Mismanaging Expectations

If the Cleveland Indians are guilty of anything this season, it's mismanaging expectations and nothing more. A fast start out of the gate, something the fans aren't particularly used to, fueled an optimism that the underlying talent ultimately just can't fulfill.

Making it all the more frustrating is the fact that the fast start was in large part due to ank incredible streak of timely hitting. Now that it has ended and the players have mostly regressed to their norms, may fans are apoplectic.

It didn't need to be this way.

Had those norms taken hold as they should have earlier on, the Indians would probably be sitting in about the position most had staked out for them before the season began. In that context, the recent call up of Lonnie Chisenhall, for example, would look a whole lot less desperate.

But the Indians did get off to that fast start, fans got to thinking that this could be the year and Tribe management was left with the rather vexing conundrum of how to make it look like the team is trying to win it all while knowing that there aren't nearly enough horses to make a legitimate run.

So what did they do? Of course, they fired the hitting coach. There's precedent for that move. Almost 6 years to the day from when current manager Manny Acta sacrificed Jon Ninnally to the god of swings and misses, his predecessor Eric Wedge did likewise to Eddie Murray.

This isn't to make the case for Nunnally one way or the other so much as it is to underscore that Nunnally was sacrificed on the altar of unreasonable expectations. But that's just the kind of move teams like the Indians tend to make to placate the fans.

In truth this year's team is hitting remarkably similar to last year's squad. It's a little ahead of last year's pace in terms of runs scored, butnthe batting averages, on base percentage, slugging percentage and OPS are virtually identical.

And why not? It's pretty much the same team or at least the same type of team. Travis Hafner is hitting this year while Shin-Shoo Choo, now on the disabled list, is not. Grady Sizemore was on the DL last year but his contributions this year, particularly lately, have been minimal. And then there's Austin Kearns, taking up space once again but at least doing so on the cheap.

Maybe that actually makes the case for dumping Nunnally because the Indians were a lousy hitting team last year. But at the very least it makes the case that from a hitting standpoint the Indians weren't ready to compete this year at a playoff level. The only reason anyone thought otherwise was skewed expectations and nothing more.

But just as water finds its level so too do major league baseball teams. The Indians are no exception and this perhaps is what fans need to remember most. The grind of a 162 game schedule allows for several peaks and valleys but ultimately it provides sufficient time for a team to reveal its true self.

Where it would really pay for the Indians to better manage fan expectations is in better explaining that this team while this team isn't playoff ready it isn't a miserable mess either. Indeed there are some building blocks exactly in the place they need to be, on the pitching staff. There have been a few hiccups lately but the bullpen has been more than just a pleasant surprise.

Chris Perez is having an all star season. Tony Sipp has been excellent as have Rafael Perez, Vinnie Pestano and even Joe Smith. Any team with a bullpen that is pitching like the Indians' bullpen is going to be competitive.

The starting rotation has three very solid pitchers at the moment in Justin Masterson, Josh Tomlin and Carlos Carrasco. Fausto Carmona has a wicked good arm and a wicked awful mental approach. He doesn't need a new team to get straightened out, just a mentor and more nurturing.

You don't need tape of the late Pete Franklin screaming in your ear to know that the only real way to build a team is through pitching. Once that's in place then you get more of it. And once you have more of it you get even more of it. The game of baseball has changed a million ways in the last 100 years but the one thing that hasn't changed is that the teams with the best pitching usually prevail.

Assuming Indians general manager Chris Antonetti understands this point, and he certainly seems to, it could hardly be argued that he doesn't have the team pointed in the right direction.

But pointing in the right direction and actually arriving at the destination are hardly the same thing. There's a pretty bumpy road in between and that's what the team is really experiencing at the moment.

The fast start made it seem like the Indians long strange trip to respectability had maybe arrived at the outskirts of their playoffs destination when in reality all that happened is that the team bus hit a particularly smooth stretch of highway where they could hit the accelerator without worrying about any speed traps.

But then people started to notice and not surprisingly it's gotten tougher, much tougher.

As a result fans are coming to the rather halting conclusion now that was staring them in the face all along--not this year, folks and it's making them a little angrier than they probably should be.

Fortunately, this is Cleveland where don't stay mad at our teams, only certain players and owners. The resignation that comes when the expectations get rightly downsized has creeped in as evidenced by the ever increasing refrain, spoken seemingly every year, to "just let the kids play."

What many fans didn't realize is that's what the team had be mostly doing all along.

A Very Thin Herd

There’s no need for the fans to bury the Cleveland Indians before the season starts. Its management already has done the job for them.

With the announcement on Monday of the opening day roster, team president Mark Shapiro and general manager Chris Antonetti have all but scrawled it across the sky that this isn’t going to be a year where fans ought to be thinking playoffs come next fall.

But it’s not like the fans had unreasonably outsized expectations of this team anyway.
In Cleveland, the fans always seem to get the team they expected. No one is much to used to pleasant surprises in these parts. Surprises, to the extent they come at all, are generally bad ones.

It’s possible, of course, that the Indians can tick off more wins than a season ago and hence point to “progress” as the theme of its “Year in Review” retrospective come next October. But a few wins either way aren’t going to be the best way to judge the progress of this franchise anyway. No, that will come when there is no longer a need to field a team fresh out of spring training with players whose resumes as thin as the ones on this team.

Let’s start with one of the more startling revelations. When the roster was announced on Monday it had 4, count ‘em, 4 non-roster invitees making the big league club. That was the first red flag. That was followed closely by another group of players that aren’t quite in the same category, but that’s only a function of the labels we choose to place on them. And that’s all before we get to the prospects on this team, players short on major league experience but counted on to lead this team in the years ahead.

In the final analysis, this Indians roster is one of the most loosely constructed and shaky rosters in the major leagues. It may not be the worst, but neither is it competitive with the upper tiers.

Spring training non-roster invitees generally are of two varieties: prospects with their hands on the bottom wrung but reaching upward, brought in for some experience and big league coaching during spring training and aging veterans hanging on to the bottom rung for dear life and on their way out. In other words, putting the latter group into the same category as the former is a mere technicality because they both occupy the same space at a given moment. The latter category, though, is really just one of those great tags that general managers like to use to place on the players who essentially walked on to the team.

An occasional walk-on making a big league club can happen to any team, particularly those clubs looking to field a team on the cheap like the Indians. But if 4 making a team is not unprecedented, then at the very least it’s unusual.

Call it the confluence of a small budget and the inability to develop your own players as the reason that the Indians have devoted nearly 20% of its opening day roster to guys that were one step into forced retirement before the Indians came begging.

As Terry Pluto detailed last week in the Plain Dealer (and as mentioned in my last column), the Indians have been awful at drafting, so bad that they have but one player on their opening day roster this year from the 2004-07 draft classes. In large part, that explains why holes are getting filled in with walk ons. There is nobody else.

Not included in this group of walk ons are at least two players, Chad Durbin and Orlando Cabrera, who for the most part fall into this same category, if not by label then by age. You cold also lump in Austin Kearnes in this category as well and it wouldn’t be unfair.

All three will probably help out the Indians but then that seems so much related to the simple fact that the roster is so thin in the first place. It’s not as if the Indians were competing with any of the league’s contenders for their services.

Then there two more relievers, Frank Hermann and Vinnie Pestano, who, because of the thinness of their resumes and lack of accomplishments at the major league level, sport the same kind of split contracts as non-roster invitees. Whether either is able to make it at the major league level for a sustained period of time is unknown but the odds aren’t in their favor at the moment.

To put the Indians’ roster in a bit more perspective, of the five actual infielders to make the club (Travis Hafner is listed on the roster as an infielder in the same way that Britney Spears is listed on her albums as a singer), two—Jack Hannahan and Adam Everett—are walk ons and one, Orlando Cabrera, is basically just that. Similarly, 4 of the 7 relievers are of a similar status, Justin Germano, Durbin, Hermann and Pestano.

It’s not so much that any of this should set off alarm bells because, well, the expectations on this club are so slight. But it does illustrate exactly why those expectations are where they need to be and why progress for this franchise won’t be measured in wins but in the ability to eliminate these kinds of players for consideration from your roster in the future.

But there is some positive news on the roster. At least 20% of it is filled with players that Shapiro obtained via the trades of Cliff Lee, CC Sabathia and Victor Martinez.

In the Lee trade, Carlos Carrasco and Lou Marson will be in the dugout at Progressive Field on opening day. Jason Donald starts the season on the disabled list.

From the trade of Sabathia, both Matt LaPorta and Michael Brantley are on the 25-man roster. From the Martinez trade, Justin Masterson is on the opening day roster.
While that in some sense offsets the holes on the roster created by poor drafting, of that entire group the only one anyone is getting particularly excited about at the moment is Carrasco and then just barely.

That doesn’t mean some of the others won’t develop, they can and should. There is still plenty of time for LaPorta and Brantley in particular. But Marson is a light hitting back up who doesn’t appear to have a future as a starter and Masterson is merely serviceable, though there is still time for both of them as well.

What this says is that when the Indians’ management had talent to trade it showed that it was a little better at making trades than in drafting young players. Unfortunately, if you had to be good at one or the other you’d probably want it to be the other way around, particularly for a team like the Indians.

The Indians under the ownership of the Dolans and the leadership of Shapiro have turned this franchise into one that will never buy its way into competitiveness but instead will get there, if ever, by being savvy in the draft, shrewd with the trades, and precise with its free agent dollars.

To this point, that formula hasn’t worked all that well with the current roster, the last really for which you could fully make Shapiro responsible, being the best evidence of it. Antonetti, the protégé turned dealmaker, has a huge task ahead of him to turn this around. It won’t come if all he’s doing is listening to the man that got the team into this predicament in the first place.