another, hope to get lucky once every decade or so, and then go about making excuses as to why his team again finished at the bottom of the division. The good thing about Shapiro is that he’s always accepted the cards he’s been dealt since he was handed the general manager’s job. Rather than complain about always getting a two of spades and a three of clubs as his hole cards, he stays in the game and tries to find a way to draw to an inside straight.

The bad thing about Shapiro, though, is that at times he serves as his biggest fan. Having drawn to that inside straight a few times, it’s almost as if he’s come to believe he can do it on command. Take last season as the prime example. Intellectually, he had to have been worried about two things: Travis Hafner and Joe Borowski. But at some point between budget meetings and prioritizing the team’s needs, he convinced himself that it wasn’t a question of “if” with regard to either but “when.” It was a bad play.

Last year’s team, attempting to build on the success of the previous season, fell apart for two reasons. First, when it mattered most early in the season the offense was awful. The injury to Victor Martinez was unanticipated and certainly was a factor. But the far bigger problem was the hole in the lineup that Hafner had become in 2007. Last season was no better. Hafner not only didn’t regain form he arguably made his situation worse by apparently trying to play through a shoulder injury that ultimately required extensive surgery.

Second, and at least as important, was the disaster in the bullpen. There were many culprits, of course, but none bigger was Shapiro pinning his hopes on Borowski. Given the teams’ economic circumstances, what Shapiro did was understandable. He was trying to save budget dollars in the bullpen and convinced himself that he could squeeze another magical season out of Borowski’s arm. There were plenty of warning signs that Borowski’s 2007 season was more illusion than reality and Shapiro at times had to think the same thing. But that didn’t stop him from seeing if that well still had some crude left in it. It didn’t.

As fans and critics, we often end up focusing too often on the mistakes that get made. But give Shapiro credit. He realized that cutting corners on the bullpen caught up with him and went about doing something about it this season by signing, at a relatively steep price, closer Kerry Wood. It’s a gamble, but it is more in the context of Shapiro holding his two of spades and three of clubs while seeing that the first three cards in the flop are a five of diamonds, a six of hearts and a seven of clubs. Waiting to see what happens on the turn and the river doesn’t seem like a bad play.

The other encouraging piece in all of this is that Shapiro no longer seems to be trying to play an impossible hand when it comes to Hafner. By the time Hafner was shut down last season, he had become a black hole in the lineup. When Victor Martinez likewise turned up injured, the offense lost its bearings.

But slowly and surely, the offense regained its footing in the second half, thanks, for example, to the emergence of Kelly Shoppach and a better second half by Ryan Garko. Right now, Hafner is well into the category of “didn’t he use to be somebody?” The upsides on the “if” questions with Hafner are the same as they were last year, but the key difference is that exhibition baseball has begun and no one seems to have moved Hafner out of the “if” category.

The downside, of course, is that despite the fact that Shapiro enters the season with his eyes wide open on Hafner, his presence in the lineup does alter the mix that was working effectively at the end of last season. When the Indians’ offense finally did regain its bearings last year, it did it in a way that was mostly contrary to how it fielded teams in the past. While not reduced to the mode of constantly trying to manufacture runs, the Indians offense also didn’t really feature those one or two big bats that had been the hallmark of this team for the last 10-15 years. Instead, it relied then as it does now, on players who can consistently get on base and have some pop. Hafner is part of that mix, out of necessity only.

While Hafner used to be a feared power hitter who could consistently get on base, he’s not that guy right now. This, again, is where corners got cut. That isn’t necessarily a criticism, at least of Shapiro. Simply put, Shapiro doesn’t have the budget luxury of taking care of every problem every year. By devoting the money to Wood, and already having a lot of money sunk into Hafner Shapiro was forced to forego finding someone to take Hafner’s place in the same way that Wood replaced Borowski and the cadre of pretenders that stepped in when Borowski flamed out.

What would be a surprise, though, is if this cut corner comes back to bite Shapiro like the one he made last season with respect to the bullpen. There’s always a chance that Shoppach’s 2008 will represent his high-water mark and that Garko simply isn’t ever going to be consistent enough, but there are enough other track records in the lineup and enough talent in the wings to make this an acceptable risk.

Shapiro may see himself more a risk manager than the professional gambler that he’s actually become. In truth there is very little difference between the two. Success in either comes down to the ability to learn from your mistakes just as success this season comes down to whether Shapiro has correctly played the lessons he’s learned. It’s very early in the game, but the results thus far are encouraging.

Another Lesson from the Local Media

If the average Cleveland Indians fan was surprised by the team’s announcement last week that catcher Victor Martinez was being shelved for the next two months because of elbow surgery, apparently it paled in comparison to the shock felt by the local reporters covering the team on a daily basis.

Crank-in-residence Sheldon Ocker of the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday really upbraided Indians’ management for all the mystery surrounding both the Martinez and Travis Hafner injuries. Ouch. Jim Ingraham of the Lake County News-Herald and Lorain Morning Journal matched Ocker indignant word-for-indignant word. Double ouch. Paul Hoynes of the Plain Dealer couldn’t personally muster the energy to register his protest formally, but once someone wakes him up I’m sure he’ll get right on it.

Sure, as Ingraham said, the Indians look bad. Guess what? The reporters covering the team look worse. Lost in the convenient rage by the local press is their complete lack of appreciation for irony. Doing what reporters often do best, pointing fingers elsewhere, these three should really be asking themselves why they were scooped on this story by the Indians’ public relations office. They supposedly cover the team on a daily basis, spending more hours with the team during the season then they do their own families. Yet not one of them was even aware that Martinez had a chronically sore elbow until Martinez left the game or if they were never mentioned it.

The complacency of most of the local media covering the town’s various pro sports teams is hardly breaking news. But then again, either were the injuries to Martinez and Hafner, playing out as they did over the course of months, not days let alone hours.

This episode really provides a nice backdrop to a column I wrote last week and the feedback it received about how the Indians management, utilizing their local media enablers, were busy weaving a new story line into the collective conscious that injuries alone were the real reason this team was performing well below the misguided preseason expectations. Injuries are playing a role certainly but the far bigger culprit is general manager Mark Shapiro’s increasingly disastrous decision to essentially stand pat this last off season.

A reader, agreeing with the points made and wondering why Hoynes, for example, wasn’t willing to come out publicly and say that that this team wasn’t wearing clothes, sent the column to Hoynes for a response. Hoynes, expressing far more anger at the reader then he could muster at Shapiro, suggested first that I got the idea to write the column from the Plain Dealer and, by the way, it must be nice sitting in the safe confines of an ivory tower and pontificating while he and his ilk slug it out each day, going down to the locker room, talking to the players and writing on a deadline. Who knew Hoynes had such contempt for Bill Livingston and Bud Shaw?

The surprise though came at the end of the email. Essentially Hoynes said you can’t use injuries as an excuse but you can’t ignore them either. In other words, he really didn’t disagree.

I’m not suggesting that anything that happens in the world of sports, particularly pro sports, is worth the wrongheaded emphasis we place on it as a society. But so long as we’re going to cover sports, there’s nothing wrong with taking it seriously. In the bubble that Hoynes, Ocker and the rest occupy the only ones apparently capable of taking it seriously and reporting on it with requisite insight are the beat reporters that “go down to the locker room.” Without them, we’d miss manager Eric Wedge saying after another loss, “we’ve just got to keep playing hard.”

What Hoynes’ email really reveals is that he like many others in his line of work these days has taken on a bunker mentality when it comes to their internet competitors. Rather than embrace the diversity of voices or accept the challenge they present, reporters like Hoynes have increasingly taken on the tone of the aging ex-wife pushed out for a younger version. In the process, the loss of relevancy they fear is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s a fair point to make by whoever makes it that Shapiro and Wedge cheated fans by not being more forthcoming earlier in the season. Indeed, it’s equally fair for anyone with a keyboard and access to an audience to second-guess the thought process that led to Shapiro and Wedge thinking that it was a good idea to initially play two obviously injured players and then keep them in the lineup while their failures and the losses continued to pile up like sandbags fending off flood waters. The problem is that it would have been far more useful for those with the supposedly inside access, like Hoynes, Ocker or any of the rest of them, to be on the front end of the story, not the back.

If the secret to insight is in the locker room, then why, again, did Hoynes, Ocker and the rest completely miss the Martinez and Hafner stories? They missed it because, gosh, Shapiro decided to be deceptive with the fan base. That doesn’t get Shapiro off the hook but a little after-the-fact indignation doesn’t mean the local reporters that were sleeping all along shouldn’t likewise hang with him.

Incapable of self-reflection, the local press has long since taken on the clubby persona of a jaded insider. Indeed, what Hoynes is essentially saying is that he and his brethren pull punches and play it safe in order to maintain access that they don’t really utilize in the first place. Shapiro and others like him know it and play into it, doling out access to them just infrequently enough to make it seem special. The reality is that Shapiro didn’t volunteer the information about Martinez sooner because he knew he could get away with it. He has a complacent pack of reporters covering this team, a pack whose interest doesn’t extend much beyond the relative merits of whether or not the chicken picata on the pre-game buffet is a bit too spicy. If Shapiro takes a little flak afterward for not being completely truthful, so be it. It isn’t going to change the coverage of his team going forward.

The lesson here is that access is overrated and insight underrated. A valid point isn’t any less so because it was made by someone on this site and not by one of the drones sitting in the press box. If you’re still relying on the local media to hold the team and its management accountable, then you’ll surely be disappointed and ill-informed. Then again you’re probably not reading this anyway. And, for the record, I couldn’t have gotten the idea for my column from reading the Plain Dealer. That would have meant that someone like Hoynes would have had to have written it in the first place and we all know by now that didn’t happen.

Becoming Unhinged

If anyone was worried that the dismal performance of the Cleveland Indians has gone unnoticed by manager Eric Wedge, worry nevermore. With each passing loss, Wedge is coming far closer to becoming unhinged than at any point since he took over as manager in 2004.

The latest evidence was on display after Wednesday afternoon’s loss to the Chicago White Sox when a visibly angry Wedge uncharacteristically challenged relief pitcher Rafael Betancourt, claiming essentially that Betancourt is afraid to pitch inside.

That Betancourt is underperforming is hardly news. Heck, it means he fits in well with this group of underachievers. That Wedge has taken his complaints public, however, does qualify as genuine news on any number of fronts.

First, blasting a player publicly is something either a rookie manager or an icon does. Wedge is neither. He may be a veteran manager, but he doesn’t have the gravitas or resume of a Jim Leyland in Detroit, for example, to pull it off just yet. By showing what some would say is his human side, Wedge began a walk on a slippery slope in new shoes with wax paper on the soles.

A manager fills many roles, from babysitter to Godfather. But first and foremost, the players have to believe that the manger is like a Secret Service agent, ready to take a bullet for them if necessary. When the manager starts firing the bullets instead, the dynamic is inverted. Put it this way, do you think Betancourt believes that Wedge has his back? To the extent that there’s a sliver of doubt in their minds, the players will now be that much more cautious with Wedge. It’s not one of those good problems to have.

Second, as awful as Betancourt and the bullpen have been, you could have won a small fortune wagering that to the extent Wedge would lose it publicly it would be because anyone of his hitters just killed another rally by swinging at another ball four. Think about Wednesday’s ninth inning. Wedge, playing small ball with a team ill equipped to handle the task, watched, in order, Ben Francisco and Victor Martinez fail to get the tying run home from third base.

When Wedge has talked about the team’s offensive problems, it’s been mostly in a generic sense, complaining that “the hitters” keep giving away at-bats but generally not focusing on any particular player. To the extent he’s spoken about anybody, it’s been in even, measured tones about Travis Hafner and the need to get him going in the right direction.

One aspect of Wedge’s attack on Betancourt that is particularly intriguing was the statement that Wedge and pitching coach Carl Willis have been making the same points over and over again to no avail. It’s similar to Wedge’s statements that he’s talked with the hitters numerous times about their approach, again to no avail.

In some sense, it suggests that the players, for whatever reason, are beginning to tune out Wedge and his staff. Wedge admitted that Betancourt isn’t listening and it’s pretty clear that no one’s much listening to hitting coach Derek Shelton either, given how the ninth inning unfolded on Wednesday.

By taking on Betancourt as he did, Wedge unwittingly presented his general manager with an issue that probably wasn’t yet on his radar screen but probably should have been: that Wedge may be starting to lose the clubhouse. How true that ultimately is will undoubtedly be the key to the way the rest of this season unfolds. Right now, it’s doubtful that Mark Shapiro sees this as anything more than isolated examples involving one or two players. But if the struggles continue, Shapiro is going to reassess that premise. And if he thinks that team is no longer listening to Wedge or his staff, then Shapiro will have a bigger problem to deal with than whether or not to dump Andy Marte.

The guess, though, is that if the clubhouse is being lost, it’s not by Wedge but by Shapiro. Wedge is just the convenient target for a boatload of frustration stemming from a variety of failures, not the least of which was Shapiro’s inability to upgrade an offense that was struggling long before this season started.

Essentially, Shapiro stood pat on an offense that last year was too highly dependent on the long ball to produce runs. Forget about runs scored, the Indians struggled on offense last year and the players know it. It was masked by the emergence of Asdrubal Cabrera late last season, but most should recall that until Cabrera arrived, the Indians looked every bit as woeful as they do now for significant stretches, which is no surprise because it’s largely the same players.

Shapiro entered this season adhering to certain assumptions that, at the time, seemed pretty reasonable: that Hafner’s 2007 was an anomaly, that Cabrera and Sizemore would be even better and that Franklin Gutierrez looked poised to make a huge jump as well. Unfortunately, not a one of them has worked out so far.

In many ways, 2008 is turning out like 2006. Having gotten painfully close the previous season, Shapiro once again resisted the urge to make any major changes. Just as they did in 2006, the players this year seem to have taken note and responded in the most negative way possible, by failing to live up to any reasonable expectations. Instead of being energized by the confidence in them that they’d be even better, they seemed to have taken Shapiro’s minor offseason tweaks as a lack of commitment.
There’s no way of really knowing of course what’s deep in the psyche of most of these players. And whether or not it’s too late to save a season that’s hemorrhaging hope by the inning is a matter of opinion that ultimately will take another 50 or so games to confirm. While this season may not end up amounting to much, it won’t be a total loss if Shapiro is now able to learn the lessons he didn’t learn following the 2005 season, that rare is the team that can improve by standing pat.

The Feet in the Fire

This time, it wasn’t the weather.

There were just over 35,000 in attendance at Sunday’s game at Progressive Field between the Cleveland Indians and the Texas Rangers. A decent crowd, certainly, but well short of a sell out on an absolutely perfect day for baseball on a Sunday of a long holiday weekend. For good measure, it was kids’ day, meaning that Junior and Squirt could run the bases afterward, assuming Ma and Pa hung around long enough.

If Indians general manager Mark Shapiro needed any more proof that interest in this team is waning quickly, then most certainly his bosses will let him know that the 8,000 or so who didn’t bother to buy a ticket Sunday made a far louder noise than anything that could have possibly been generated by those who did bother to show up.

It’s a combination of things, to be sure, but ultimately when a team can’t score runs it’s frustrating, irritating, but above all else, boring. A great pitching performance like C.C. Sabathia’s has a certain beauty that is always underappreciated, but it isn’t even close to enough Novocain for the pain this team is inflicting on its fans. At bat after at bat, called third strike after called third strike, the institutional failures hang over this team like a lethal mushroom cloud.

The regression analysts among us, and there are plenty that actually work for the Indians, will tell you that even a team that can’t hit can’t hit this bad. True. But if the upside isn’t all that high, where’s the settling point: 4.5 runs a game instead of 4.1?

You could use Sunday’s game as a microcosm for the season thus far, but really it’s just the latest in the assembly line that’s been punching out one bad game after another. Particularly in these last 10 games, any loss but Friday’s, an aberration if ever there was one, provides an appropriate snapshot. Sunday’s loss was set early, when the Indians loaded the bases with one out in the second inning and couldn’t find a way to get even one run in. Ben Francisco topped the ball, creating a force out at the plate. He could be forgiven because, frankly, he’s the only player hitting these days.

But up came Travis Hafner and his latest opportunity to disappoint. He met expectations, flying out to center field, sucking the life once again out of the team and its fans. If lack of self-awareness is a disease, Hafner is suffering from a particularly acute form. His post-game quote was a gem: “It seemed like we had a chance to score runs all day. But we couldn't find a way to get runners across the plate.” If by “we” he means “I” and by “all day” he means “all season” then it’s accurate. Otherwise, it seems a tad unfair to call out the collective.

There was a host of one of post-game call-in shows that suggested that despite the struggles, Hafner has to stay in the number three spot in the order. No need to take the host to task. It’s actually a common sentiment, actually, borne out of the school of thought that Hafner will eventually come out of it.

Not to go all negative by throwing around a bunch of facts, but it’s been over a year already and nothing about the way he’s swinging the bat suggests there is anything to come out of. Still, giving him the dwindling benefit of an ever increasing doubt, if he’s going to come out of it, let him do it in Buffalo and let it be for the rest of the season. Assuming there’s no collective bargaining restriction, Hafner should be on the next Trailways to Buffalo. If it works half as well for him as it did for Cliff Lee, then he’ll surely earn his way back on this team next spring.

The thought of demoting Hafner has to have crossed Shapiro’s mind at least once for each of the 600 or so at bats since his spiral began. But there are a number of factors at play from the personal to the practical. Hafner has been in the big leagues since 2002. As recently as the 2006 season, he was the face, the future of the franchise. He has a long-term guaranteed contract worth millions. Psychologically, making that kind of move would probably be perceived as a negative in the clubhouse, perhaps more so than his constant failures at the plate. In short, in the context of sports, it’s a difficult decision.

If Shapiro’s frustrated, what must be going through manager Eric Wedge’s brain? If this were anyone but Hafner, he’d have stapled his backside to the bench, next to Andy Marte’s, in late April. But Wedge understands the political ramifications at play and knows that navigating this storm is where a manger really earns his money. Which is why the safe course is to stay the course.

At some point, though, if the Indians as a team keep batting around the Mendoza line and scoring runs like they were the Seattle Pilots this will come to a head unless Shapiro makes a move first. Wedge isn’t simply going to put his own job in jeopardy for the sake of Hafner’s ego. Shapiro will either have to bail him out or the two will collide. A transcript of that conversation would be an instant bestseller.

The only other option, at least in the near term, is the very convenient disabled list. With a supposedly chronic shoulder and/or elbow problem, Hafner’s a candidate for the DL every day he shows up for work. It would hardly be a shock if he ends up there soon followed by an extended rehab stint in Akron and Buffalo. It’s a decent organizational compromise to an obviously thorny issue. If it doesn’t work, then the transition to Buffalo for the rest of the season isn’t as tricky.

Ridding the team of Hafner, even in the short run, doesn’t solve all of the other problems. But it does give them a kick start. Most importantly, what it really does is tell the rest of the team that the money may be guaranteed but their spot on the roster isn’t. If you don’t think that’s a message that needs to be sent, then watch Jhonny Peralta sleepwalk his way through a game some time. The season isn’t lost yet, but it will be unless someone’s feet actually get held to a fire.

62 Million Reasons to Find an Answer

It’s reasonably accepted in baseball circles that good pitching tends to beat good hitting. It’s why general managers build teams from the pitching mound out. But following the Cleveland Indians this season, particularly in the last seven days, what we’ve learned is that it’s equally true that bad pitching also beats bad hitting.

Around the fringes, people keep talking about the Indians’ offensive woes like it is the economy. Management, in the form of manager Eric Wedge and general manager Mark Shapiro, is reluctant to admit the recession that’s evident to everyone else, but it is now willing to at least concede that there has been some sort of slowdown. Well, recognition that a problem exists is always helpful, but Shapiro isn’t going to be able to paper over it by mailing out refund checks to the hapless that paid good money to watch bad baseball this past week and then skip town.

In a historical context, the Indians haven’t suddenly rediscovered the 1970s. But if you want to use history as a teacher, then just know that the last time the Indians went through a stretch like this they fired the hitting coach. Which raises the question, is current hitting coach Derek Shelton in trouble?

Following Sunday’s shut out to the terminally futile Kansas City Royals, Wedge said that everything was open for evaluation. Most of the ensuing discussion focused on the players, the lineups and darn near everything else but Shelton. If the team is really going to do something more than the usual gestures like changing the lineup and calling up a player or two, then Shelton is fair game. And if Shelton is fair game, then he has reason to be worried, for about 62 million more reasons than you think.

It was just under three years ago when Shelton replaced Eddie Murray under nearly identical circumstances, at least on the surface. It was early June and the Indians were hitting .243 as a team, a figure which is actually one point better than the Indians current team batting average. When Wedge fired Murray, he said “it's not just about right now, it's just about what we feel is best for our ballclub today, the future and long term. From an offensive standpoint, I feel we can do better. But it's not just about Eddie Murray. I just felt that we needed to make a change and I felt this was best for our ballclub.”

That move by Wedge was still one of the best managerial moves he’s made. Being freed from the shadowy grip of the moody Murray, Indians hitters across the board responded. By season’s end, the team’s average was .271, nearly 30 points higher. They were also fourth in the league in runs scored and third in on-base percentage. It was an onslaught that continued throughout 2006 as well. But as 2007 wore on and now nearly a quarter of the 2008 season in the books, the drop in production has been dramatic.

Clearly Indians hitters were more welcoming to Shelton, at least at the onset. But at this point, it’s almost as if you could simply substitute Sheton’s name in Wedge’s quote about Murray and make it fit equally as well. That doesn’t mean that Shelton is entirely to blame for the current woes, but it’s undeniable that the team has been in a hitting tailspin for most of the last 200 games.

The real onus for the offensive struggles appears to be focused far more intently on Travis Hafner, but that doesn’t take the heat off of Shelton. If anything, it increases it. Enough has already been said about Hafner’s struggles to fill the library in his hometown of Jamestown, North Dakota, which may not be saying much actually. And ignoring the roadside psychology of those who are prone to diagnose a problem they couldn’t be more ill-equipped to evaluate, the larger truth is that the correlation between Hafner’s so-called slump and the Indians overall offense is nearly perfect.

Certainly, Hafner’s personal lack of production accounts for a big part of the team’s dip. But it’s not just the lack of hitting. The real problem is the stench that Hafner’s struggles create on the rest of the lineup. There are such things as team slumps, but when the one guy more than any other in the lineup that’s paid to hit no longer can, all it’s done is increase the pressure on every one else. Other than catcher Victor Martinez, who is a hitting savant like Manny Ramierez but without similar power, you can literally see every other player in the lineup trying to do too much, time and time again..

If Ryan Garko, for example, swings any harder, his large intestine is going to pop out of its casing. Casey Blake seems to walk to the plate feeling like he has to defy his career stats and hit .350 and 40 home runs when the Indians would be far better off if he’d just get to those career averages. Asdrubal Cabrera just seems lost. Jhonny Peralta appears bored.

This is where guys like Shelton are really supposed to earn their keep. Wedge continues to bemoan not just the lack of hitting but the inability of his hitters to put themselves into good hitters counts. He’s been critical, too, of the lack of adjustments that his players are making from at bat to at bat and from game to game. The simple question is whose fault is that? Not to carry the analogy too far, but Shelton is somewhat akin to a football team’s offensive coordinator. If a team supposedly has the right players—and Indians management has made it clear that it believes it has the right players—then blaming the players only gets you so far. Time to turn to the one calling the plays.

But if you’re Shelton, where do you start given that there’s only 24 hours in a day? You could attack the symptoms, like Garko, Blake, and the dynamic duo of Jason Michaels and David Dellucci. You can try and straighten out Cabrera before he loses confidence. You can even given Peralta an extra can of Mountain Dew with his pre-game meal. But first and foremost, if Shelton is astute at all, his energy will be expended in figuring out if Hafner is salvageable. Right now the Indians have about $62 million committed to Hafner through 2013 and if he continues to hit like Bob Uecker then his deal will be a bigger albatross around the Indians neck than Barry Zito’s contract will be with the San Francisco Giants. If Hafner isn’t going to make it, the impact on the team and ownership won’t stop reverberating for the next decade.

Given the size of that investment, the Indians will dump Shelton long before they change course on Hafner, even as he’s become baseball’s equivalent of golf’s David Duval, a major winner who now can’t break 80. If Shelton doesn’t understand this calculus and find a way to right the biggest ship of all soon, then his inevitable firing in early June will actually be well deserved. The only problem, though, is unlike in 2005, an immediate resurgence doesn’t appear nearly as likely.

The Lost Weekend--Almost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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