The Future Of the Indians...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lingering Items--Branding Edition

The Cleveland Browns’ Johnny Football is the new Johnny Paycheck, having just signed a 4-year $8 million contract with just over $4 million of it guaranteed.  That means we’re about 4 months away from someone, Manziel’s agent for example, looking to redo it on the heels of a couple of completed passes, one of which was for a touchdown.

But on the plus side we’re probably mere weeks, maybe days, away from Johnny Paycheck doing something completely stupid and over the top with his bonus money.  Think Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson character in The Jerk after he became famous, just gaudier.

The last time I visited the status of Cleveland’s premier party boy, Manziel, he was an unsigned gallivant building brand awareness as this generation’s Joe Namath, but with an Instagram account.  In the intervening weeks about the only thing that’s changed, other than a relatively modest rookie contract based on his relatively modest draft status is that his head coach, Mike Pettine, named Brian Hoyer the starting quarterback heading into training camp.

Ok, another thing changed.  Slowly, methodically, the players are aligning behind Hoyer to the exclusion of Manziel, lineman Paul Krueger being one, former Browns’ quarterback Brady Quinn being another. Neither were particularly negative but the first shots across the bow by players who have been there.

Krueger criticized by his constant positive references to Brian Hoyer.  It was telling.  Quinn was more direct, rightly noting that others in the locker room tend to look to the quarterback and how he conducts his business and right now most of Johnny Paycheck’s business is of the drinking, partying and carrying on variety.

Manziel will try the patience of his fellow players, the coaching staff and the fans on a daily basis.  He already is.  Every time a player or Pettine has to respond to a media inquiry about Johnny Paycheck is a minute that Pettine could have spent on almost anything else.  This is a franchise, a coaching staff, a roster that can’t afford any wasted minutes and Manziel has used up any reasonable allocation already.

The arc of these sorts of things is always the same.  An immature kid with too much money pushes the limits of his new found status.  At first it seems reckless but in a fun, vicarious sort of way.  Think Manziel on a floating fake swan, for example.  Over time it goes from amusing to bemusing to vexing as losses mount and interceptions, fumbles and injuries mount.

Eventually there’s a Come-to-Jesus moment where the bad boy, sans eye wink, tries to earnestly convince the fans that he’s reformed his hard partying ways before they got truly out of hand.  Finally there’s the real Come-to-Jesus moment where the career is in jeopardy and rapid maturity is no longer an interesting concept. 

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Manziel will follow this rather predictable arc.  He’s well into phase 1 with as he constantly reminds those who ask that he’s young, single and what’s the harm?  There is none until there is some and there will be some.

The only real question is how long it takes to get through this arc with Manziel.  He may think he’s working hard when he’s not otherwise playing hard but the truth has a way of revealing itself either way.  You can’t wing a NFL career.  You either take it seriously or it spits you out prematurely.

Training camp doesn’t open for another 5 weeks.  That means 5 more weeks of Manziel in borderline embarrassing situations and 5 more weeks of wondering whether this guy is hell bent on partying himself out of the league before he ever sees an actual field.

Manziel’s a young guy and should have his fun.  But he’s not a college guy anymore.  He’s taken his talents to the professional level and eventually needs to act that way.  He seems to have modeled himself after the New England Patriot’s Rob Gronkowski.  That hasn’t been working out too well for Gronk these days as he suffers through injuries one season after another. 

It’s a legitimate question and hope that Johnny Paycheck can stay on the field more than Gronkowski.  But the more immediate question is when he’ll see that field in the first place.  Each moment spent prostrate in an inflatable swan is another minute he’s losing ground to Hoyer.

**
With the NBA draft just over a week away, it remains fascinating, in a dysfunctional Cleveland Browns sort of way, that the Cavs still don’t have a head coach.  For the moment they seem to be following the rubric of the Browns, meaning they are interviewing anyone with a pulse in order to hire someone who wasn’t on anyone’s radar.  Or else they’ll hire a retread.  Dan Gilbert, the Cavs’ owner, has more than sufficiently demonstrated a mercurial almost random streak when it comes to presiding over his investment.

At this point there seems to be no use in hiring a coach before the draft.  Depending on who general manager David Griffin drafts, the potential pool of coaching candidates could greatly increase or shrink precipitously.

There are probably two absolute head shaking aspects to what’s happening to the Cavs.  First, Griffin seemed to be at best a reluctant choice by Gilbert to remain as general manager once Chris Grant was fired.  From that tenuous platform Griffin has parlayed himself into temporarily the most powerful man in the franchise.  With no coach from which to gain input on the draft, the Cavs’ future literally rests on his shoulders.  That’s fine as far as it goes, it’s just that you’d like to think the future would have been entrusted to someone in whom Gilbert had unconditional faith.

Second, if the current model for sustained NBA success is the San Antonio Spurs, the Cavs’ approach couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to it.  The turnover in the front office and coaching staff is the most obvious example but truthfully everything else does flow from that, just as it has with the Browns.

The NBA remains the most difficult sport in which to turn a franchise around.  You need a nucleus as both the Spurs and the Heat demonstrated.  But the difference really is the other 8 or 9 players that fill out the roster.  The Heat lost to the Spurs definitively because most of the roster after the big 3 has simply been cobbled together based mostly on salary and luxury cap considerations.  The Spurs have always been the most methodical team in the league, making sure that every spot had a defined role with a player specifically chosen for that role.

The Cavs right now have a shaky nucleus at best and an almost embarrassing array of players who fit together as precisely as the pieces of 10 separate jigsaw puzzles would if you put them all in one box and shook it.

Never has a franchise been given such gifts by the NBA gods these last several years and while it would be difficult to say that those gifts have been squandered completely it isn’t difficult to say that they’ve been misused.  A team with a more stable ownership and front office would have had a more methodical approach to ensuring that all these gifts were complementary.  Of course if the Cavs had that kind of franchise then they wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.

**

There’s an interesting legal battle brewing at the most mundane of places in the federal government—the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  In a move that seems to have caught, certainly, the Washington Redskins and, likely as certainly, NFL headquarters off guard, the Patent Office invalidated the Redskins’ various trademarks as having been improvidently granted in the first place because they perpetuate racism.

That decision will be held in abeyance while the Redskins appeal, but make no mistake that the death knell on the most racist name in sports continues to sound ever louder.

It is honestly difficult to construct a compelling argument to support Dan Snyder’s dogged insistence on keeping the Redskins’ name.  He’s left with arguing tradition and sounds just as silly as those who argue for abolishing gay marriage. 

Times change as do one’s sensibilities.  The Redskins’ name has always been offensive.  What’s changed is the populace’s sensitivities to it and that’s not a bad thing.  Separate water fountains for whites and blacks were once commonplace and accepted aided by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1896.  Times did change then as did sensibilities and this ultimately was reflected a little more than a half century later when the Supreme Court outlawed it in its seminal Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

The point is that tradition is a flimsy argument because the only real tradition the Redskins name is perpetuating is overt racism.  If/when the Patent and Trademark Office’s ruling is upheld in court, the Redskins will have no choice.  The issue becomes economic and there’s nothing that will change a buffoon like Snyder’s mine more quickly than the lost money from not being able to commercially exploit the name Redskins or, stated differently, watching others do that with no legal recourse.

The more difficult question that’s now getting attention has to do with the Cleveland Indians.  There’s nothing blatantly racist about the name or what that name symbolizes.  A challenge to the Patent and Trademark Office probably wouldn’t be successful if the intent was to rid the team of the trademark “Indians.”

The real issue is the trademark Chief Wahoo, a clownish almost disturbing caricature of an Indian.  The toothy grin, the bright red skin.  Like the name Redskins, the real truth is that American Indians always saw Chief Wahoo as a racist symbol, just as African-Americans saw the Little Black Sambo character as racist.  The only thing that’s changed is that people are starting to better understand what they mean.

To a certain extent the Indians have been de-emphasizing the Chief Wahoo symbol for the last several years and I’m certain that the Patent and Trademark Office’s ruling in the Redskins matter will accelerate this thinking.  If it didn’t, it should.  If the Indians end up in the Patent and Trademark Office with a similar challenge to a patently offensive symbol they’ll get a similar result.

It would be nice to think that the Indians owners would show some leadership and courage on the issue and declare immediately that the Chief Wahoo symbol is now in the past and won’t be used again to market the team.  We all should now call on them to do it.

I don’t think it will happen.  But I do believe the Dolans are more sympathetic to the issue than Dan Snyder is to his issue.  That means fans will see continue to see less and less of Chief Wahoo until the point where he’s disappeared altogether, not officially necessarily but effectively.  Once the team voluntarily takes any economic clout out of the symbol, its use becomes irrelevant.  The only real issue with this approach is that by not definitively eliminating it now, they leave open the possibility of future owners of the team taking a different approach.

Let’s avoid the circus.  Just do the right thing now and move on.  Chief Wahoo, it’s time to report to the front office and bring your playbook.

Lingering Items--Indians Business Edition

One of the abiding questions of recent times about what’s happening with the business side of the Cleveland Indians revolves around the Dolans’ recent sale of SportsTime Ohio.

The Dolans went to some difficulty and expense to first cancel its television broadcast contract with Fox Sports Ohio and then launch their own cable venture m 2006 with Indians games as the centerpiece.  Yet just a handful of years later they abandoned the project and sold STO, ironically to Fox Sports.  Did the Dolans cash in?  Is that what funded this past season’s free agent splurge?  Hard to know in either case, but perhaps they sold for a more mundane reason: it may not have been generating the profits they thought.

On the surface team owners establishing their own cable networks to broadcast their games seems like a good business plan.  Essentially they sell the broadcast rights to themselves, one pocket to the other, and get cable television subscribers to fund it.  What could go wrong?

Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  The Dolans aren’t disclosing anything other than corporate speak to explain the rationale behind why they abandoned STO but perhaps a story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal shed some light on what was really going on: cable operators don’t want to pay huge fees to carry a channel the overwhelming majority of cable subscribers don’t even watch.

As a backdrop, the Dolans weren’t the first to establish what amounted to an in house cable network as a way of enhancing their revenues.  In some sense they were probably a bit late to the party on that one.  But as it turns out, those ventures weren’t nearly as foolproof as club owners thought they would be.

Tuesday’s story focused on a similar operation in Houston that was dedicated to broadcasting Astros and Rockets games but there’s no reason to think the same math doesn’t apply in Cleveland.

In Houston as in Cleveland, owners and investors wanted to cash in on what seemed to be ever increasing licensing fees passed merrily along to increasingly strapped cable television subscribers.  It’s kind of a “cake and eat it too” plan.  The team sells its television rights to its own network.  That network goes to the various cable operators and demands that the channel be carried on basic cable at a huge per subscriber fee. The owners get huge licensing fees and nearly all the advertising revenue.

And for years, that’s exactly what’s happened.  Indeed, the single biggest content fee passed along to subscribers is that charged by ESPN to cable operators.  Those operators don’t want to alienate viewers and thus carry the channel, passing along the cost to the entire subscriber base.  It’s made ESPN rich enough to bid on the broadcast rights to baseball and football which, in turn, has given ESPN the clout to charge even higher fees to operators which, in turn, has further increased the monthly cable bills of all of us.

As ESPN thrived under the model, a mini explosion of similar channels followed, mostly focused on more discrete subjects such as the NFL, major league baseball, the Big 10, the SEC, and the like.

It works for just about as long as cable operators are willing to offer the channels and pass along the costs.  That is becoming an increasingly more difficult task.  Cable operators often argue that they are merely protecting the interests of their customers who don’t want to keep seeing their monthly bills increase.  That’s true, but a convenient truth.

There is significant evidence, according to the Wall Street Journal story, that sports on television isn’t nearly as popular as perceived.  According to Nielsen ratings cited by the Journal, aside from the NFL and the biggest games in a handful of other sports, the TV audience for sports is about 4% or less of households on average.  That’s a pretty stunningly low number.  For basketball and hockey, it’s less than 3%.  Ouch.

That means that somewhere around 96% of all cable subscribers are tuning in, if at all, only for the biggest games.  For the most part, they could care less.  That means that the same 96% of cable subscribers are paying so that the more rabid 3-4% can watch a midweek Golden State vs. Utah basketball game.

A more reasonable person might ask: why can’t the 4% who want to watch sports on a regular basis simply pay for it themselves?  The answer to that is simple and two-fold.  First, there is a point at which even that 4% would not continue to ante up.  There simply aren’t enough viewers willing to pay enough money to justify the network’s investment into broadcasting the sport.  Second, it’s more lucrative for networks to sell advertising time if they can plausibly argue that their reach is 96% bigger than it really is.

The other truth for the cable operators is less, shall we say, “consumer oriented.”  You see, many cable operators like Time Warner, also own and produce their own content that they like to have broadcast on their cable systems.  Adding content they don’t own competes for eyeballs with the content they do own, although perhaps not as much as they think.  The bigger issue though is that as high cost sports networks push cable bills higher, customers abandon cable for something else, like the internets.  That’s bad for cable operators who have seen flat to declining customer growth for the last several years.

ESPN has enough market clout and diverse programming to mostly get what it wants.  Rarely do you see cable operators drawing a line on them.  But increasingly they are drawing a line with others.  Time Warner, for example, refused to carry the NFL Network for years until the NFL lowered its economic demands and agreed to allow Time Warner to put the network on a sports tier that is paid for separately by the customers who want it.   Undoubtedly that’s hurt the financial model of the NFL Network even as it has expanded its theoretical reach.

All of this gets us back to STO.  The Dolans didn’t get into too many skirmishes with cable operators over the subscriber fees but they had to lower their financial demands to accomplish this and that in turn lowered the profits, not to mention the quality of the overall product.  Outside of the Indians’ game, the programming on STO mostly has the look and production values of a local cable access show and with about the same size audience.

So STO was sold to Fox Sports.  But in many ways this is a different Fox Sports.  In the last few years Fox Sports has been expanding its footprint and is launching its own ESPN clone of a network.  Having regional programming that feeds into a national platform gives it a significant head start in its head to head death match with ESPN.

Given Fox’s imperialistic plans, the Dolans undoubtedly realized a profit in the sale and perhaps that, more than anything else, likely funded the free agent shopping spree this last off season.

While the STO venture was mildly successful for the Dolans, it wasn’t nearly as successful as they imagined.  To the extent that has an impact on future budgets for the team itself, and undoubtedly it does, it makes it less likely that fans will see similar shopping sprees in future off seasons.  Welcome to 2009, Indians fans.

**

Speaking of business plans and because there are no such things as coincidences, the Indians have gone full Monty into what they like to call dynamic pricing, according to Crains Cleveland Business.

Essentially the Indians vary ticket prices like Las Vegas varies hotel prices.  Buy early and you’re likely to pay less, irrespective of the opponent.  Wait until the last minute against a desirable opponent and expect to pay more.

Crains used the example of bleacher seats for the upcoming game against Texas on July 27th, which is a fireworks night.  Initially tickets were sold for between $10 and $26, depending on location.  The prices right now range from $30.25 to $36.

This has generated some mild complaints among some fans and has spurred a slight increase in advance ticket sales, which is the Indians’ goal.

Fans who are complaining do so because they want the right to wait until the last second to buy a ticket without any consequence attached to it.  But that’s not a reality in most any other purchase and there’s no compelling reason it should be the reality when it comes to Indians ticket purchases.

If I book a flight at the last minute, I expect to pay more.   That may seem unfair except that by buying late I gave myself the maximum flexibility to change my plans.  That flexibility came at a cost, of course, and I could have traded that off by taking more of a risk by buying it earlier and hoping my plans didn’t change.  It is a choice.

The same holds true for sports tickets.  It can be hard for a fan to plan in April to attend a game in July without knowing how his plans could change. That’s why many don’t choose to buy tickets that far in advance.  They don’t want to take the risk that they’ve wasted their money.  But there’s no reason, moral, ethical, economical, that the Indians or any other team have to assure fans that tickets can be had at the same price the day before the game.   It’s simple risk shifting and there’s nothing wrong with that.

As mentioned, the Indians are seeing some success with dynamic pricing which can only mean that there’s no going back.  That’s a radical change from the days when you could literally walk up the day of the game and buy a good seat for the same price that the person sitting next to you paid two months prior.  But on this issue, there’s no faulting the Indians or the Cavs and Browns when they inevitably follow suit.  Sometimes a business needs to be run like a business.

**

The Indians beginning the second half of a surprising season leads to this week’s question to ponder: Who is more deserving of the first half MVP, Jason Kipnis or Terry Francona?

Lingering Items--Bigger Truths Edition

If I had just one wish as a sports columnist, it would be to write with the absolute clarity and sense of purpose of Jason Whitlock.  He doesn’t duck important issues, particularly when race is involved.  He doesn’t adhere to conventional wisdom or anyone’s party line and doesn’t write to meet anyone’s expectations but his own.  Time and again he’ll be on the opposite side of where you’d thought he’d be on a particular issue and where you might be.  When you're finished, he'll change your mind.

His recent column on Jay-Z’s entrée into the world of sports as an agent is brilliant in both its simplicity and logic.  Jay-Z may be a cultural phenomena, Whitlock argues, but that doesn’t qualify him to represent athletes.  More to the point, Jay-Z only trusts his musical career to the best in the music business. Athletes like Kevin Durant and Robinson Cano should do likewise, meaning trust their athletic careers to the best in that business instead of a wanna be athlete living vicariously.  It’s such a solid, simple view that it reveals, in clear sentences contained in short paragraphs, the illogic of Durant firing his current agents only to be represented by Jay-Z.  It can't and won't end well.

But this isn’t a fan letter about or to Whitlock.  It’s more to emphasize that issues of race and politics and business and sports occasionally intersect and when they do sorting through them is tricky business.  The issues reveal themselves often enough that there's no need to contrive them, except if your the Plain Dealer's Bill Livingston.

Livingston never met a sentence he couldn’t torture or a thought he couldn’t mangle.  It’s usually best to ignore him, like his bosses do by relegating him to the back pages of the sports section waiting out his retirement.  Occasionally Livingston gets lucky, the Indians are off, the Browns and Cavs aren’t doing something stupid, and there’s a big hole to fill on the front page.  When that harmonic convergence occurs, we’re left with a column from Livingston like last week when he kind of sort of defended celebrity chef Paula Deen’s blatant racism by ham handedly using the Gordon Gee situation as a counterpoint, as if the situations are at all similar.

To put Deen and Gee in the same column is idiotic.  One is a racist and a hypocrite.  The other wears a bow tie.

Deen’s in trouble because she couldn't bring herself to settle a lawsuit/shakedown brought by someone who had the goods on her.  Now she's really paying because, well, she said what she said.  Yea, the legal system sucks sometimes.  Yea, the woman and her attorney were engaged in a legal form of extortion.  But ultimately Deen brought on her own demise because she hasn’t the good sense to understand that by not purposely escaping the vestiges of a racist upbringing you're damned to repeat them.

When it comes to Gee, what he said and did can’t credibly be argued as even remotely similar.  Making jokes at the expense of the boobs that run Notre Dame or mocking the modest academic achievements of certain SEC schools is a weird thing for a college president to do in any context but it isn’t racism or hypocrisy.  It’s just an uber geek unable to read the room.

The implication that Gee escaped his foibles as Deen is being unfairly punished given her recent change of heart is so off the mark that it makes you wonder if anyone at the PD bothered to even try to edit the column.    Gee was forced to retire.  His income, always less than Deen’s, was impacted.  Deen fell further because she had much further to fall.  Ohio State is as big of academic platform as anyone could want but it pales in comparison to the platform that Deen used very profitably to push her lard-based recipes on the public while hiding both the diabetes that her cooking style induced and the fact that once diagnosed she became a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical industry while still pushing the country toward obesity.

A sports columnist works best when he or she can take sports related events and find their inner truths in the context of a larger world.  That’s Whitlock’s unique talent and Livingston’s biggest problem.  With the Plain Dealer going to a mostly internet based platform, Livingston will now be forced to compete almost directly with Whitlock.  I suspect his retirement, like Gee’s, will be forced and will be soon as well. Good riddance.

**

The Indians have been one of the consistently worst teams in major league baseball the last 10 years.  Their attendance has been at or near the bottom in each of those years.  Some may see cause and effect but not club president Mark Shapiro.  He sees a different truth, one that requires no introspection on the failures of his front office reign.

Whether you view Shapiro has incompetent or unfairly hamstrung by cheap owners is probably missing the point.  Shapiro is a survivor of the first order because the chief skill he possesses is the ability to sell his genius to a gullible ownership that has bought everyone of his excuses without question or exception.

In a column in Crain’s Cleveland Business, Kevin Kelps unwittingly falls victim to Shapiro’s snake oil charm by advancing a Shapiro theory that the Indians’ attendance hasn’t really tanked, it’s been market corrected.  Under the Shapiro theory, per Kelps, the Indians’ sell out streak and attendance in the early 2000s was the result of a new stadium and a lack of competition from the Browns.  The loss of corporate backers that have moved out of town, increased competition from the Browns (as if) and a recession have all served to create a new normal where the Indians will be one of the worst draws in baseball because, well, they just will be because, I guess, we suck as fans.

Like most Shapiro theories, it has enough truthiness to pass muster among gullible owners and columnists.  But what’s far more fascinating is the utter lack of blame that Shapiro places on himself and his charges in building one of the worst teams in the league, year after year.  The underlying message from Shapiro is that wins and losses aren’t all that relevant to attendance.  Market size and competition within that market is what matters most.

What’s interesting about that theory is that it’s merely a rehash of what pre Jacobs field/Jacobs ownership tried to sell as well as if baseball games are to be enjoyed on their individual merits, like any other form of entertainment.  They, like Shapiro, sold that yarn because they couldn’t do what it really took to boost attendance: spend.  If fans are spending their discretionary cash on anything but the Indians, then that's the Indians' fault, not the fans.

There are true baseball fans among us but they are and always will be a minority here and elsewhere.  Baseball, like other major league sports, is not a collection of individual games but a pursuit with an overarching story, like a movie.  Brad Pitt can open a movie based on his name but he can’t make it profitable if the movie sucks.  Movie studio execs wouldn’t argue that the paying public should just be grateful to attend movies without regard to whether or not it’s entertaining so why should a baseball exec like Shapiro?

The Indians lousy attendance is directly and almost perfectly correlated to their performance.  It’s true that a particular game might be entertaining but most fans are tourists and not natives and so when they spend their money they want to maximize the chance that the product they’ll see will be entertaining.  A team that loses more than it wins doesn’t maximize the odds the average fan needs to make the investment and if there’s one thing we know about the Indians of the last decade it’s that they lose more than they win.

Shapiro has strangely held on to a job in which he’s been abjectly unsuccessful for most of it, assuming you judge success by wins and losses.  He’s not come close to building or sustaining a team that is more likely than not to win day in and day out.  He’s facilitated an ownership group that has repeatedly disappointed its fan base by refusing to make the needed investments despite promises to do so.

All I hear right now is that the Dolans did spend in the offseason.  They did.  But it doesn’t vitiate the previous decade when they didn’t. The indifference of fans now is that they already have the singe marks from the previous times they got too close to the flame.  You can't blame them for wanting to see more from a team and a franchise then a starting pitching staff that can't go 6 innings on a nightly basis.

Shapiro is smart enough to know that he’s selling a load of crap and smart enough, hopefully, to not actually believe that load of crap.  The truth is that the potential of this market is known and it’s much higher than what we’re seeing now because the team has been so bad.  Is it as high as it was in 2001?  Perhaps not.  But this town has more than demonstrated it will pay up and show up when given a consistent reason to do so.  Shapiro has more than proven an inability to give the fans their reason and the only ones who truly don’t get that simple point are the most important: the Dolans.

**

The Cavs' pursuit of rickety and underperforming free agent center Andrew Bynum is perhaps one of the most fascinating free agent pursuits in years.  By almost any measure, Bynum isn’t worth even half the money the Cavs have thrown at him.  He’s basically the basketball equivalent of Grady Sizemore, drawing interest based on his theoretical value unrelated to his actual production because all too often he's injured.

What makes it fascinating is that the Cavs offered to make him richer in one year than the average fan will see in a lifetime and yet they still couldn't keep him from pursuing a contract elsewhere.  Bynum and his agent felt obliged to test the greater fool theory to see if there’s anyone dumber or more desperate than the Cavs.  There could be.  Sports owners and executives are generally a nervous bunch. It didn't turn out to be the case.

The plight of the Cavs is such that they literally have to throw that kind of money around to even get in a conversation with a player of any credibility and it’s a stretch right now to even but Bynum in that category.  Cleveland is a miserable place to be in the winter and that’s the heart of the NBA season.  The Cavs have nice facilities but so does everyone else.  What they lack is something they can’t change: the weather.  They also don’t have enough horses to be considered an upper echelon team at the moment so whoever comes is coming into a rebuilding project that may or may not take.  It's not Shaquille O'Neal sidling up to LeBron James.

Twelve million a year is  certainly enough to get me to live even in Michigan during a football season but that doesn’t mean I’d like it and it may be enough to get Bynum to Cleveland even if he won’t like it.  But if either Atlanta or Dallas had gotten close to the Cavs offer, Bynum wasn't coming and the Cavs and they could have continued to stockpile cash and cap space in the misguided belief that LeBron James sees the errors of his way and returns to a city he didn’t much like in the first place.

The Cavs will be built, if at all, organically.  Free agents show up in basketball when they think they are the final piece and not the first.

**

There are plenty of sports questions to ponder, but the biggest question to ponder this week (and last): will it ever stop raining?

Lingering Items--Decisionmaking Edition

At least Chris Antonetti is polite. The Cleveland Indians general manager met with the media earlier in the week to give the typical GM mea culpea that usually follows a disaster of a season that resulted in someone other than the GM getting fired. Such is the state of affairs in Cleveland with the Indians where everything changes and yet remains remarkably the same.

There’s been no rush by anyone to defend former manager Manny Acta, meaning that no one much is questioning his firing. But as I recall no one much questioned his hiring even though he had flamed out in Washington while trying to guide a talentless roster through turbulent times. Why anyone except Antonetti and Mark Shapiro and The Dolans thought that Acta would be any different trying to guide this talentless roster through turbulent times really tells you pretty much all you need to know about why things do remain remarkably the same with the Indians having just experience ANOTHER 90+ loss season.

The players aren’t always the best guide in determining the effectiveness of their boss so taking their word on anything is always risky. Especially risky is giving any weight to anything Chris Perez has to say. I like the fact that he’s quotable and media friendly and I hope that as long as he remains in the game he stays exactly that way. But simply because he speaks his mind shouldn’t be confused in any sense that his comments are particularly well thought out. Most often they aren’t.

The Indians problems didn’t walk about the door once Manny Acta was told to gather his personal belongings and exit stage left, as Perez claimed. The Indians are being run by the Mad Magzine equivalent of the Usual Gang of Idiots and their problems really are rooted in incredibly poor decision-making at these higher levels. Acta had just failed in almost identical circumstances and here he was now being told to succeed. Just as Acta, barely breathing, couldn’t yell competence into players who weren’t, so couldn’t the Gang of Idiots running the team suddenly turn Acta into a successful manager.

The chain of command that is the Indians is responsible foremost for the utter disaster of a season. There’s nothing wrong with living life on a budget and the Oakland As again proved that good things can come when good decision making is the skill most valued on a team with limited financial resources.

So in that sense let’s get past the notion that the Dolans, simply because they lack enough financial wherewithal to be major league owners, are killing this team in and of itself through a small budget. More funds would help, but their far bigger sin given their finances is that they couple it with incredibly poor decision making.

Why, for example, they wouldn’t hold either Shapiro or Antonetti or, preferably, both responsible for the way the season went and simply sacrifice Acta is a question that hasn’t been answered and probably never will, at least adequately. The Dolans are the ones that promoted Shapiro even though nothing about the way he was running the team as general manager suggested that the promotion was deserved.

You can find individual situations that worked and even a season or two that went OK under Shapiro but the evidence against his overall tenure is far more damning. When Shapiro was promoted to club president the team was in worse shape from a talent perspective then when he became general manager. It wasn’t then poised to be competitive and still isn’t. Shapiro is respected because he’s been around, cleans up nice and is rapid fire with the kind of buzzwords that often mask actual ability, but he isn’t respected because he’s accomplished great things. Name one, just one.

Shapiro, having kept his job, continued to demonstrate his lack of competence by retaining Antonetti, who was a bad hire from the outset. Antonetti was basically in charge of the Indians’ drafting process before taking over as general manager and of all the weak links in the organization, player development has been the weakest.

There have been plenty of excuses for this such as the Indians deliberately avoiding players in the draft who had signed with certain agents because they knew they couldn’t meet the agent’s financial demands for the player. But those are just excuses. Over time, and under Antonetti’s specific direction, the Indians consistently made the wrong choices in the draft to the point that there were no viable players they could plug into this team this season when all the levees around the team failed at the same time. And let’s face it, the levees all failing at the same time wasn’t an accident but was the result of maintenance done on the cheap for years coalescing just as August beckoned.

In his role as general manager, Antonetti has shown an amazing level of consistency in perpetuating his bad decisions. I applauded then and still do the idea of the Ubaldo Jimenez trade because it was bold and the timing was right. This team needed some boldness. But big risk comes with either big rewards or big problems. This came with big problems because of massive misjudgments regarding the players involved in that trade. A major part of the reason Antonetti makes so much money is precisely because he is the one that has to take the fall for those decisions.

Then there were the free agent signings, if you can call them that, of this past season. Everyone except Antonetti apparently saw them as wrongheaded, at the very least and that’s what they turned out to be. It’s as if Antonetti was given $75 and told to buy a enough food to sustain his family for a week and instead spent $70 of it on lottery tickets and the other $5 on soda and potato chips. The lottery tickets were all losers and the soda and potato chips weren’t good for anything more than a snack and when it was over the fans, as usual, were starving.

This culture of decision making at the Indians is what is killing this franchise. Whoever the Indians hire as the next manager, be it Sandy Alomar or Terry Francona, will be fine in and of itself. Both are qualified, one more so than the other. But let’s not anyone pretend that it will make a difference. Antonetti will be making player acquisition and roster decisions and Shapiro will be doing whatever it is he does and the Dolans will do whatever it is they do. Until the top of this pyramid becomes better decision makers this team will continue to the same path as the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Kansas City Royals.

**

Speaking of decision making, new Cleveland Browns owner in waiting, Jimmy Haslam III, has let it be known that no major decisions will get made until after the year is over. That’s as it should be, of course.

It doesn’t mean that Mike Holmgren will stick around. He very well could leave of his own accord. But for those worried that Tom Heckert might leave mid year or those begging for Pat Shurmur to leave mid year, neither appears likely, except that I don’t know how even a new owner holds on to Shurmur if this team doesn’t win a game soon.

I wonder, though, whether Haslam has seen or will see NFL Films’ latest installment of A Football Life entitled “Cleveland ’95.” It’s a terrific history lesson on decision making, taking the long view and making sure an owner understands his place in the grand scheme of things.

The documentary on the Browns’ 1995 season was fascinating, at the very least. The narrator made the point early on that if you were there then you can’t forget. Actually, you can. The overall injustice lingers and should. The details though got lost to time.

The Browns were 11-5 in 1994 and won a playoff game under Bill Belichick. The 1994 season had been 3 years in the making. Art Modell, to his credit, gave Belichick enough freedom to overhaul the franchise the way he saw fit and Belichick, to his credit, work tirelessly toward that goal even if he acted like an asshole publicly while doing so.

The success wasn’t immediate though in context to Browns 2.0 wasn’t so bad. The team went 6-10 then 7-9 and 7-9 in Belichick’s first three seasons. But anyone remembering those seasons remembers them mostly for all of the competitive losses the team piled up, similar to how this current Browns team piles up competitive losses.

Then it all came together in 1994 and the Browns really did seem on the precipice. Indeed, the team was picked as a Super Bowl contender in 1995. After starting off 3-1, Modell then sabotaged the season by striking a deal with Baltimore to move the team. The players were every bit as dispirited as the fans. So were the coaches. And as Belichick says now, with every bit of sarcasm that only a Browns fan could love, he kept looking around for help from Modell but he wasn’t to be found. Modell was off in Baltimore, hiding.

When the wreckage of that season was completed, the Browns stood at 5-11. And everything that Belichick had built, and it was formidable, had been mostly wasted when Modell stupidly fired him.

Modell and his apologists can reinvent history all they want, but Modell was a terrible decision maker. He twice fired Hall of Fame coaches and though he ended up with one Super Bowl it was more the product of a system that Belichick built in Cleveland that, as Ozzie Newsome admitted in the documentary, he simply continued in Baltimore. Newsome has been successful in keeping the Ravens consistently in the contenders conversation but the team hasn’t nearly reached the heights that Belichick has with the New England Patriots, a team he rebuilt much like he was rebuilding the Browns.

The larger point though for Haslam is that these are lessons in decision making in the context of professional sports he needs to learn mostly from the way decisions turn out for those whose processes are flawed. Modell was emotional and impetuous. He lacked a both a moral center (obviously) and a fully developed business sense. On the one hand he would give Belichick the freedom to rebuild which shows a level of understanding on how it all works but on the other hand even though he could see the tangible results fired him anyway because Belichick couldn’t pump air into the balloon that Modell deliberately and irresponsibly deflated during that '95 season. Then there’s a revealing moment in the Cleveland ’95 documentary where Newsome recalls that Modell preferred the Ravens draft a quarterback instead of Jonathan Ogden. Maybe Modell finally got too tired for the fight but he let Newsome make the pick the team needed instead of the one Modell wanted and as a result Ogden stabilized the offensive line like only few others of that ilk can. Ogden's arrival made a Super Bowl quarterback out of Trent Dilfer.

Haslam could also learn plenty from how the Dolans dither over their team. Trust, when the only goal is stability, isn’t any better formula for success than constantly changing directions while the game is still being played. I don’t think that Holmgren and Heckert sink to the level of Shapiro and Antonetti, but if Haslam stays with them merely for stability and not for vision, then the mindless, endless wandering through the desert will continue.

**

With the Cavaliers grinding back to life, it’s fair to see this upcoming season as a referendum on Dan Gilbert’s decision making. When LeBron James left town (and, let’s face it, there was absolutely nothing Gilbert could have done to change that outcome, not a single thing) Gilbert discovered that the hole left behind was much larger than it should have been.

Enter Grant. Since taking over Grant has made a number of moves to try and fill in those gaps. Kyrie Irving isn’t James but he isn’t Bobby Sura either. The potential in the moves is promising and while this season isn’t make or break it will start to form the real foundation of whether the Cavs can get back to being a top level team in the NBA-mandated 8-10 years of penance that must be paid during any rebuilding process.

Gilbert is a bold decision maker who seems to put equal weight on both the process and the outcome. He’ll give Grant enough rope but he won’t Grant’s loyalty blind him to Grant’s failures should that be what develops. That’s probably how it should be.

This Cavs season will be interesting not from a win/loss standpoint but more from whether or not Grant can buck the trend of the other GMs in this town who have not been up to the challenges of their tasks and whether or not Gilbert will have the patience to even let us find this out. It’s not a sexy outlook and certainly not one that sells tickets this season but if they get the balance right, it will sell plenty of tickets eventually.

**

As long as we’re on the topic of both bad decision making and the Cleveland Indians, this week’s question to contemplate: Why would anyone renew a season ticket package at any level with the Indians?

All My Cleveland Teams

When I was a kid, my mother, a fan of soap operas generally, and the ABC brand in particular, would spend hours each day engrossed in the doings of Pine Valley, Port Charles and wherever else the ventures of Erica Kane, Vicki Lord Reilly Buchanan or Luke and Laura Baldwin Spencer took them.

Despite putting out 5 full hours of programming each day for 52 weeks out of the year, the plots of each moved with all the plodding speed of Bernie Kosar in his prime. That’s another way of saying that you could miss months of a show at a time and pick up nearly where you left off without having missed anything significant.

It took my recent trip abroad and my both forced and deliberate avoidance of the Cleveland sports scene (except to see if anything else had been sold or anyone had been fired) to realize that the numbing sameness of those soaps were no match for the present day Cleveland Indians or Browns.

It’s not that things don’t change with these teams. It’s that the changes are almost imperceptible. New characters get introduced; old ones are killed off, not literally just fired or cut. The merry-go-round of one season to the next does spin but tends to not make progress. The same tired story lines abound.

Consider the Indians. There may come a point where something dramatic will happen that makes the average fan actually start paying attention again but that day seems far off. Instead it’s just the gradual wear of what turns into another meaningless season that turns into an off season of excuses that turns into another new season of misplaced hope that turns into, well, you get the idea.

The Indians having suffered the inevitable swoon of a flawed roster are playing out the string of a season with 6 weeks still remaining. Nothing’s been accomplished and there’s nothing to be accomplished. It’s been a pointless season unless the point was to provide comfort in the familiar. We could say that it’s time to “let the kids play” but that too is is the same plot point each year.

Upon my return I did get a chance to peruse an interview someone locally did with Paul Dolan. It may have been Terry Pluto though that hardly matters. I was struck by Dolan’s chagrin at the Indians’ 11-game losing streak and how that took the team right out of contention. More accurately, I was struck by the fact that Dolan was chagrinned by the Indians’ 11-game losing streak.

No one can actually see an 11-game losing streak coming, I’ll give Dolan that. But as the season turned serious, which it always does after the All Star break, flaws get highlighted. There was always going to be a stretch where the team would embrace its pretender status by enduring a stretch of games where they’d go, say, 11-22. The fact that the Indians dug this 11-game hole in one fell swoop is a tribute to efficiency but not surprise and certainly not chagrin.

No, chagrin should be saved for the fans that never get the benefit of a better or at least more interesting story arc. But then again if you don’t change the producers of the show or bring in a fresh crop of writers with different ideas, why should anyone expect anything different?

I doubt that Manny Acta’s job is in jeopardy just as I doubt that Chris Antonetti’s or Mark Shapiro’s jobs are in jeopardy just as I doubt that the Dolans have any plan on selling the franchise. It’s not that any of them are particularly or unusually incompetent. It’s more that none of them bring anything particularly new or fresh to the mix anymore, assuming they ever did.

For example, there may come a time when Antonetti makes a better trade or hits on a bargain basement free agent, but there will not come a time when he takes a different approach to making trades or signing free agents. The confines of his jobs have been set by his bosses and they’ve shown no inclination to try and do anything differently. Likewise the extent of his abilities is well established. It’s not so much insanity in the sense of them doing the same things in the same way and expecting a different result. It’s more like doing the same things in the same way and assuming the same result, as if the point is existence and not competitiveness.

The long view of this all, like the long view of those soaps, is that things will change but ultimately they’ll stay the same.

The Browns are a different kind of soap opera but a soap opera nonetheless. Their willingness to replace leading characters has been bold if nothing else. But these changes, alas, have been in soap opera tradition, meaning that there has been some sort of disfiguring accident and when the bandages removed a new actor emerges playing essentially the same part.

Maybe you like Mike Holmgren or Tom Heckert better than, say, Carmen Policy and Dwight Clark, but fundamentally they’re playing the same parts in much the same way. And that has been the real disappointment of As the Browns Turn. You’d like to think that the new actors would bring a heretofore unseen dimension to the role but ultimately they fall into the same old traps reading the same old lines and getting the same old results.

But unlike their sister show, General Indians, there is every chance that the Browns will actually take a much different direction. The impending ownership change is noteworthy because it really is the opportunity to completely re-imagine the enterprise. If the new owner doesn’t do something bold then it will be an opportunity squandered.

I saw where Bud Shaw of the Plain Dealer made the point that nothing should be off the table when it comes to the Browns and I couldn’t agree more. Maybe you like some of the moves Heckert has made and maybe he is a keeper, but let’s not get sentimental over Brandon Weeden or Travis Richardson just yet. The team is still deeply flawed and a complete change of direction, which is to say a completely fresh approach from how the team buys pencils to how it conducts the draft and signs free agents, isn’t going to be much of a setback.

Stability is the hallmark of any good franchise so advocating for instability seems counterintuitive. But as the Indians have shown us, stability as a goal unto itself, can also be a veritable breeding ground of long-term mediocrity.

Besides, what’s so stable about the Browns anyway? The fans have shown a keen ability to be comforted by the thought of football without any promise of good football. Indeed, they seem more engaged by their consensus of rage against the miserable show that is the Browns. In short, they may hate the results but they certainly love to hate those results, don't they?

You have to wonder, though, will these teams go the way of the ABC soaps, which, after decades on the air, find themselves canceled? It's hard to imagine, but eventually any business model built on delivering the same bland results is bound to fold.

Low Cost, Low Risk, Low Effort

The only way a true Cleveland Indians fan could be surprised at the state of the team’s roster or the front office’s refusal to improve it at the trade deadline is if he fell asleep in a cave, woke up, and thought it was 1997.

This front office and this ownership group dangle the possibility of late season moves to a starving fan base to keep interest afloat but were never serious about really doing anything. That would involve risk and cost money and if there are two things that are anathema to this front office and ownership group it’s risk and cost.

The only plus side to this inaction is that by doing nothing they also did nothing dumb. The hottest of rumors involved a possible trade of Shin-Soo Choo because he’ll be a free agent at the end of NEXT SEASON and because he has in his employ Scott Boras. See, the Indians front office hates Scott Boras. Just the mention of his names causes them to wet themselves. Boras doesn’t think much of creative, hometown discount type deals. He’s as sentimental as a jellyfish and twice as slippery. In the 2012 offseason he’ll market and sell Choo to the highest bidder and there is no chance that it will be the Indians.

So, as is the custom here in Cleveland, the angst rolls, the chat rooms explode and the talk shows crackle over the possibility of getting “nothing” for Choo as he leaves for New York or California or Detroit.

Since we do know how this movie plays out in theory it makes sense to try and get something for Choo, in theory. But ask yourself whether you trust Chris Antonetti to get good value for Choo? Antonetti has nothing yet on his resume that suggests he’s got enough gravitas or savvy to convince a team to part with legitimate prospects in exchange for Choo. Stated differently, there's nothing to inform the fan that Antonetti could have ever been on the other side of the Ubaldo Jimenez trade.

Thus the calculus is whether or not Choo’s value to the team is higher as a player here for another season and a half or as a commodity to be bartered clumsily for a couple of players who we ultimately hope will get good enough to be traded down the road for other prospects.

Until Antonetti proves his meddle as a general manager the best, safest course is inaction. Better to actually watch Choo in Cleveland for another 200 games or so then to watch Choo play those 200 games for a contending team while grousing over the prospects his trade would garner as they toil in Eastlake or Akron.

Meanwhile, back where it matters, fan interest, at least as measured by attendance and television ratings, is ebbing. It's not that they can't figure out what the Indians are doing, it's that they can. The code, such as it was, has been cracked and the Indians are listing as a franchise as if this were 1989.

No question that the front office and the owners have noticed, but at the moment no one's quite sure what they plan on doing about it. For the time being they're trying to paper over the problem with promotions. But they can't have a fireworks display every night. Eventually they'll have to find an answer to the abiding question of how exactly it plans on having a team with enough heft to contend for an entire season.

It’s been a nice, pleasant surprise the last few seasons that the team stayed within spitting distance of contention until the Browns’ preseason started. But while the team generated some raised eyebrows for the first half of last and this season, few fans if any believed that the team was really built to contend. Even that, though, isn't the crux of the sin. It's more that there doesn't seem to be any intention to take the bold steps that contention actually requires.

The slightly broader context of this season begins with last season, extends to last off season and culminates, most probably, with the current disastrous road trip.

Last year’s team was achingly similar to this year’s model and therein lies the problem for the fans. There’s been no progress. Everyone could see the holes in the roster last year that caused the team to fade just as the season got interesting. That would seem to have begged an approach to fill those holes in a meaningful way.

Yet there was nothing bold done in the offseason to give the fans even a sliver of hope that this season would be anything different. It hasn’t been and so the fans, jaded by this vicious cycle of inaction, are losing interest.

Building a team the way the Indians are trying to do was never going to be an easy task. It relies on so many things going right and is so dependent on almost nothing going wrong. The front office has done a lousy job in the draft for the last several years and its impact is being felt through the lack of impact players in the minors. The front office keeps kicking the tires on retreads and it shows. Derek Lowe and Johnny Damon have very little left in their tanks. Next year's retreads aren't going to offer anything different. And the few risks it does take are always head scratchers. Grady Sizemore anyone?

We’re long past debating the frugal way in which this franchise operates. It won’t change and railing about it isn’t going to change anything either. But we’re not past debating the point as to whether Antonetti or Mark Shapiro can implement the strategy.

The early results on the Antonetti reign aren’t very promising as the wave of empty seats and lower broadcast ratings readily attest. All that's really occurred is a continuation of the Shapiro reign where a previous season's ability to contend was ignored in favor of a murky longer view involving progressively cheaper players and wounded warriors and a vague promise to do something when the time is right.

Well, guess what?, the time never seems to be right and that's ultimately what has the fan base miserable. You can't keep selling the same bottle of snake oil and not have the public eventually catch on. They have. The fans may be hopelessly hopeful but they aren't stupid. They may give the front office and the owners the benefit of another off season, but when that begets next year's Derek Lowe or Johnny Damon, they'll find other ways to spend their money. That means that Dan Gilbert and his casino, situated comfortably next door to Progressive Field, are likely going to stay healthy for another year while the Indians take on still more water.

Extending the Cynicism

If anyone other than Cleveland Indians general manager Chris Antonetti and team president Mark Shapiro had made the decisions to “extend” the contracts of Carlos Santana and Asdrubal Cabrera, I’d buy into it easier. As it is, when these two conspire to sign younger players to what are being called contract extensions, fans would do well to look at little more closely, mainly because with these two it's rarely as it seems.

Shapiro is a disciple of John Hart. Antonetti in turn is a disciple of Shapiro. Behind Antonetti is no doubt so acolyte that will also be a lesser light. In the Indians’ general manager, where inbreeding of its executive think is preferred, the generations are getting progressively weaker not stronger.

When Hart took a flyer on signing younger players to contract extensions, it was innovative. With an eye for talent, Hart singled out good young players and actually did make a financial commitment to them in a way no one else was doing at the time but in the same way that the Jacobs-owned Indians actually made commitments to legitimate free agents.

As the money has dried up under the Dolans’ ownership, the challenges have been greater and Shapiro, a generation removed from Hart, has never quite been up to the task. The best that can charitably be said about his tenure as general manager is that it was uneven, from questionable trades to questionable extensions with a few outright successes to keep the fans guessing.

I could rail about how Shapiro has taken a gift for gab and clipped speech and turned it into a career without actually having accomplished anything too meaningful on the field, but why rail about that? Fans already know that the Indians won the division in 2007 with Shapiro ostensibly in charge and have been awful ever since as he tinkered and tortured his way to creating a machine that can smoothly deliver a crap sandwich season after season.

Now comes still another generation removed in the form of Antonetti. Until Santana and Cabrera were signed to their “extensions” the Indians looked suspiciously like a team that was deliberately avoiding putting players under anything other than a one-year contract.

I could rail about how Antonetti, armed with statistics, helped make a mess of the Indians player development process when he was Shapiro’s first lieutenant, but why rail about that, either? Fans can see the fruits of his efforts each night as they gnaw through the imaginary phone telephone cords of the landlines they once owned bemoaning Antonetti’s inability to a) grow any meaningful talent through the draft and b) find meaningful help through questionable trades or in the cutout section of the flea market he shops every off season.

So when the announcement came that the Indians had signed Santana to an “extension” similar to that given to Cabrera, I didn’t know whether to get cynical or skeptical but I knew it had to be one or the other. It turns out that either will do.

The cynic in me believes that Santana was signed to an extension mainly on the strength of his two home-run performance in the team’s only win this season and the fact that he’s beating the cover off the ball in comparison to rest of his teammates at the inglorious pace of a .250 average. But the skeptic in me knows better. When it comes to making decisions about players the Indians move roughly at the pace of a governmental agency so the chance that Santana’s “hot” start factored into current thinking is minimal.

Really, though, it doesn’t take a professional cynic or skeptic to see through the veneer of these extensions as less about a commitment to spending money to retain valuable assets and more about an opportunity for team and player to hedge their bets.

A player with at least three years of service is eligible for salary arbitration. He isn’t eligible for free agency until after his sixth year. In the cases of Santana and Cabrera, the contract extensions, such as they are, buy the Indians certainty through the arbitration years while providing the players a launching pad for their inevitable trade somewhere else in that last year of their contracts should their performance meet or exceed expectations.

Because if there's anything worse to the Indians then a player underperforming his contract, it's a player on the brink of free agency outperforming his contract.

This is the kind of transaction that garners Shapiro the admiration of his fellow team presidents at the off season meetings and earns knowing nods to Antonetti from his counterparts in opposing press boxes each night. But don’t believe for a moment that it represents a change in direction for the team or the ones paying the bills. These extensions add no clarity to finding the answer to the inevitably frustrating question of whether or not this team will ever be properly funded to be truly competitive.

Don’t take my word for it, just be a student of history. The Indians under Shapiro have been bloodless in trading away talented fan favorites during their free agent seasons rather than pursue them to what would be true contract extensions. Shapiro first and now Antonetti understand the financial limits of their bosses and thus have laid the groundwork where it’s now accepted orthodoxy that the Indians can’t outbid any other team for the services of a player they grew and nurtured.

In truth, it’s a choice the Indians have made not to pursue high priced talent and not an inevitability thrust upon them by the baseball Gods or the economy. The operations of the Detroit Tigers prove that point.

Nonetheless, I’ve long since reconciled myself to this method of operation as most fans have. What’s frustrating though is for the Indians to try to treat these fans as some sort of idiots who cannot see through the simple pretense of the frugal way in which they choose to operate a franchise designed not to win but to turn a decent profit for the owner irrespective of performance.

Knowing that they couldn’t lose Santana and Cabrera for most of the periods through which they’re now signed, these new contracts don’t represent extensions as much as they represent agreed upon financial hedges against the vagaries of the arbitration process.

The problem with the arbitration process for the Indians is that it represents disorder to the anal-retentive way in which they like to operate. It almost doesn’t matter what kind of year the player had because arbitration only enriches, it never cuts. So no matter how either Cabrera or Santana performs during one of their arbitration years, they know they’ll get a raise with the only question being how much.

Since Shapiro likes to plan his 5-year operating budget down to the number of light bulbs that will be needed in the overhanging lamp in his office, it’s unfathomable to him to not know what number to plug into his budget for Cabrera's or Santana's salary in those years, particularly should Cabrera or Santana actually put together a good season.

Now these so-called extensions give Shapiro and Antonetti real budget certainty on two of their better players, allowing them to focus elsewhere. This isn’t really a criticism because having budget certainty is pretty important to any multi-million dollar business.

But creating budget certainty is not a proxy for commitment and the Indians have no more or less of a commitment to either player today then they had for them before the extensions were signed.

What I'm less certain about is why Santana or Cabrera signed on. They would get their money anyway. At best these new contracts, particularly for that first free agency year, represent an insurance policy against injury or really bad performance. Since neither are pitchers, I'm not sure that trade off makes sense in either case and I suspect that the agents won't outlive these deals.

Perhaps that's the real talent of Shapiro and Antonetti. They took a good deal for them and convinced the agents that it was a good deal for their clients. Not bad, when you think about. Now if Shapiro and Antonetti could just find a way to exercise that talent in a way that actually improves the team, by say, signing a free agent that can actually hit.