Is there anything more painful in sports than watching a team in an offensive slump? As Cleveland sports fans, you can take your pick: the Indians or the Cavs. Whichever you chose, though, is mostly irrelevant. The local teams lately have been an assault on the eyes and the senses.
While it may be difficult for the moment to forget about the results of the Cavaliers-San Antonio Spurs snore-fest in Game three of the NBA Finals, try. While you’re at it, dispense with the notion that the game was some sort of sublime defensive struggle. Focus instead on what you were forced to endure: 48 minutes of really bad basketball by two teams playing in their sport’s premier event.
One team had to win that game and one team did, the better one. But if San Antonio is truly the elite team of the league, a dynasty in the making, then the league needs to do some serious soul searching and figure out how to re-introduce offense to the game. The level of play by both teams has been remarkable only in its ability to sap the enthusiasm of even the most die hard fan, let alone the casual fan whom the league needs to really reach.
A good game need not result in a 122-118 score, but neither should it ever devolve into a 78-72 grind. The supposedly top two teams in the league played 48 minutes of basketball, collectively took 185 shots (38 of which were 3-pointers) and made only 70, for a rousing shooting percentage of 37.8%. If you want to get picky, the Cavs 3-19 from the three-point line was a major contributor to that figure, but looked at from the other angle, the Spurs 10-19 shooting on their three-pointers helped raise the two teams overall shooting percentage .8%. From inside the line, the teams were a collective 57-147, or 37.0%. When professional basketball players can’t even make four out of every 10 shots with the championship on the line, something is wrong.
There is always a certain amount of defensive pressure that results in forced shots. But anyone witnessing Tuesday nights’ game knows that defense was hardly the reason. The Cavs had so many open looks at the basket from nearly everywhere on the court, they could have been playing the Knicks. Players were missing all manner of layups and 10-footers. Time after time, player after player bounced shots off the back of the rim. Maybe it was defensive pressure or maybe it was the pressure of the moment, but when players are missing long, it tends to mean they are having trouble controlling their emotions. Besides, if defensive pressure was really the culprit, then why were the teams a collective 10-31 from the free throw line?
If you dig deeper into the statistics of this series you’ll see that in each game the Cavs have had two quarters in which they’ve failed to score even 20 points. In game one, it was quarters one and three. In game two, it was the first and second quarter. In game three, it was quarters one and three again. That accounts for half of all the quarters played in the entire series. More to the point, the Cavs simple inability to put the ball in the basket in the first quarter has set an offensive tone that has carried on throughout each game. Thus, if the Cavs are to be successful in game four, and they have to be, a good place to start would be a way to score at least 20 points in the first quarter. It hasn’t happened yet.
You could point to the second half of game two to counter the argument that the Cavs haven’t scored all series, but you can’t consider the second half without taking into account how deep of a hole they dug for themselves in the first half. The Spurs had a whopping 25-point lead going into the second half of that game which obviously changed the nature of how the rest of that game would be played. Moreover, it’s hardly as if the Cavs carried over that momentum in game three. They scored only 38 points in the first half and 34 points in the second half. At best, the second half of game two was the anomaly. Game three was the standard.
While the Cavs and their offensive woes are partially responsible for a series that is devoid of any real drama, the Spurs shouldn’t be given a pass. They have failed to score 20 or more points in three quarters and have scored only 20 points in three others, which accounts for exactly half of the entire series as well. No wonder you’re left with a sense that this series is being played in monotone. Maybe the grind of the playoffs has taken its toll on both teams, but if that’s the case then the NBA needs to find a better system quickly or they’ll find themselves splitting time on the Versus network with the NHL begging people to watch their playoffs.
And as if the Cavs offensive ineptitude hasn’t been enough to cut the legs out from most Cleveland fans, then the Indians are doing their level best to complete the job these days. In the month of June, they are 5-7. While two of those losses were against the Detroit Tigers, five have been against the relative dregs of the league: Kansas City, Cincinnati, Seattle and Florida. The formula for success in baseball hasn’t changed in a hundred years: beat up the bums and play .500 against the rest. That’s certainly not the formula the Tribe has used lately, but if they plan to return to post season, they simply can’t keep playing down to their level of competition, something they seem to do all too frequently.
Where the Indians have really suffered of late, though, is on offense, much like the Cavs. They’ve been shut out twice in their last four games. Against Florida on Wednesday and on the heels of just being shut out the night before (and two nights before that), the Indians remained in a coma until the 6th inning, when they scored six runs. But that “explosion” was aided greatly by some really bad baseball on the part of the Marlins as five of those runs were unearned.
The one really bright spot of that inning was David Dellucci’s three-run home run. Prior to that and even going back over the previous three games, the Indians hitters were having trouble getting themselves into good hitting counts and even when they did they either popped out or grounded out. You’d search in vain for a hard hit ball. Even more difficult was finding a way to take advantage of a pitcher in trouble, exemplified by their ineptness on Sunday against the Reds with the bases loaded and the game on the line.
When Dellucci came to bat against the Marlins in the sixth inning, it was just after relative chaos had ensued. Byung-Hyun Kim, as most will recall, is a converted closer after having been run out of Arizona following his post-season Jose Mesa impressions while with the Diamondbacks. As a starter, he’s been the kind of pitcher that would make a team long for Scott Elarton. In other words, his appearance on a major league roster wouldn’t be possible without expansion. Still, there he was shutting out the Indians until his defense took on the character of a Sunday morning beer league and booted the ball around.
Taylor Tankersley, who is hardly Dennis Eckersly, came in for relief, an appearance notable only because he was summarily tossed by home plate umpire Brian Knight for drilling Grady Sizemore in the shoulder on a 0-2 pitch. By that point, all manner of argument had broken out and Aaron Boone (yes, that Aaron Boone) another beneficiary of baseball expansion, found himself with an early shower as well. By the time order had been restored, Lee Gardner was suddenly on the mound for the Marlins and four pitches later Dellucci put the game out of reach.
It’s hard to know when a team’s offensive slump might end, but an at-bat like Dellucci’s is often a good start. Not only had it been awhile since any Indian had gone deep, but it also was the first time in awhile that the Indians had actually taken advantage of a gift-wrapped situation. While this may not be the most critical point in the season, it is pretty clear that the Tigers aren’t going away. As such, the Indians can ill afford a prolonged offensive slump, particularly with the Atlanta Braves making their way to Jacobs Field this weekend.
As for the Cavs, they really have no choice but to end their offensive slump. No team has ever come back from an 0-3 deficit and nothing the Cavs have done thus in thus far in the series foretells any change in that precedent. All that says is that it’s unlikely that the Cavs will win the championship. What it doesn’t say is that they shouldn’t at least use every opportunity they still have in the waning days of this season to find their stroke, if only to make watching the game a bit less painful.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
Getting Whacked
Well, that happened.
Feel free to apply that to any one of the three events of Sunday, none of which could have made anyone very happy: the Indians extra-inning loss; the end of The Sopranos or the Cavs deer-in-the-headlights performance against the San Antonio Spurs in Game 2 of the NBA Finals.
It’s hard to draw any cosmic connection between the three events beyond the obvious disappointment underlying each. Still, if bad things happen in three then that quota was certainly reached yesterday, which mean that things are looking up for Tuesday.
At last look, the Indians, entering game two of their own version of the neverending story with the Seattle Mariners, had lost five of their last nine. There certainly is an ebb and flow to the season and sometimes a team wins when it should lose and vice versa, which is why it is often better to not get lost among the trees that represent each individual game and just take stock of the forest. But every once in awhile there is a game that demands strict scrutiny, Sunday’s game with the Reds being a prime example.
Manager Eric Wedge called it one of the worst offensive efforts he could remember. Who’s to argue? Outside of pitcher C.C Sabathia, who had two hits, one would be hard pressed to find a quality bat among the 27 outs made. It’s not even so much that the regular hitters appeared to have no approach toward any of the Reds pitchers, it’s that they didn’t even look like they were trying. As Wedge noted (courtesy of Paul Hoynes game story) “you can't allow a game like that to happen . . . not collectively. There are going to be individuals that struggle, but you can't have a total breakdown from the entire ballclub.”
But a total breakdown it was, which is why, in the end, a stellar effort by Sabathia was wasted. For those keeping track, the Indians offense has turned pathetic with Sabathia on the mound. In his last two starts, he’s been the recipient of exactly one run. Amazingly, he’s 1-0 in those starts, which pretty much is all the evidence that is needed to place Sabathia on the All Star team.
Part of that may be due to the fact that when Sabathia is on the mound, the Tribe is usually facing the opposition’s best pitcher as well. But that just further fuels the urgency for the hitters to ensure that they remain disciplined and focused at the plate because the opportunities are likely to be fewer. For whatever reason, though, the Indians hitters were neither disciplined nor focused on Sunday. Perhaps they, too, were waiting for the finale of The Sopranos to begin.
But no such excuse could be made for the Cavs. They were actually playing opposite of Tony and the crew, which was probably a good thing if you care about the team’s reputation nationally. It’s easy enough to record one show and watch another in this day and age, but hopefully most decided against it and tuned into The Sopranos instead. At least then those viewers would have missed one of the most miserable halves of basketball the Cavs have played all season.
It’s true enough that the Cavs also, naturally, played a miserable third quarter Sunday night. But by the time the third quarter rolled around, the Cavs were already pretty much out of the game due to, as Wedge might say, a total breakdown by the entire club.
If fans of The Sopranos were disappointed in how writer David Chase chose to end his opera, at least they can take solace in the fact that it was, after all, only a show. The Cavs, on the other hand, were real life and whatever one might think of Chase’s final Sopranos script, it still ran rings around whoever scripted the Cavs first half approach.
At this point, the conventional wisdom is putting the blame on head coach Mike Brown and his decision to continue to start an injured Larry Hughes. His inability to guard Tony Parker has created a sort of domino effect that seems to have taken the other four, including LeBron James, out of their rhythm. There is a fair amount of validity to that wisdom, but it misses the point. It’s unlikely that a healthy Larry Hughes would be faring much better.
It’s pretty likely at this point that Brown is merely trying to protect rookie Daniel Gibson, preferring to bring him in off the bench rather than place undue pressure on him by starting him over Hughes. While it’s hard to argue with a coach when he is in a much better position to know his players than the average fan, nothing in Gibson’s make up even whiffs at him being intimidated by the enormity of the situation. Brown’s caution seems, at the very least, unnecessary.
In this regard, Brown should take a page from Mike Hargrove’s handbook when he started rookie pitcher Jaret Wright in the fourth and seventh games of the 1997 World Series. Wright was a much more heralded rookie than Gibson and, consequently, had more pressure on him. But Wright also had the kind of swagger and bravado that allowed him to easily handle the situation. And handle it he did, winning game four and giving up only one run in 6 1/3 innings in game seven. Not only was Wright not the reason the Indians lost that series, he was the reason they almost won it.
Gibson is in much the same situation. Though seeming to lack the overt swagger and step of Wright, he doesn’t lack for confidence either. Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals proved that. He doesn’t seem to need Brown’s paternal approach, particularly when he has James covering his back on the floor. The guess is that Brown will give in and Gibson probably will start on Tuesday night. If not, then Brown will have exhibited the true flaw of the inexperienced coach: stubbornness. It was on full display Sunday night and if Brown, like the rest of his team, is going to take the step to the next level, then he has to have the courage to admit when something’s not working and try something else. If not, then the Cavs in this series will quickly find themselves suffering the same fate as The Sopranos: canceled.
Feel free to apply that to any one of the three events of Sunday, none of which could have made anyone very happy: the Indians extra-inning loss; the end of The Sopranos or the Cavs deer-in-the-headlights performance against the San Antonio Spurs in Game 2 of the NBA Finals.
It’s hard to draw any cosmic connection between the three events beyond the obvious disappointment underlying each. Still, if bad things happen in three then that quota was certainly reached yesterday, which mean that things are looking up for Tuesday.
At last look, the Indians, entering game two of their own version of the neverending story with the Seattle Mariners, had lost five of their last nine. There certainly is an ebb and flow to the season and sometimes a team wins when it should lose and vice versa, which is why it is often better to not get lost among the trees that represent each individual game and just take stock of the forest. But every once in awhile there is a game that demands strict scrutiny, Sunday’s game with the Reds being a prime example.
Manager Eric Wedge called it one of the worst offensive efforts he could remember. Who’s to argue? Outside of pitcher C.C Sabathia, who had two hits, one would be hard pressed to find a quality bat among the 27 outs made. It’s not even so much that the regular hitters appeared to have no approach toward any of the Reds pitchers, it’s that they didn’t even look like they were trying. As Wedge noted (courtesy of Paul Hoynes game story) “you can't allow a game like that to happen . . . not collectively. There are going to be individuals that struggle, but you can't have a total breakdown from the entire ballclub.”
But a total breakdown it was, which is why, in the end, a stellar effort by Sabathia was wasted. For those keeping track, the Indians offense has turned pathetic with Sabathia on the mound. In his last two starts, he’s been the recipient of exactly one run. Amazingly, he’s 1-0 in those starts, which pretty much is all the evidence that is needed to place Sabathia on the All Star team.
Part of that may be due to the fact that when Sabathia is on the mound, the Tribe is usually facing the opposition’s best pitcher as well. But that just further fuels the urgency for the hitters to ensure that they remain disciplined and focused at the plate because the opportunities are likely to be fewer. For whatever reason, though, the Indians hitters were neither disciplined nor focused on Sunday. Perhaps they, too, were waiting for the finale of The Sopranos to begin.
But no such excuse could be made for the Cavs. They were actually playing opposite of Tony and the crew, which was probably a good thing if you care about the team’s reputation nationally. It’s easy enough to record one show and watch another in this day and age, but hopefully most decided against it and tuned into The Sopranos instead. At least then those viewers would have missed one of the most miserable halves of basketball the Cavs have played all season.
It’s true enough that the Cavs also, naturally, played a miserable third quarter Sunday night. But by the time the third quarter rolled around, the Cavs were already pretty much out of the game due to, as Wedge might say, a total breakdown by the entire club.
If fans of The Sopranos were disappointed in how writer David Chase chose to end his opera, at least they can take solace in the fact that it was, after all, only a show. The Cavs, on the other hand, were real life and whatever one might think of Chase’s final Sopranos script, it still ran rings around whoever scripted the Cavs first half approach.
At this point, the conventional wisdom is putting the blame on head coach Mike Brown and his decision to continue to start an injured Larry Hughes. His inability to guard Tony Parker has created a sort of domino effect that seems to have taken the other four, including LeBron James, out of their rhythm. There is a fair amount of validity to that wisdom, but it misses the point. It’s unlikely that a healthy Larry Hughes would be faring much better.
It’s pretty likely at this point that Brown is merely trying to protect rookie Daniel Gibson, preferring to bring him in off the bench rather than place undue pressure on him by starting him over Hughes. While it’s hard to argue with a coach when he is in a much better position to know his players than the average fan, nothing in Gibson’s make up even whiffs at him being intimidated by the enormity of the situation. Brown’s caution seems, at the very least, unnecessary.
In this regard, Brown should take a page from Mike Hargrove’s handbook when he started rookie pitcher Jaret Wright in the fourth and seventh games of the 1997 World Series. Wright was a much more heralded rookie than Gibson and, consequently, had more pressure on him. But Wright also had the kind of swagger and bravado that allowed him to easily handle the situation. And handle it he did, winning game four and giving up only one run in 6 1/3 innings in game seven. Not only was Wright not the reason the Indians lost that series, he was the reason they almost won it.
Gibson is in much the same situation. Though seeming to lack the overt swagger and step of Wright, he doesn’t lack for confidence either. Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals proved that. He doesn’t seem to need Brown’s paternal approach, particularly when he has James covering his back on the floor. The guess is that Brown will give in and Gibson probably will start on Tuesday night. If not, then Brown will have exhibited the true flaw of the inexperienced coach: stubbornness. It was on full display Sunday night and if Brown, like the rest of his team, is going to take the step to the next level, then he has to have the courage to admit when something’s not working and try something else. If not, then the Cavs in this series will quickly find themselves suffering the same fate as The Sopranos: canceled.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Are You Worried Yet?
Cleveland fans, as the Cavs enter Game 2 of the NBA Finals…
Are you worried that the Cavs will lose and then get swept in four games?
Are you worried that the real LeBron James never does show up?
Are you worried that the real reason the Cavs got to the ultimate stage is to perpetuate another cruel joke on Cleveland sports fans? Another set up for disaster?
If you’re a Cleveland sports fan and you aren’t at least secretly asking yourself those questions and more then, well, you’re not a Cleveland sports fan.
That same shovel of dirt need not be turned over again, here, as the national media are doing a good enough job of reminding the locals of all the wretched failures that sports fans of this city’s professional teams have had to endure. But perhaps there is another way to look at it. For example, have the fans of any team been as prepared as fans of Cleveland’s sports teams for failure? Probably not, which is what puts them a leg up and everyone else. As Carl Spackler might say, we’ve got that goin’ for us, which is nice.
But the whole truth that is that if you never know failure, you can never fully appreciate success. That’s why the Cavs just getting to the NBA Finals was so exhilarating. Years of failure had taught fans what it was like to finally scale the mountain. But remember this. Though the Cavs wait to get in the NBA Finals was the longest for any franchise, it was actually half a decade less than the drought suffered by their Gateway neighbors, the Indians, when they finally made it to the World Series in 1995. Looking back at that accomplishment, the feeling among the fans then and the fans when the Cavs finally broke through was nearly identical; an intense release from an overmatched pressure valve that had been building on the seeds of failure stretched over 41 years.
But despite the fact that the Indians team of 1995 was exceptionally strong and its appearance in the World Series, given how the baseball season plays out over its long season, was hardly a surprise, there was still a rather deep feeling of dread underlying the giddiness. The concern then, as now, was that having gotten to the big show the Indians would crap all over themselves. If you’re being honest, when the Indians lost the first two games of that series, you were worried. Not about winning the whole thing, but about whether the Tribe would be swept and how often the comparisons to the 1954 team would be thrown in your face.
Thus, as satisfying as it was when the Indians won the American League Championship, their victory in game three of the World Series was even bigger. Not only would the Indians not get swept, but suddenly they were only down two games to one and it was a series again.
Remember that as you turn to ABC Sunday evening. On the minds of most Cavs fans right now, conditioned as they are by the countless stories since game one describing the brilliant awesomeness of the Spurs and the overmatched awfulness of the Cavs, is that the Cavs will get swept. Of course, those same writers, just prior to game one were telling a slightly different story, but no matter. Even if the Cavs don’t find a way to solve Tim Duncan and, more importantly, the soon-to-be Desperate Husband, Tony Parker, the Cavs come home Tuesday with the opportunity to make it a series and a decent chance that they will do just that.
The cynic in most Cleveland sports fans will rightly point out that the Indians went on to lose in 1995 so it mattered little that they weren’t swept. True, of course, but not the whole story. For one thing, despite all the accomplishments of the Atlanta Braves, they lost the World Series in 1991 and 1992 before getting to the top in 1995. And even after beating Cleveland in 1995, they lost again in 1996 and 1999. In other words, winning the ultimate prize isn’t a matter of destiny. Often, it’s a matter of luck. But luck, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, is something you tend to find the harder you work. And, with all due regard to Yankee fan, nobody has worked harder in baseball than the Braves at staying at the top.
Which is something else to remember about the Cavs. In owner Dan Gilbert, they have one of the hardest working owners in sports. When Gilbert first arrived on the scene, there was great trepidation about whether he was to the NBA what Daniel Snyder is to the NFL, a self-made and self-absorbed multi-millionaire who figured because he watched a few games he knew everything about the sport. But some early public relations stumbles notwithstanding, Gilbert has proven the complete opposite, to the point that most fans are wondering why he can’t also own the Indians and the Browns.
What makes Gilbert such a great owner is that he understands that professional sports is, in many ways, just like any other multi-million dollar business. It needs structure and rigor and people with talent and vision to make it successful. The players, like employees in any business, tend to come and go, and thus it is imperative that a fundamentally solid structure striving always to continuously improve be put in place. Work hard enough and luck will inevitably follow. Indeed, in that vein Gilbert’s following the business model that has proven so successful for the business that made him his money in the first place, Quicken Loans.
When you enter the Q, there is a culture that Gilbert has put in place that is built not simply on customer satisfaction but customer loyalty, which is really the more important of the two attributes. One may quibble with all of the trappings that surround the game experience at the Q, but one cannot quibble with the intent. Gilbert wants to ensure that he is delivering value always, something not easily achieved given the ticket prices.
Compare that to either the Indians or the Browns. The Dolans have achieved some business success, to be sure, but not on the scale of Gilbert. Randy Lerner may have more money, but it’s inherited. Lerner’s best attribute, like the Dolans, is that he’s a fan first and truly understands the psyche of his fan base. But his struggle in building a successful franchise stems from the simple fact that he’s never had to build a business from the ground up. He’s still in the trial and mostly error phase. Gilbert, on the other hand, is the consummate entrepreneur. He scraped and scratched and tried and failed long before he got to Cleveland. He may not yet be a man in full, but he’s much further along the path and Cavs fans are the beneficiaries.
Sure, the fact that the Cavs are in the NBA Finals is a surprise to most, perhaps even to Gilbert. But there is no question, as we’ve said before, that if the Cavs didn’t get in the finals soon, they would do so sooner anyway. That prediction was borne initially out of the sheer brilliance of LeBron James, who is likely to be considered one of the all time greatest players when he retires, in a Cleveland uniform, a hundred years from now, but it also was a nod to the business acumen of Gilbert as well.
Cleveland fans will always have something to worry about. In the short-term, it’s whether or not the Cavs will get swept. But the real takeaway in all of this is that behind the scenes a successful franchise is beginning to emerge. And if “luck” isn’t on the side of the Cavs this time, it will be inevitably.
Are you worried that the Cavs will lose and then get swept in four games?
Are you worried that the real LeBron James never does show up?
Are you worried that the real reason the Cavs got to the ultimate stage is to perpetuate another cruel joke on Cleveland sports fans? Another set up for disaster?
If you’re a Cleveland sports fan and you aren’t at least secretly asking yourself those questions and more then, well, you’re not a Cleveland sports fan.
That same shovel of dirt need not be turned over again, here, as the national media are doing a good enough job of reminding the locals of all the wretched failures that sports fans of this city’s professional teams have had to endure. But perhaps there is another way to look at it. For example, have the fans of any team been as prepared as fans of Cleveland’s sports teams for failure? Probably not, which is what puts them a leg up and everyone else. As Carl Spackler might say, we’ve got that goin’ for us, which is nice.
But the whole truth that is that if you never know failure, you can never fully appreciate success. That’s why the Cavs just getting to the NBA Finals was so exhilarating. Years of failure had taught fans what it was like to finally scale the mountain. But remember this. Though the Cavs wait to get in the NBA Finals was the longest for any franchise, it was actually half a decade less than the drought suffered by their Gateway neighbors, the Indians, when they finally made it to the World Series in 1995. Looking back at that accomplishment, the feeling among the fans then and the fans when the Cavs finally broke through was nearly identical; an intense release from an overmatched pressure valve that had been building on the seeds of failure stretched over 41 years.
But despite the fact that the Indians team of 1995 was exceptionally strong and its appearance in the World Series, given how the baseball season plays out over its long season, was hardly a surprise, there was still a rather deep feeling of dread underlying the giddiness. The concern then, as now, was that having gotten to the big show the Indians would crap all over themselves. If you’re being honest, when the Indians lost the first two games of that series, you were worried. Not about winning the whole thing, but about whether the Tribe would be swept and how often the comparisons to the 1954 team would be thrown in your face.
Thus, as satisfying as it was when the Indians won the American League Championship, their victory in game three of the World Series was even bigger. Not only would the Indians not get swept, but suddenly they were only down two games to one and it was a series again.
Remember that as you turn to ABC Sunday evening. On the minds of most Cavs fans right now, conditioned as they are by the countless stories since game one describing the brilliant awesomeness of the Spurs and the overmatched awfulness of the Cavs, is that the Cavs will get swept. Of course, those same writers, just prior to game one were telling a slightly different story, but no matter. Even if the Cavs don’t find a way to solve Tim Duncan and, more importantly, the soon-to-be Desperate Husband, Tony Parker, the Cavs come home Tuesday with the opportunity to make it a series and a decent chance that they will do just that.
The cynic in most Cleveland sports fans will rightly point out that the Indians went on to lose in 1995 so it mattered little that they weren’t swept. True, of course, but not the whole story. For one thing, despite all the accomplishments of the Atlanta Braves, they lost the World Series in 1991 and 1992 before getting to the top in 1995. And even after beating Cleveland in 1995, they lost again in 1996 and 1999. In other words, winning the ultimate prize isn’t a matter of destiny. Often, it’s a matter of luck. But luck, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, is something you tend to find the harder you work. And, with all due regard to Yankee fan, nobody has worked harder in baseball than the Braves at staying at the top.
Which is something else to remember about the Cavs. In owner Dan Gilbert, they have one of the hardest working owners in sports. When Gilbert first arrived on the scene, there was great trepidation about whether he was to the NBA what Daniel Snyder is to the NFL, a self-made and self-absorbed multi-millionaire who figured because he watched a few games he knew everything about the sport. But some early public relations stumbles notwithstanding, Gilbert has proven the complete opposite, to the point that most fans are wondering why he can’t also own the Indians and the Browns.
What makes Gilbert such a great owner is that he understands that professional sports is, in many ways, just like any other multi-million dollar business. It needs structure and rigor and people with talent and vision to make it successful. The players, like employees in any business, tend to come and go, and thus it is imperative that a fundamentally solid structure striving always to continuously improve be put in place. Work hard enough and luck will inevitably follow. Indeed, in that vein Gilbert’s following the business model that has proven so successful for the business that made him his money in the first place, Quicken Loans.
When you enter the Q, there is a culture that Gilbert has put in place that is built not simply on customer satisfaction but customer loyalty, which is really the more important of the two attributes. One may quibble with all of the trappings that surround the game experience at the Q, but one cannot quibble with the intent. Gilbert wants to ensure that he is delivering value always, something not easily achieved given the ticket prices.
Compare that to either the Indians or the Browns. The Dolans have achieved some business success, to be sure, but not on the scale of Gilbert. Randy Lerner may have more money, but it’s inherited. Lerner’s best attribute, like the Dolans, is that he’s a fan first and truly understands the psyche of his fan base. But his struggle in building a successful franchise stems from the simple fact that he’s never had to build a business from the ground up. He’s still in the trial and mostly error phase. Gilbert, on the other hand, is the consummate entrepreneur. He scraped and scratched and tried and failed long before he got to Cleveland. He may not yet be a man in full, but he’s much further along the path and Cavs fans are the beneficiaries.
Sure, the fact that the Cavs are in the NBA Finals is a surprise to most, perhaps even to Gilbert. But there is no question, as we’ve said before, that if the Cavs didn’t get in the finals soon, they would do so sooner anyway. That prediction was borne initially out of the sheer brilliance of LeBron James, who is likely to be considered one of the all time greatest players when he retires, in a Cleveland uniform, a hundred years from now, but it also was a nod to the business acumen of Gilbert as well.
Cleveland fans will always have something to worry about. In the short-term, it’s whether or not the Cavs will get swept. But the real takeaway in all of this is that behind the scenes a successful franchise is beginning to emerge. And if “luck” isn’t on the side of the Cavs this time, it will be inevitably.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Shifting Priorities
These are rather confusing times for most Cleveland sports fans. It’s early June and they’re still rooting for a team whose season started nearly eight months ago. Meanwhile, the team whose attention usually occupies their minds right about now is all but being ignored for the moment. And that other team, the one that appears on the scene by mid-July, can hardly get any ink at all.
Making matters worse, as usual, is the local media, particularly the television stations. They know of only one way to act and that’s to overreact, mainly because most of them are carpetbaggers. You had to like the intrepid reporter on Channel 5’s morning news program Tuesday, a reporter who probably just recently learned how to pronounce Cuyahoga, interviewing Trapper Jack (yes, Trapper Jack!) the morning disc jockey on a local soft rock radio station. What the reporter wanted to know was what callers were telling Trapper about the Cavs. The reporter couldn’t possibly have looked more awkward if she were wearing a barrel and smoking a pipe. Not to do her job for her, but if you’re going to check in with callers to a radio station, perhaps a visit to, say, WTAM, which actually runs a morning talk show, would have been more productive. And so it goes.
Soon, you’ll see the hosts of the local news shows, when they aren’t proclaiming themselves the exclusive this or the official that with regard to the Cavs, adorned in Cavs colors and reading their teleprompters from sets covered in Cavs pennants. By Thursday, Wilma Smith will probably be wearing a LeBron jersey and doing a live remote from the Riverwalk in San Antonio. That may not be the end of the world as we know it but it’s at least the 3,243rd reason to ignore the local media.
But if you’re a Cleveland sports fan over the age of 35, these are legitimately confusing times. For those, there used to be a very specific rhythm to Cleveland sports, which the Cavs playoff run as disrupted. The sporting year began in early April with the Indians home opener. The baseball season would end sometime around early July when the Browns reported to camp. Whether the Browns were good or not, it usually carried fans interest until at least Christmas. Once the Bowl season ended, it was nearly Super Bowl time, which, until a few years ago carried you into late January. Now it’s early February. But then came the dark days for the next two or so months that had to be endured until the Indians trekked off to Tucson (now Winter Haven, soon to be Arizona again) for spring training. But the interim was used to complete the chores that had been piling up, things like painting and wallpapering, for example. And then, come lat March the cycle began again.
Though the Cavs have been around since 1971, they had never realized enough sustained success to actually alter that rhythm. There was nothing particularly magical about opening night and unless the Lakers were making their once yearly appearance, scant reason to head to actually head to a game.
Certainly this wasn’t only true, just mostly. There was excitement during that first season or two and then came the Miracle of Richfield season of 1975-1976. But for the next decade thereafter, the highest the Cavs ever finished in their division was 3rd and that was in 1977. When the Gunds bought the franchise and the team dodged a huge bullet by getting Brad Daugherty instead of Len Bias, the Cavs made more than a cameo appearance in the fans collective conscience. The teams during the period of 1987-1997 featured, at various times, Mark Price, Larry Nance, Brad Daugherty and Hot Rod Williams. Though the Cavs made several playoff appearances during that run, they made it past the first round only twice. Once injuries and age creeped in, the Cavs began a significant tailspin that didn’t truly end until LeBron James arrived, following an unprecedented high school career just down the road in Akron.
In addition to a lackluster history that has featured only 16 playoff appearances since 1971 another factor contributing to the general malaise was that the Cavs played in a nice arena in the nice country town of Richfield. Unfortunately, it was too far off the beaten path from the main population centers of the Cleveland area. And other than Whitey’s Booze and Burgers, the Tavern of Richfield or Barney Google’s in the Holiday Inn there wasn’t anywhere to really go either before or after the games.
Moreover, during this same time period, the growth in the Cleveland area was mostly in the suburbs east and west of the city. It wasn’t a perfect storm, necessarily, but it was a huge factor nonetheless contributing to the indifference. Venturing to a Cavs game in Richfield and having to traverse I-271 in the winter was always a cruel request. It’s the reason, frankly, that the Gunds were all too willing to bring the team back downtown even though the Coliseum was one of the nicer venues in the league.
Additional factors also conspired to keep the Cavs mostly off the radar screen. For example, because the Cavs were not an elite team, they were hardly ever on national television and though they were broadcast locally, for the formative years of their existence, when loyalty is nourished, this was well before cable and ESPN. If you were lucky, maybe one game a week was on Channel 43, competing for time with Johnny Powers and Big Time Wrestling as well as reruns of Star Trek.
Additionally, to most fans NBA players were the most difficult to relate to, perhaps because Cleveland has never had much exposure to big time college basketball. And it wasn’t as if NBA players had the best of reputations. Indeed, until Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league, the NBA itself was having a huge image problem resulting in large part from its own sordid drug history. There’s always been the perception, too, that NBA players refuse to play defense, that the officials refuse to call fouls, particularly on elite players, and that with such an expanded playoff format, the regular season was essentially meaningless.
So a perennially bad team playing in a league that featured an inferior product competing for attention with fans in a football town with an undying affection for a bad baseball team always reduced the Cavs to also-ran status.
But just as Magic and Bird saved the NBA, with a huge assist from the Michael Jordan, LeBron James has saved this franchise. Particularly in the last two years, the Cavs now have a place on the calendar of most Cleveland fans, even if the hold on that calendar is still on the flimsy side. While no one was looking, the Cavs caused a reshuffling in priorities.
This season, given the Cavs playoff run, the Indians have all but been ignored, despite the fact that they have played 55 games, a full third of their season, and find themselves in first place over the Detroit Tigers. True, the weather this spring has been mostly miserable, but the Indians just aren’t drawing yet. That probably isn’t completely or even mostly attributable to the Cavs and their fortunes, but the attention that the Indians neighbors on Gateway Plaza are drawing, particularly now, is a factor.
The Indians will find their audience, just not yet. When the Cavs complete their season in the next few weeks, fans will realize that this Indians team is unlike most of the Indians teams of their youth. This team isn’t likely to swoon in June and die in July. When fans can refocus their attention they will see that this team is more like the teams of the late ‘90s, featuring a nice mix of pitching and hitting, that should make them a factor through September.
In reality, the team that is going to suffer from attention deficit is the Browns, and they only have themselves to blame. Cleveland may always be a football town first, but the local franchise has certainly tested the patience of its fans over the last decade and a half and it is having an impact. When Modell moved the team to Baltimore and Cleveland was without a team for four years, interest didn’t die but it waned considerably. The return brought new excitement but since then the new Browns have been nothing short of an embarrassment to the great tradition they inherited. Though the franchise, for the first time ever, has an owner rich enough to not have to take out bank loans to sign overrated receivers, the team has otherwise been a mess from the top down. As it stands, the Browns are having trouble renting out loges.
The drafting of Brady Quinn and Joe Thomas has brought renewed optimism, to be sure, but in the short run the only interest the Browns will probably draw will be in the preseason and then only to see Quinn’s first few professional games. Once that occurs, Cleveland fans will return to the Indians and a potential playoff run. In other words, by the time real interest in the Browns returns, they will be four or five games into the season and if form holds, sporting at best a 1-3 record. Good luck with that.
In the end, the re-ordering of fan priorities is one of the more intriguing aspects of the emergence of the Cavs and the Indians. Whether the shift is permanent will play out over time, but it would be unwise to bet against Cavs owner Dan Gilbert. As hard as he has worked to this point, he’ll work twice as hard to ensure that his place in line isn’t squandered. The Browns will find if they haven’t yet, that the years of mismanagement won’t be tolerated forever. For once, they will have to earn their place back in the hearts and minds and wallets of Cleveland fans. Whether they truly are up to the task is iffy, at best.
Making matters worse, as usual, is the local media, particularly the television stations. They know of only one way to act and that’s to overreact, mainly because most of them are carpetbaggers. You had to like the intrepid reporter on Channel 5’s morning news program Tuesday, a reporter who probably just recently learned how to pronounce Cuyahoga, interviewing Trapper Jack (yes, Trapper Jack!) the morning disc jockey on a local soft rock radio station. What the reporter wanted to know was what callers were telling Trapper about the Cavs. The reporter couldn’t possibly have looked more awkward if she were wearing a barrel and smoking a pipe. Not to do her job for her, but if you’re going to check in with callers to a radio station, perhaps a visit to, say, WTAM, which actually runs a morning talk show, would have been more productive. And so it goes.
Soon, you’ll see the hosts of the local news shows, when they aren’t proclaiming themselves the exclusive this or the official that with regard to the Cavs, adorned in Cavs colors and reading their teleprompters from sets covered in Cavs pennants. By Thursday, Wilma Smith will probably be wearing a LeBron jersey and doing a live remote from the Riverwalk in San Antonio. That may not be the end of the world as we know it but it’s at least the 3,243rd reason to ignore the local media.
But if you’re a Cleveland sports fan over the age of 35, these are legitimately confusing times. For those, there used to be a very specific rhythm to Cleveland sports, which the Cavs playoff run as disrupted. The sporting year began in early April with the Indians home opener. The baseball season would end sometime around early July when the Browns reported to camp. Whether the Browns were good or not, it usually carried fans interest until at least Christmas. Once the Bowl season ended, it was nearly Super Bowl time, which, until a few years ago carried you into late January. Now it’s early February. But then came the dark days for the next two or so months that had to be endured until the Indians trekked off to Tucson (now Winter Haven, soon to be Arizona again) for spring training. But the interim was used to complete the chores that had been piling up, things like painting and wallpapering, for example. And then, come lat March the cycle began again.
Though the Cavs have been around since 1971, they had never realized enough sustained success to actually alter that rhythm. There was nothing particularly magical about opening night and unless the Lakers were making their once yearly appearance, scant reason to head to actually head to a game.
Certainly this wasn’t only true, just mostly. There was excitement during that first season or two and then came the Miracle of Richfield season of 1975-1976. But for the next decade thereafter, the highest the Cavs ever finished in their division was 3rd and that was in 1977. When the Gunds bought the franchise and the team dodged a huge bullet by getting Brad Daugherty instead of Len Bias, the Cavs made more than a cameo appearance in the fans collective conscience. The teams during the period of 1987-1997 featured, at various times, Mark Price, Larry Nance, Brad Daugherty and Hot Rod Williams. Though the Cavs made several playoff appearances during that run, they made it past the first round only twice. Once injuries and age creeped in, the Cavs began a significant tailspin that didn’t truly end until LeBron James arrived, following an unprecedented high school career just down the road in Akron.
In addition to a lackluster history that has featured only 16 playoff appearances since 1971 another factor contributing to the general malaise was that the Cavs played in a nice arena in the nice country town of Richfield. Unfortunately, it was too far off the beaten path from the main population centers of the Cleveland area. And other than Whitey’s Booze and Burgers, the Tavern of Richfield or Barney Google’s in the Holiday Inn there wasn’t anywhere to really go either before or after the games.
Moreover, during this same time period, the growth in the Cleveland area was mostly in the suburbs east and west of the city. It wasn’t a perfect storm, necessarily, but it was a huge factor nonetheless contributing to the indifference. Venturing to a Cavs game in Richfield and having to traverse I-271 in the winter was always a cruel request. It’s the reason, frankly, that the Gunds were all too willing to bring the team back downtown even though the Coliseum was one of the nicer venues in the league.
Additional factors also conspired to keep the Cavs mostly off the radar screen. For example, because the Cavs were not an elite team, they were hardly ever on national television and though they were broadcast locally, for the formative years of their existence, when loyalty is nourished, this was well before cable and ESPN. If you were lucky, maybe one game a week was on Channel 43, competing for time with Johnny Powers and Big Time Wrestling as well as reruns of Star Trek.
Additionally, to most fans NBA players were the most difficult to relate to, perhaps because Cleveland has never had much exposure to big time college basketball. And it wasn’t as if NBA players had the best of reputations. Indeed, until Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league, the NBA itself was having a huge image problem resulting in large part from its own sordid drug history. There’s always been the perception, too, that NBA players refuse to play defense, that the officials refuse to call fouls, particularly on elite players, and that with such an expanded playoff format, the regular season was essentially meaningless.
So a perennially bad team playing in a league that featured an inferior product competing for attention with fans in a football town with an undying affection for a bad baseball team always reduced the Cavs to also-ran status.
But just as Magic and Bird saved the NBA, with a huge assist from the Michael Jordan, LeBron James has saved this franchise. Particularly in the last two years, the Cavs now have a place on the calendar of most Cleveland fans, even if the hold on that calendar is still on the flimsy side. While no one was looking, the Cavs caused a reshuffling in priorities.
This season, given the Cavs playoff run, the Indians have all but been ignored, despite the fact that they have played 55 games, a full third of their season, and find themselves in first place over the Detroit Tigers. True, the weather this spring has been mostly miserable, but the Indians just aren’t drawing yet. That probably isn’t completely or even mostly attributable to the Cavs and their fortunes, but the attention that the Indians neighbors on Gateway Plaza are drawing, particularly now, is a factor.
The Indians will find their audience, just not yet. When the Cavs complete their season in the next few weeks, fans will realize that this Indians team is unlike most of the Indians teams of their youth. This team isn’t likely to swoon in June and die in July. When fans can refocus their attention they will see that this team is more like the teams of the late ‘90s, featuring a nice mix of pitching and hitting, that should make them a factor through September.
In reality, the team that is going to suffer from attention deficit is the Browns, and they only have themselves to blame. Cleveland may always be a football town first, but the local franchise has certainly tested the patience of its fans over the last decade and a half and it is having an impact. When Modell moved the team to Baltimore and Cleveland was without a team for four years, interest didn’t die but it waned considerably. The return brought new excitement but since then the new Browns have been nothing short of an embarrassment to the great tradition they inherited. Though the franchise, for the first time ever, has an owner rich enough to not have to take out bank loans to sign overrated receivers, the team has otherwise been a mess from the top down. As it stands, the Browns are having trouble renting out loges.
The drafting of Brady Quinn and Joe Thomas has brought renewed optimism, to be sure, but in the short run the only interest the Browns will probably draw will be in the preseason and then only to see Quinn’s first few professional games. Once that occurs, Cleveland fans will return to the Indians and a potential playoff run. In other words, by the time real interest in the Browns returns, they will be four or five games into the season and if form holds, sporting at best a 1-3 record. Good luck with that.
In the end, the re-ordering of fan priorities is one of the more intriguing aspects of the emergence of the Cavs and the Indians. Whether the shift is permanent will play out over time, but it would be unwise to bet against Cavs owner Dan Gilbert. As hard as he has worked to this point, he’ll work twice as hard to ensure that his place in line isn’t squandered. The Browns will find if they haven’t yet, that the years of mismanagement won’t be tolerated forever. For once, they will have to earn their place back in the hearts and minds and wallets of Cleveland fans. Whether they truly are up to the task is iffy, at best.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
All is Well
At least the Spurs don’t represent the state of Florida. Otherwise Cleveland fans would have one more paranoid thought on their minds as they ready themselves for the Cavaliers first appearance ever in the NBA Finals later this week.
For most Cleveland area sports fans, this is really the third crack they have at national glory in just the last year. The Ohio State Buckeyes went to the National Championship games in both football and basketball this past season, only to fall short to the Florida Gators. Indeed, the last Cleveland professional sports team to play for the championship was the Indians who lost to, who else?, the Florida Marlins when Jose Mesa melted down in Game 7. But the Cavaliers are facing the Spurs, who reside in San Antonio, and thus from that perspective alone one has to like their chances for getting a local team over the hump.
With the first game still several days away, there will be plenty of time for analysis. But one thing is probably for certain, it’s unlikely that Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, or Manu Ginobili will melt down like the Pistons Rasheed Wallace did several times against the Cavaliers. In fact, it’s fair to say that it was Wallace’s raging frustration, as much as anything else, which cost the Pistons their chance to return to the NBA Finals and an opportunity to claim their fourth NBA title.
But feel not sorry for the Pistons and the aging, toothless loudmouths they literally transformed into over the course of the last week. The Pistons found themselves up two after the first two games of the series and displaying the kind of false swagger that comes with failing to acknowledge that in each game they were nonetheless outplayed. After each loss, with the roar getting louder and the on-coming rush taking form, Pistons guard Chauncey Billups sounded like Kevin Bacon’s character in “Animal House,” telling Pistons fans to essentially remain calm and that all was well.
But anyone watching this series knew that this was an act. At every key turn, it was the Cavaliers, not the much more experienced Pistons, which remained calm, repeatedly finding a way to finish what they had started. The Pistons, on the other hand, seemed to take their cue from Wallace and as he panicked as the series deepened, so too did the Pistons. In Saturday night’s fourth quarter, the house finally collapsed on Wallace and the rest of his team and thus, as Sunday morning dawned, a new pecking order had clearly emerged in the NBA’s Eastern Conference.
In many ways, this series was actually won over a year ago. When the Cavaliers advanced to the conference semifinals last year, they were given no chance whatsoever against the Pistons and indeed a 27-point loss in the first game seemed to confirm those predictions. But then as now, the Cavaliers found a way to survive, inflicting enough body blows on the way to a Game 7 loss to take the fight out of the Pistons in their match-up with Miami. It was those same body blows, however, that never did sufficiently heal and with the Cavs constantly pounding at their kidneys throughout this series, the Pistons never found their sea legs. As a result the Pistons never did find their rhythm as well, either offensively or defensively, and when the final horn sounded Saturday night, the Pistons knew that this was not just another loss but the end of an era that was never fully realized in the first place.
Because LeBron James is, well, LeBron James, he will always be the focus of this team. But for whatever rarified accomplishments James might achieve next, it’s still a team game and there is simply no way to get to the finals in any sport without having enough supporting players around you to make a difference. That, in the end, is what really cost the Pistons this series. Their bench was horrible, to put it charitably. Other than Jason Maxiell’s performance in Game 2, Pistons fans would have a hard time finding any Pistons reserve that made a meaningful contribution in this series.
The Cavs, on the other hand, got significant minutes, as they usually do, from Anderson Varajeo. But he was hardly alone. With Larry Hughes nursing a sore ankle, Cavs coach Mike Brown was forced to improvise. That led to some meaningful minutes for Damon Jones who played better defense in the limited time he had in this series then he’s ever played while in a Cavs uniform. But the biggest assist of all goes to the youngest player on the court, Daniel “Boobie” Gibson. Looking like he should be attending his Senior Prom rather than playing in the NBA’s Eastern Conference Finals, Gibson made the Pistons pay dearly for their one-note defensive scheme in Game 6 that seem designed solely to keep James from again lighting up the scoreboard. James repeatedly found a wide-open Gibson who calmly knocked down five three-pointers on his way to a game high and career high 31 points.
Perhaps what is most amazing about the fact that the Cavaliers are headed to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history is that it was hard to see this coming. Though the Cavs did win 50 games this season, it often seemed like a struggle. At no point did they find, let alone maintain, the kind of consistency they have found in the playoffs. In fact, when owner Dan Gilbert told reporters at halftime of the final regular season game that it was important for the Cavs to take another step in their growth by reaching the Eastern Conference Finals, no one disagreed but the optimism was hardly universal that this growth would actually be achieved this year.
But James never has followed the more typical path, which this year would have been a good showing in the Eastern Conference Finals. Like he’s been doing since junior high school, by force of will he literally accelerated his personal growth and that of the team as a whole during the Pistons series, not allowing either himself or his teammates to be satisfied with just showing up. With his performances, particularly beginning with Game 3, James seemed to say, if we have to play, we might as well win and his teammates followed suit. It’s a mentality that will serve them well when they take on a vastly more experienced team in the Spurs in the Finals.
But again, there is plenty of time between now and Thursday to analyze the Spurs series in mind-numbing detail. Today is for the long-suffering fans of Cleveland sports, one of whom is James himself, to relish. Like the Indians pennant in 1995 or the Buckeyes National Championship in 2002, the Cavs victory over the Pistons represents both a historical footing and a context for all that comes next. Hopefully what’s next is a victory celebration on Public Square in about two weeks.
For most Cleveland area sports fans, this is really the third crack they have at national glory in just the last year. The Ohio State Buckeyes went to the National Championship games in both football and basketball this past season, only to fall short to the Florida Gators. Indeed, the last Cleveland professional sports team to play for the championship was the Indians who lost to, who else?, the Florida Marlins when Jose Mesa melted down in Game 7. But the Cavaliers are facing the Spurs, who reside in San Antonio, and thus from that perspective alone one has to like their chances for getting a local team over the hump.
With the first game still several days away, there will be plenty of time for analysis. But one thing is probably for certain, it’s unlikely that Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, or Manu Ginobili will melt down like the Pistons Rasheed Wallace did several times against the Cavaliers. In fact, it’s fair to say that it was Wallace’s raging frustration, as much as anything else, which cost the Pistons their chance to return to the NBA Finals and an opportunity to claim their fourth NBA title.
But feel not sorry for the Pistons and the aging, toothless loudmouths they literally transformed into over the course of the last week. The Pistons found themselves up two after the first two games of the series and displaying the kind of false swagger that comes with failing to acknowledge that in each game they were nonetheless outplayed. After each loss, with the roar getting louder and the on-coming rush taking form, Pistons guard Chauncey Billups sounded like Kevin Bacon’s character in “Animal House,” telling Pistons fans to essentially remain calm and that all was well.
But anyone watching this series knew that this was an act. At every key turn, it was the Cavaliers, not the much more experienced Pistons, which remained calm, repeatedly finding a way to finish what they had started. The Pistons, on the other hand, seemed to take their cue from Wallace and as he panicked as the series deepened, so too did the Pistons. In Saturday night’s fourth quarter, the house finally collapsed on Wallace and the rest of his team and thus, as Sunday morning dawned, a new pecking order had clearly emerged in the NBA’s Eastern Conference.
In many ways, this series was actually won over a year ago. When the Cavaliers advanced to the conference semifinals last year, they were given no chance whatsoever against the Pistons and indeed a 27-point loss in the first game seemed to confirm those predictions. But then as now, the Cavaliers found a way to survive, inflicting enough body blows on the way to a Game 7 loss to take the fight out of the Pistons in their match-up with Miami. It was those same body blows, however, that never did sufficiently heal and with the Cavs constantly pounding at their kidneys throughout this series, the Pistons never found their sea legs. As a result the Pistons never did find their rhythm as well, either offensively or defensively, and when the final horn sounded Saturday night, the Pistons knew that this was not just another loss but the end of an era that was never fully realized in the first place.
Because LeBron James is, well, LeBron James, he will always be the focus of this team. But for whatever rarified accomplishments James might achieve next, it’s still a team game and there is simply no way to get to the finals in any sport without having enough supporting players around you to make a difference. That, in the end, is what really cost the Pistons this series. Their bench was horrible, to put it charitably. Other than Jason Maxiell’s performance in Game 2, Pistons fans would have a hard time finding any Pistons reserve that made a meaningful contribution in this series.
The Cavs, on the other hand, got significant minutes, as they usually do, from Anderson Varajeo. But he was hardly alone. With Larry Hughes nursing a sore ankle, Cavs coach Mike Brown was forced to improvise. That led to some meaningful minutes for Damon Jones who played better defense in the limited time he had in this series then he’s ever played while in a Cavs uniform. But the biggest assist of all goes to the youngest player on the court, Daniel “Boobie” Gibson. Looking like he should be attending his Senior Prom rather than playing in the NBA’s Eastern Conference Finals, Gibson made the Pistons pay dearly for their one-note defensive scheme in Game 6 that seem designed solely to keep James from again lighting up the scoreboard. James repeatedly found a wide-open Gibson who calmly knocked down five three-pointers on his way to a game high and career high 31 points.
Perhaps what is most amazing about the fact that the Cavaliers are headed to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history is that it was hard to see this coming. Though the Cavs did win 50 games this season, it often seemed like a struggle. At no point did they find, let alone maintain, the kind of consistency they have found in the playoffs. In fact, when owner Dan Gilbert told reporters at halftime of the final regular season game that it was important for the Cavs to take another step in their growth by reaching the Eastern Conference Finals, no one disagreed but the optimism was hardly universal that this growth would actually be achieved this year.
But James never has followed the more typical path, which this year would have been a good showing in the Eastern Conference Finals. Like he’s been doing since junior high school, by force of will he literally accelerated his personal growth and that of the team as a whole during the Pistons series, not allowing either himself or his teammates to be satisfied with just showing up. With his performances, particularly beginning with Game 3, James seemed to say, if we have to play, we might as well win and his teammates followed suit. It’s a mentality that will serve them well when they take on a vastly more experienced team in the Spurs in the Finals.
But again, there is plenty of time between now and Thursday to analyze the Spurs series in mind-numbing detail. Today is for the long-suffering fans of Cleveland sports, one of whom is James himself, to relish. Like the Indians pennant in 1995 or the Buckeyes National Championship in 2002, the Cavs victory over the Pistons represents both a historical footing and a context for all that comes next. Hopefully what’s next is a victory celebration on Public Square in about two weeks.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Witness
You’d have to go back to Tiger Woods’ chip shot on the 16th hole at Augusta in 2005 to find anything close to the perfect marriage of marketing and reality that occurred Thursday night at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan.
LeBron James, whose Nike slogan is “Witness” made everyone do just that, particularly a tired and frustrated Detroit Pistons team, as he single-handedly gave the Cavaliers control of the Eastern Conference Finals with an adrenalin-pumping two-point double-overtime victory. Those lucky enough to witness one of the great performances in NBA playoff history, whether in person or on television, will forever be able to point to James’ career-defining performance as the singular reason to forever silence whatever critics might remain of James.
The statistics, as they often can be, were head-shaking. James played nearly 51 minutes, meaning he sat for only about seven. He was 18-33 from the floor, which would be special if most of the shots were of the 7-10 foot variety. Instead, they were an amazing array of lay-ups, dunks, three-pointers and fade-away 20-footers, proving that James has every shot imaginable in his personal arsenal. He scored the team’s last 25 points and 29 of their last 30, and it wasn’t out of selfishness, either. The team had a total of 13 assists, seven of which were from James. It was simply that James was in the kind of zone that only the rarest of athletes can attain and his teammates and opponents knew it. James was double and triple-teamed repeatedly. Pistons head coach Flip Saunders said that they tried all manner of traps and defensive schemes to stop him, but nothing worked. Indeed, the Pistons had no chance.
We noted before and will say it again, even if the Cavaliers find themselves coming up short in this series, the Pistons know their run is about to end. While many see James and his performance in the last three games as nothing short of the international emergence of perhaps the best player in the NBA, what really is being witnessed is the sea-change of transition in the Eastern Conference. The Pistons are the aging giant trying to hang on to one last moment of glory before they are forced to reload their roster with enough youth to take on James and the Cavs for the next several years.
There have been any number of moments in this series that underscore that point. Pistons forward Rasheed Wallace provided his own private catalogue in game four alone, from throwing his headband in disgust and earning a fifth technical foul to the jersey toss in the tunnel to the visitors locker room after the game.
But for a real signature moment, look no further than Antonio McDyess’ clothesline takedown of the Cavs Anderson Varejao at the end of the first quarter Thursday night. Varejao is a handful, to be sure, and has a tendency to infuriate the opposition in even the most insignificant of regular season games. But the McDyess flagrant foul, borne out of the frustration that comes when a series isn’t going the way it should, in the end played more like pathetic attempt to intimidate the Cavs early and take them out of their game.
But where the Pistons were able to make that tactic work last year when Wallace took an elbow to Zydrunas Ilgauskas and drew blood, this year was different. No one, including James, seemed to come to Ilgauskas’s defense at the moment of impact last year, but as soon as Varejao went down, James literally jumped him and into the face of McDyess. That action cost McDyess his evening, cost James a technical, and sent a message to Wallace and the others that this isn’t last year, as if they didn’t know that already.
For all the swagger and pomposity that can be the Pistons, they seem, frankly, toothless in this series. Though they have won two of the five games, they have not dominated the Cavs at any point. In fact, it’s really been the opposite. The Pistons have had trouble finding any traction in any game that would take them on an insurmountable run. The Cavs, feeding mostly off James but displaying on a team level the kind of tenacity that makes Varejao such a pest to his opponents, have refused to be run off the court. Even during those miserable third quarters, excluding Thursday night, the Cavs have still managed to keep it close enough to put themselves in a position to win at the end of each game.
In some ways coincidental and in other ways ironic, it is nevertheless fitting that James’ signature game came at the same time as all manner of controversy is swirling around Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. Bryant, who at various points has been the best player in the game, is frustrated and lonely and can’t seem to figure out where he wants to be and what he wants to do next. James, on the other hand, looks like the model of consistency and decorum on the court and off while singularly ensuring for David Stern and the rest of the NBA that as long as the Cavs are in the playoffs, good ratings likely will follow.
And while there is always a larger context to everything, for the local fans this is nearly as good as it possibly can get. Right now, in LeBron James, Cleveland sports fans have in their midst the opportunity to watch and appreciate as one of their own one of the top two or three greatest basketball players in the world. Clevelanders have had their share of superstars in a variety of sports, but you’d have to go back to Jim Brown to find the last time any Cleveland team had one of the greatest players in the game. That isn’t necessarily an indictment on the mediocre teams fielded by the various Cleveland teams in the ensuing years as much as it is an emphasis on the fact that the truly greats are in short supply.
If the James and the Cavs are not able to finish off this series, a smattering of critics will re-emerge, just as they did when James passed to a wide-open Donyell Marshall in game one of the series. If James and the Cavs advance to the Finals, those same critics will nit-pick if they can’t get past San Antonio which, for all intents and purposes, are the New England Patriots of the NBA. That kind of scrutiny comes with the territory and is something James has faced since his sophomore year in high school. But a performance like Thursday night’s can’t be denied and while it may not lead to the ultimate prize right now, it leaves no doubt that James has the ability to bring this town the championship it so desperately craves if not sooner, then soon anyway.
LeBron James, whose Nike slogan is “Witness” made everyone do just that, particularly a tired and frustrated Detroit Pistons team, as he single-handedly gave the Cavaliers control of the Eastern Conference Finals with an adrenalin-pumping two-point double-overtime victory. Those lucky enough to witness one of the great performances in NBA playoff history, whether in person or on television, will forever be able to point to James’ career-defining performance as the singular reason to forever silence whatever critics might remain of James.
The statistics, as they often can be, were head-shaking. James played nearly 51 minutes, meaning he sat for only about seven. He was 18-33 from the floor, which would be special if most of the shots were of the 7-10 foot variety. Instead, they were an amazing array of lay-ups, dunks, three-pointers and fade-away 20-footers, proving that James has every shot imaginable in his personal arsenal. He scored the team’s last 25 points and 29 of their last 30, and it wasn’t out of selfishness, either. The team had a total of 13 assists, seven of which were from James. It was simply that James was in the kind of zone that only the rarest of athletes can attain and his teammates and opponents knew it. James was double and triple-teamed repeatedly. Pistons head coach Flip Saunders said that they tried all manner of traps and defensive schemes to stop him, but nothing worked. Indeed, the Pistons had no chance.
We noted before and will say it again, even if the Cavaliers find themselves coming up short in this series, the Pistons know their run is about to end. While many see James and his performance in the last three games as nothing short of the international emergence of perhaps the best player in the NBA, what really is being witnessed is the sea-change of transition in the Eastern Conference. The Pistons are the aging giant trying to hang on to one last moment of glory before they are forced to reload their roster with enough youth to take on James and the Cavs for the next several years.
There have been any number of moments in this series that underscore that point. Pistons forward Rasheed Wallace provided his own private catalogue in game four alone, from throwing his headband in disgust and earning a fifth technical foul to the jersey toss in the tunnel to the visitors locker room after the game.
But for a real signature moment, look no further than Antonio McDyess’ clothesline takedown of the Cavs Anderson Varejao at the end of the first quarter Thursday night. Varejao is a handful, to be sure, and has a tendency to infuriate the opposition in even the most insignificant of regular season games. But the McDyess flagrant foul, borne out of the frustration that comes when a series isn’t going the way it should, in the end played more like pathetic attempt to intimidate the Cavs early and take them out of their game.
But where the Pistons were able to make that tactic work last year when Wallace took an elbow to Zydrunas Ilgauskas and drew blood, this year was different. No one, including James, seemed to come to Ilgauskas’s defense at the moment of impact last year, but as soon as Varejao went down, James literally jumped him and into the face of McDyess. That action cost McDyess his evening, cost James a technical, and sent a message to Wallace and the others that this isn’t last year, as if they didn’t know that already.
For all the swagger and pomposity that can be the Pistons, they seem, frankly, toothless in this series. Though they have won two of the five games, they have not dominated the Cavs at any point. In fact, it’s really been the opposite. The Pistons have had trouble finding any traction in any game that would take them on an insurmountable run. The Cavs, feeding mostly off James but displaying on a team level the kind of tenacity that makes Varejao such a pest to his opponents, have refused to be run off the court. Even during those miserable third quarters, excluding Thursday night, the Cavs have still managed to keep it close enough to put themselves in a position to win at the end of each game.
In some ways coincidental and in other ways ironic, it is nevertheless fitting that James’ signature game came at the same time as all manner of controversy is swirling around Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. Bryant, who at various points has been the best player in the game, is frustrated and lonely and can’t seem to figure out where he wants to be and what he wants to do next. James, on the other hand, looks like the model of consistency and decorum on the court and off while singularly ensuring for David Stern and the rest of the NBA that as long as the Cavs are in the playoffs, good ratings likely will follow.
And while there is always a larger context to everything, for the local fans this is nearly as good as it possibly can get. Right now, in LeBron James, Cleveland sports fans have in their midst the opportunity to watch and appreciate as one of their own one of the top two or three greatest basketball players in the world. Clevelanders have had their share of superstars in a variety of sports, but you’d have to go back to Jim Brown to find the last time any Cleveland team had one of the greatest players in the game. That isn’t necessarily an indictment on the mediocre teams fielded by the various Cleveland teams in the ensuing years as much as it is an emphasis on the fact that the truly greats are in short supply.
If the James and the Cavs are not able to finish off this series, a smattering of critics will re-emerge, just as they did when James passed to a wide-open Donyell Marshall in game one of the series. If James and the Cavs advance to the Finals, those same critics will nit-pick if they can’t get past San Antonio which, for all intents and purposes, are the New England Patriots of the NBA. That kind of scrutiny comes with the territory and is something James has faced since his sophomore year in high school. But a performance like Thursday night’s can’t be denied and while it may not lead to the ultimate prize right now, it leaves no doubt that James has the ability to bring this town the championship it so desperately craves if not sooner, then soon anyway.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Distractions
With all of the attention Braylon Edwards gets as the Cleveland Browns team malcontent, just be glad of one thing: he’s not Michael Vick. The enigmatic, and that’s putting it charitably, quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons has been the kind of lightning rod for criticism and distraction that a wannabe like Edwards could only hope for.
Take a look at just the last year. In April, 2006, Vick had to settle a lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that Vick allegedly gave her herpes. Remember this incident as we’ll come back to it in a moment. Moving forward to the football season, following a loss to the New Orleans Saints last November, which was the Falcons fourth straight loss, Vick gave the fans the one-finger salute.
Fans, in general, are a forgiving bunch. They’d root for Hitler if he was on their team and could rush for a thousand yards. But there is something about giving the fans the finger that they find hard to forget. That’s why the Falcons public relations department had to spring into action so quickly to write Vick’s apology, which appeared on their web site soon after the gesture. Said Vick Joe the public relations guy “First and foremost, I would like to apologize for my inappropriate actions with fans today. I was frustrated and upset at how the game was going for my team, and that frustration came out the wrong way. That’s not what I’m about. That’s not what the Atlanta Falcons are about. I simply lost my cool in the heat of the moment. I apologize and look forward to putting this incident behind me.”
The problem for Joe the public relations guy is that he violated the first rule of ghostwriting: know your speaker. And if Vick has proven anything since this incident, it’s that giving the finger to the fans is exactly what he is about and could care less about putting that incident or any other behind him.
Just a few short months later, in January, 2007, Vick came under police scrutiny when he tossed a suspicious “water” bottle away before boarding a plane at the Miami airport. Police, retrieving the bottle, said it smelled of marijuana and contained a hidden compartment that contained a “small amount of dark particulate.” Apparently, though, there was not enough of the “dark particulate” on which to draw any conclusions and eventually police declined to file any charges against Vick.
Still, it was unwarranted scrutiny for Vick and the Falcons, forcing the overworked p.r. staff to once again spring into action to explain why Vick found it necessary to carry such a curious container, particularly in an airport. This time, under the name of Vick’s attorney, a statement was issued that said, in part, “Michael intends to spend this offseason focusing on his family, working with his teammates and the new coaching staff to insure that the Falcons have a great season in 2007, and devoting time to his charitable interests.”
Indeed. Who knew that dog fighting was the charitable interests that Vick had in mind? In late April, police, conducting a drug investigation, raided a house in rural Virginia owned by Vick. Whether drugs were found isn’t know, but what they did find, according to ABC News were dozens of dogs, pit bulls mostly, a dog fighting pit, blood stained carpets and other dog fighting paraphernalia. According to a confidential source, Vick is one of the “big boys” of dog fighting and bets tens of thousands of dollars on individual fights.
Up until the investigation of Vick, no one heard much about dog fighting. On the list of societal ills, it probably doesn’t make the top 10 but as an extreme form of animal cruelty it is a felony nonetheless in every state but two. But clearly many see it as victimless and trivial and can’t see what all the fuss is about. At least that’s what Clinton Portis and Chris Samuels of the Washington Redskins essentially thought when they defended Vick and his “private” activities in an unguarded moment speaking to a reporter while the cameras were rolling. Both suggested that prosecuting Vick would be ridiculous and unfair. Of course, once the team and the NFL got hold of the quotes, Portis and Samuels, through the Redskins p.r. staff, quickly backtracked so as not to also implicate themselves in such activities.
Wherever one comes down on this issue, this much is certain: it’s not something that a team’s quarterback ought to be occupying his time with. It’s hard to imagine either Peyton Manning or Tom Brady having such a sordid hobby. The Falcons p.r. staff, clearly tired of dealing with Vick and the messes he creates, has almost stopped trying to defend him. In easily one of the most fascinating statements ever issued by any team anywhere, the Falcons said, in response to the ABC News report, “Michael was drafted by the Falcons in 2001. The allegations regarding him are still under investigation, and until we have facts related to the investigation, we are unable to respond further.”
No talk about pursuing any bogus off-season charitable endeavors. No happy talk about putting the allegations behind him. No assurance, actually, that they even expect Vick to be cleared of the charges. In that context, the curious statement about Vick’s draft status is all the more understandable. Given his history of making the team look ridiculous, the p.r. staff knew that is was the one statement that they knew would still be true a few weeks from now. The guess, though, is that it will ultimately prove to be the one true statement from which they’d most like to escape.
With all of these animal cruelty allegations hanging around, the lack of comment from Vick is probably understandable. But one thing is for sure, if you want him to talk just question his manhood.
In early April, a few weeks before the dog fighting allegations surfaced, a web site that purposely and clearly publishes fake news had a story suggesting that Vick is gay. It was clearly a spoof as the web site’s address, www.fakeawish.com, would suggest. But the story circulated on the internet like only stories like this can, prompting Vick, just two days after the dog fighting allegations came to light, to call into an Atlanta radio station. Rather than address the more sordid issues, he used the forum to let the ladies know he’s still a player off the field as well. He told the shows hosts, “everybody who knows me, knows how I get down. It’s not even an issue.” The lawsuit he settled over allegedly infecting a woman with herpes should have been enough evidence of that. See? There is a circle of life.
Given Vick’s rather interesting off-season, it would hardly surprise if new Atlanta Falcons coach Bobby Petrino is re-thinking his decision to leave the relatively controversial-free Louisville Cardinals program. And to spurned Cardinals boosters, they’re probably relishing just a bit in the kind of trouble Petrino has seen since making his deal with the NFL devil. Still, it’s a tough situation to witness.
Which brings us back around to Braylon Edwards. His latest misstep, just days after he presented the “new” Braylon Edwards by donating a $1 million to a scholarship fund for inner-city students, was to be the only no-show on the first day of the team’s “voluntary” workout. Reports indicate that Edwards was in Ann Arbor attending a charity golf outing. Edwards, demonstrating the kind of backward leadership that makes sense only to him, refused to comment on the absence directly, leaving the coaching staff and the other players to repeatedly answer questions about his absence. With Edwards, he only talks when it suits him. In the rare moments his teammates actually need him to open his pie hole, Edwards usually disappears leaving them to dangle in the wind.
Edwards has been a marginally productive player in his two seasons with the Browns and is more noted for the many manifestations of his “me first” mentality, but for all the distractions he’s created in his short time here, the one thing Browns fans can be thankful of is that he’s not Michael Vick, at least not yet.
But that’s more a statement about the state of professional athletes these days. We’ve been reduced to parsing the severity of leadership lapses in order to keep perspective. When compared to someone like Vick or any number of the players on the Cincinnati Bengals, we may be grateful that Edwards is just a loud-mouth self-serving malcontent and not a societal miscreant with deeper demons. But in the end, what’s the difference? For teams trying to find their way out of abyss, any distraction is harmful. If Edwards is watching, this is really the lesson he needs
Take a look at just the last year. In April, 2006, Vick had to settle a lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that Vick allegedly gave her herpes. Remember this incident as we’ll come back to it in a moment. Moving forward to the football season, following a loss to the New Orleans Saints last November, which was the Falcons fourth straight loss, Vick gave the fans the one-finger salute.
Fans, in general, are a forgiving bunch. They’d root for Hitler if he was on their team and could rush for a thousand yards. But there is something about giving the fans the finger that they find hard to forget. That’s why the Falcons public relations department had to spring into action so quickly to write Vick’s apology, which appeared on their web site soon after the gesture. Said Vick Joe the public relations guy “First and foremost, I would like to apologize for my inappropriate actions with fans today. I was frustrated and upset at how the game was going for my team, and that frustration came out the wrong way. That’s not what I’m about. That’s not what the Atlanta Falcons are about. I simply lost my cool in the heat of the moment. I apologize and look forward to putting this incident behind me.”
The problem for Joe the public relations guy is that he violated the first rule of ghostwriting: know your speaker. And if Vick has proven anything since this incident, it’s that giving the finger to the fans is exactly what he is about and could care less about putting that incident or any other behind him.
Just a few short months later, in January, 2007, Vick came under police scrutiny when he tossed a suspicious “water” bottle away before boarding a plane at the Miami airport. Police, retrieving the bottle, said it smelled of marijuana and contained a hidden compartment that contained a “small amount of dark particulate.” Apparently, though, there was not enough of the “dark particulate” on which to draw any conclusions and eventually police declined to file any charges against Vick.
Still, it was unwarranted scrutiny for Vick and the Falcons, forcing the overworked p.r. staff to once again spring into action to explain why Vick found it necessary to carry such a curious container, particularly in an airport. This time, under the name of Vick’s attorney, a statement was issued that said, in part, “Michael intends to spend this offseason focusing on his family, working with his teammates and the new coaching staff to insure that the Falcons have a great season in 2007, and devoting time to his charitable interests.”
Indeed. Who knew that dog fighting was the charitable interests that Vick had in mind? In late April, police, conducting a drug investigation, raided a house in rural Virginia owned by Vick. Whether drugs were found isn’t know, but what they did find, according to ABC News were dozens of dogs, pit bulls mostly, a dog fighting pit, blood stained carpets and other dog fighting paraphernalia. According to a confidential source, Vick is one of the “big boys” of dog fighting and bets tens of thousands of dollars on individual fights.
Up until the investigation of Vick, no one heard much about dog fighting. On the list of societal ills, it probably doesn’t make the top 10 but as an extreme form of animal cruelty it is a felony nonetheless in every state but two. But clearly many see it as victimless and trivial and can’t see what all the fuss is about. At least that’s what Clinton Portis and Chris Samuels of the Washington Redskins essentially thought when they defended Vick and his “private” activities in an unguarded moment speaking to a reporter while the cameras were rolling. Both suggested that prosecuting Vick would be ridiculous and unfair. Of course, once the team and the NFL got hold of the quotes, Portis and Samuels, through the Redskins p.r. staff, quickly backtracked so as not to also implicate themselves in such activities.
Wherever one comes down on this issue, this much is certain: it’s not something that a team’s quarterback ought to be occupying his time with. It’s hard to imagine either Peyton Manning or Tom Brady having such a sordid hobby. The Falcons p.r. staff, clearly tired of dealing with Vick and the messes he creates, has almost stopped trying to defend him. In easily one of the most fascinating statements ever issued by any team anywhere, the Falcons said, in response to the ABC News report, “Michael was drafted by the Falcons in 2001. The allegations regarding him are still under investigation, and until we have facts related to the investigation, we are unable to respond further.”
No talk about pursuing any bogus off-season charitable endeavors. No happy talk about putting the allegations behind him. No assurance, actually, that they even expect Vick to be cleared of the charges. In that context, the curious statement about Vick’s draft status is all the more understandable. Given his history of making the team look ridiculous, the p.r. staff knew that is was the one statement that they knew would still be true a few weeks from now. The guess, though, is that it will ultimately prove to be the one true statement from which they’d most like to escape.
With all of these animal cruelty allegations hanging around, the lack of comment from Vick is probably understandable. But one thing is for sure, if you want him to talk just question his manhood.
In early April, a few weeks before the dog fighting allegations surfaced, a web site that purposely and clearly publishes fake news had a story suggesting that Vick is gay. It was clearly a spoof as the web site’s address, www.fakeawish.com, would suggest. But the story circulated on the internet like only stories like this can, prompting Vick, just two days after the dog fighting allegations came to light, to call into an Atlanta radio station. Rather than address the more sordid issues, he used the forum to let the ladies know he’s still a player off the field as well. He told the shows hosts, “everybody who knows me, knows how I get down. It’s not even an issue.” The lawsuit he settled over allegedly infecting a woman with herpes should have been enough evidence of that. See? There is a circle of life.
Given Vick’s rather interesting off-season, it would hardly surprise if new Atlanta Falcons coach Bobby Petrino is re-thinking his decision to leave the relatively controversial-free Louisville Cardinals program. And to spurned Cardinals boosters, they’re probably relishing just a bit in the kind of trouble Petrino has seen since making his deal with the NFL devil. Still, it’s a tough situation to witness.
Which brings us back around to Braylon Edwards. His latest misstep, just days after he presented the “new” Braylon Edwards by donating a $1 million to a scholarship fund for inner-city students, was to be the only no-show on the first day of the team’s “voluntary” workout. Reports indicate that Edwards was in Ann Arbor attending a charity golf outing. Edwards, demonstrating the kind of backward leadership that makes sense only to him, refused to comment on the absence directly, leaving the coaching staff and the other players to repeatedly answer questions about his absence. With Edwards, he only talks when it suits him. In the rare moments his teammates actually need him to open his pie hole, Edwards usually disappears leaving them to dangle in the wind.
Edwards has been a marginally productive player in his two seasons with the Browns and is more noted for the many manifestations of his “me first” mentality, but for all the distractions he’s created in his short time here, the one thing Browns fans can be thankful of is that he’s not Michael Vick, at least not yet.
But that’s more a statement about the state of professional athletes these days. We’ve been reduced to parsing the severity of leadership lapses in order to keep perspective. When compared to someone like Vick or any number of the players on the Cincinnati Bengals, we may be grateful that Edwards is just a loud-mouth self-serving malcontent and not a societal miscreant with deeper demons. But in the end, what’s the difference? For teams trying to find their way out of abyss, any distraction is harmful. If Edwards is watching, this is really the lesson he needs
Monday, May 28, 2007
Youth Be Served
It’s been an interesting week or so for the 22-year olds among us. For many that age, which is to say four years removed from high school, they have already or will be soon graduating from college and looking for that first job. Parties will be thrown and toasts will be made as they begin their journey toward adulthood. No one expects much from them because, heck, they’re only 22.
Then there is LeBron James. To say he’s taken a slightly different path in his 22 years would be a slight understatement. Rather than toil in college, he went out and become an international superstar and icon, not simply a basketball player but a brand unto himself. But in the process, he raised the expectations of those around him to perhaps unrealistic heights, something no one typically expects of someone that age.
We smile and shake our heads knowingly when someone like Lindsay Lohan, barely younger than James, crashes and burns and ends up in rehab. If you don’t like your stars of the Hollywood variety, one can spend the day compiling a list of young sports stars that flamed out similarly. The fame, the money, the pressure, it’s hard to handle, especially at that age. But with James, it’s always been different. He not only has to handle the pressure and the fame and money but the barrel full, but he has to continuously exceed the increasingly unrealistic expectations of everyone around him or else be branded a failure.
It’s hard to say where James may end up in the pecking order of great players once his NBA days are done, but for anyone lucky enough to attend Game Three of the Eastern Conference Championship between the Cavaliers and the Detroit Pistons Sunday night, James provided his greatest service yet—he made even the casual among us care about pro basketball again. And whether he’s 22 or 32, matters little. What matters most is that he’s accomplished what seemed impossible and that’s something that can never be taken away.
And don’t think that James’ task is the result one big victory or because of any particular victory, actually. It’s really because James, in the way that he plays the game, has chosen to show anyone willing to invest a few hours of time that NBA basketball, played at the kind of level that only kids like James can play it at, brings the same indescribable thrills, the same giddy highs and the same depressing lows as any sport anywhere.
One of the most frustrating things to basketball fans is the great disparity between the regular NBA season and the playoffs. The intensity, such a key component of the playoffs, is hardly visible during the regular season. Football, with only 16 games, doesn’t have that luxury. Baseball, which seemingly floats along for months, has always had a different rhythm and, frankly, with its pace and its imperfect nature, it’s difficult to detect how hard a player is playing anyway. But NBA basketball, with its constant motion and fans sitting just feet away from the game, is a much easier read. That’s why it’s always been criticized for the seemingly causal attitude of the players during the regular season as compared to the different gear most are able to find once the playoffs hit.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that eight teams in each conference make the NBA playoffs. But with the resurrection of the Cavs under James, Cleveland fans are quickly relearning the real ways of the NBA. For example, what’s most apparent is that the players and coaches, the smart ones anyway, use the regular season as a means to an end--seeding for the playoffs. The Pistons, now playing in their fifth Eastern Conference finals, knew they didn’t need to win 60+ games this year to be considered great; they only needed to win 51 in order to get the top seed. Based on the make-up of that team, it’s apparent they chose to win 53. The extra energy necessary to win 10 more games in order to be compared with Dallas hardly seemed worth it in that context. It’s why Detroit has been one of the top teams in the league for years.
Dallas, which seemed on the precipice of greatness this year, regressed. Perhaps driven by the desires of its owner to be that showcase team, the Mavericks compiled a gaudy 67-15 record regular season record but found itself taking an early exit from the playoffs to a clearly inferior team, victims of an overconfidence borne by its regular season prowess. The same is true with Phoenix. Like Dallas, it ran hard during the regular season, winning 61 games, but was spent by the second round of the playoffs. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the final four teams all had victory totals in the 50s, but it seems unlikely.
It would be too much to suggest that James at his age has gotten the Cavs to the point where they can play to a seed, but it seems like they are on that road nonetheless. One gets the feeling, though, that if the Cavs really had been a threat to take the number one seed from Detroit, the Pistons would have simply won an extra game or two to hold their position.
But even if the Cavs don’t survive this particular series, there is no question that there is a transition taking place in the Eastern Conference and even if you don’t recognize it, there’s no question that the Pistons do. Right now, the Cavs are extracting a heavy price on Detroit again, just as they did last year in the playoffs. Should the Pistons prevail in this series, they aren’t likely to have much left in the tank against the Spurs, who look to prevail against a Utah team that is looking more and more like the Cleveland of the West.
Detroit, for all its experience, is starting to look its age. The average age of the Pistons starting five is almost 31 years of age. The average age for the Cavs starters, on the other hand, is 26. If that doesn’t seem like much, just consider that the average Pistons starter has played well over 400 games more than the average Cavs starter. That’s a lot of running up and down the court and bumping and shoving in the lane. Experience has its place, particularly in the playoffs, but there comes a time where experience is just a euphemism for age, particularly old age and that time may just be creeping up on the Pistons. And, like it or not, those bumps and bruises that healed so quickly at 22 linger much longer at 32. Detroit Pistons forward Rasheed Wallace now takes extended breathers during games. When he wasn’t in the game, forward Chris Webber sat on the bench with an ice pack strapped to his back. Tayshaun Prince, the relative youngster of the bunch, spent a fair amount of time with an ice pack on his leg.
Whether or not the Pistons can muster that last bit of energy to put themselves in the NBA finals, one can almost sense that they know their window is closing and it is James and his teammates who have their fingers on the sill. There was a point in Sunday night’s game where Wallace looked simply exhausted. The James dunk directly over Wallace earlier in the quarter was the precursor, but with 2:33 left in the fourth and the Cavs nursing an 81-76 lead, James had the ball in his hands on the left perimeter. As Wallace stepped out to throw an outstretched hand in his face, James sank a beautiful three-pointer sending the crowd into its 20th frenzy of the night and forcing the Pistons to call time. As Wallace walked toward the bench, he could hardly believe what had just taken place. Shaking his head in disbelief and headed for a quick rest, it was apparent nonetheless that Wallace knew the game was over. There was simply no way that his aging body could match-up to James this late in the game.
There has been much written about James this past week, a lot of which has been negative. Loudmouth commentators, paid to be provocative, called James out for passing to a wide-open Donyell Marshall. Those same commentators complain that James hasn’t taken the team on his back, whatever that means. The James supporters on the other hand have taken to trying to quell the uprising by reminding everyone of James’ tender age. Both sides have their points, but in the end its James’ age that may be the best thing going for him and his Cavaliers team. There is enough experience under the belt that he and his teammates are no longer in awe by the intensity of the playoffs. But there also is enough youth and naiveté that they can push themselves to enter new realms.
If winning a NBA championship process, there is no question that the Cavs are on the right path. They may not be able to get over the hump and into the finals this year, but they are a team, if not the team, on the come. And if that’s too much to ask of a 22-year old, just remember this: next year James will be 23.
Then there is LeBron James. To say he’s taken a slightly different path in his 22 years would be a slight understatement. Rather than toil in college, he went out and become an international superstar and icon, not simply a basketball player but a brand unto himself. But in the process, he raised the expectations of those around him to perhaps unrealistic heights, something no one typically expects of someone that age.
We smile and shake our heads knowingly when someone like Lindsay Lohan, barely younger than James, crashes and burns and ends up in rehab. If you don’t like your stars of the Hollywood variety, one can spend the day compiling a list of young sports stars that flamed out similarly. The fame, the money, the pressure, it’s hard to handle, especially at that age. But with James, it’s always been different. He not only has to handle the pressure and the fame and money but the barrel full, but he has to continuously exceed the increasingly unrealistic expectations of everyone around him or else be branded a failure.
It’s hard to say where James may end up in the pecking order of great players once his NBA days are done, but for anyone lucky enough to attend Game Three of the Eastern Conference Championship between the Cavaliers and the Detroit Pistons Sunday night, James provided his greatest service yet—he made even the casual among us care about pro basketball again. And whether he’s 22 or 32, matters little. What matters most is that he’s accomplished what seemed impossible and that’s something that can never be taken away.
And don’t think that James’ task is the result one big victory or because of any particular victory, actually. It’s really because James, in the way that he plays the game, has chosen to show anyone willing to invest a few hours of time that NBA basketball, played at the kind of level that only kids like James can play it at, brings the same indescribable thrills, the same giddy highs and the same depressing lows as any sport anywhere.
One of the most frustrating things to basketball fans is the great disparity between the regular NBA season and the playoffs. The intensity, such a key component of the playoffs, is hardly visible during the regular season. Football, with only 16 games, doesn’t have that luxury. Baseball, which seemingly floats along for months, has always had a different rhythm and, frankly, with its pace and its imperfect nature, it’s difficult to detect how hard a player is playing anyway. But NBA basketball, with its constant motion and fans sitting just feet away from the game, is a much easier read. That’s why it’s always been criticized for the seemingly causal attitude of the players during the regular season as compared to the different gear most are able to find once the playoffs hit.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that eight teams in each conference make the NBA playoffs. But with the resurrection of the Cavs under James, Cleveland fans are quickly relearning the real ways of the NBA. For example, what’s most apparent is that the players and coaches, the smart ones anyway, use the regular season as a means to an end--seeding for the playoffs. The Pistons, now playing in their fifth Eastern Conference finals, knew they didn’t need to win 60+ games this year to be considered great; they only needed to win 51 in order to get the top seed. Based on the make-up of that team, it’s apparent they chose to win 53. The extra energy necessary to win 10 more games in order to be compared with Dallas hardly seemed worth it in that context. It’s why Detroit has been one of the top teams in the league for years.
Dallas, which seemed on the precipice of greatness this year, regressed. Perhaps driven by the desires of its owner to be that showcase team, the Mavericks compiled a gaudy 67-15 record regular season record but found itself taking an early exit from the playoffs to a clearly inferior team, victims of an overconfidence borne by its regular season prowess. The same is true with Phoenix. Like Dallas, it ran hard during the regular season, winning 61 games, but was spent by the second round of the playoffs. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the final four teams all had victory totals in the 50s, but it seems unlikely.
It would be too much to suggest that James at his age has gotten the Cavs to the point where they can play to a seed, but it seems like they are on that road nonetheless. One gets the feeling, though, that if the Cavs really had been a threat to take the number one seed from Detroit, the Pistons would have simply won an extra game or two to hold their position.
But even if the Cavs don’t survive this particular series, there is no question that there is a transition taking place in the Eastern Conference and even if you don’t recognize it, there’s no question that the Pistons do. Right now, the Cavs are extracting a heavy price on Detroit again, just as they did last year in the playoffs. Should the Pistons prevail in this series, they aren’t likely to have much left in the tank against the Spurs, who look to prevail against a Utah team that is looking more and more like the Cleveland of the West.
Detroit, for all its experience, is starting to look its age. The average age of the Pistons starting five is almost 31 years of age. The average age for the Cavs starters, on the other hand, is 26. If that doesn’t seem like much, just consider that the average Pistons starter has played well over 400 games more than the average Cavs starter. That’s a lot of running up and down the court and bumping and shoving in the lane. Experience has its place, particularly in the playoffs, but there comes a time where experience is just a euphemism for age, particularly old age and that time may just be creeping up on the Pistons. And, like it or not, those bumps and bruises that healed so quickly at 22 linger much longer at 32. Detroit Pistons forward Rasheed Wallace now takes extended breathers during games. When he wasn’t in the game, forward Chris Webber sat on the bench with an ice pack strapped to his back. Tayshaun Prince, the relative youngster of the bunch, spent a fair amount of time with an ice pack on his leg.
Whether or not the Pistons can muster that last bit of energy to put themselves in the NBA finals, one can almost sense that they know their window is closing and it is James and his teammates who have their fingers on the sill. There was a point in Sunday night’s game where Wallace looked simply exhausted. The James dunk directly over Wallace earlier in the quarter was the precursor, but with 2:33 left in the fourth and the Cavs nursing an 81-76 lead, James had the ball in his hands on the left perimeter. As Wallace stepped out to throw an outstretched hand in his face, James sank a beautiful three-pointer sending the crowd into its 20th frenzy of the night and forcing the Pistons to call time. As Wallace walked toward the bench, he could hardly believe what had just taken place. Shaking his head in disbelief and headed for a quick rest, it was apparent nonetheless that Wallace knew the game was over. There was simply no way that his aging body could match-up to James this late in the game.
There has been much written about James this past week, a lot of which has been negative. Loudmouth commentators, paid to be provocative, called James out for passing to a wide-open Donyell Marshall. Those same commentators complain that James hasn’t taken the team on his back, whatever that means. The James supporters on the other hand have taken to trying to quell the uprising by reminding everyone of James’ tender age. Both sides have their points, but in the end its James’ age that may be the best thing going for him and his Cavaliers team. There is enough experience under the belt that he and his teammates are no longer in awe by the intensity of the playoffs. But there also is enough youth and naiveté that they can push themselves to enter new realms.
If winning a NBA championship process, there is no question that the Cavs are on the right path. They may not be able to get over the hump and into the finals this year, but they are a team, if not the team, on the come. And if that’s too much to ask of a 22-year old, just remember this: next year James will be 23.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The Pass
If the Cavaliers are unable to get past the Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals, Cleveland sports fans add a new phrase to their lexicon, “the pass” as in the pass from LeBron James to a wide-open Donyell Marshall at the end of Game One Monday night. Until Thursday rolls around and Game Two is underway, “the pass” is likely to take on a life of its own, the length of which will greatly depend on the level of disappointment that results from this series.
To recap, as if that was even necessary, the Cavs were down by two with 12 seconds left. James had the ball in his hands and was driving toward the hoop. As the Pistons defense collapsed around him, Marshall was left all alone in the corner with seemingly enough time to order dinner and do a Sudoku puzzle. Rather than put the ball to the hoop against, among others, Rasheed Wallace, who already had about 48 blocks in the game, James instead passed the ball to Marshall. It was one of those moments. Detroit players and fans were holding their breath. The ball was moving in slow motion. As it clanged against the back of the rim and careened from the hoop and the outstretched arms of Sasha Pavlovic, Detroit players and fans could breathe again. Game One was in the books.
The debate on the message boards and talk radio, locally and nationally, are almost singularly focused on that final pass. The position that is now building momentum is that James is, in essence, a coward and not worthy of superstar status. The thinking goes that neither Michael Jordan nor Kobe Bryant would have made that pass and that someone who wants to be known as the King or the Chosen One can only earn those nicknames by taking the shot and finishing the game. It’s how legends are made.
Let’s dispense with the most obvious points first. For the third straight playoff game, the Cavs disappeared in the third quarter. Whatever Head Coach Mike Brown is telling the troops at halftime isn’t working. The team lacks intensity and a game that was in their control was just as suddenly out of their control. There is also the little thing, again, of poor shooting, particularly at the foul line. The Cavs were 11-17, which put them in a huge hole considering the closeness of the game.
But even when these points are disregarded, the rhetoric doesn’t quite hold together. Despite their reputations, Jordan and to a lesser extent Bryant did work hard to get their teammates involved in the game, both during the regular season and in the playoffs. For his career, Bryant averages 4.5 assists per game for the regular season as well as the playoffs. Jordan averaged 5.7 assists during the regular season and 5.7 during the playoffs. Just on that, alone, there is no way to know what either would have done under the same circumstances although one suspects that if the Pistons had left, say, Steve Kerr that open under the same circumstances, the ball would have found its way to him.
In the case of James, he’s always been a different type of player than either of those two anyway. Since high school, he’s had the reputation of someone who is just as content to pass up in favor of a teammate with a better shot as to take the shot himself. That has continued in the pros, which is apparent from the simple fact that he has averaged 6.4 assists per game during the regular season and 8.2 assists per game during the playoffs. But his playoff assists average is hardly the astounding figure it appears to be. While any number of his teammates has stepped up during various playoff games, no one has done it consistently. That has resulted in opposing teams designing a game plan around letting anyone but James beat them. That puts the pressure on those teammates, and, by extension, General Manager Danny Ferry, to make sure that they are the kind of players who can and will make that shot. That just isn’t the case. Not yet, anyway. James hasn’t even had the benefit of a wingman like Steve Kerr, let alone players the caliber of Scottie Pippen or Shaquille O’Neal.
On the surface, that might seem to argue in favor of James taking that shot, but the truth is it underscores why it will always be difficult for James to take that shot. The less players there are to scare the other team, the more players that team can put on James, particularly at crunch time. And until those players step up and assume their roles on a consistent basis, there simply is no reason for opposing teams to do anything different then what they currently are doing to stop the Cavs.
Second, conveniently forgotten in this mix is the fact that James did virtually the same thing last year in the deciding playoff game against the Washington Wizards. With 14 seconds left and the Cavs down by one, Larry Hughes inbounded the pass to James who immediately and expectedly drew the double team. With the clock winding down, James found a wide open (sound familiar?) Damon Jones who hit the jumper with just four seconds left, sending the Cavs to the conference semifinals.
The difference? Jones hit the shot that Marshall didn’t. There was little if any complaining then by anyone that James was a coward or was afraid to take a shot with the game and the series on the line. The recollection is that James proved, once again, to be the consummate team player by finding an open man instead of forcing up a final shot.
But consider the fan reactions that might have been under either of two alternative scenarios. If James takes the shot and misses, fans would have been subjected to countless replays on ESPN and its various iterations, all of which would have drawn a huge circle around the wide-open Marshall, the same guy that scorched the New Jersey Nets the other night from the three-point line. If Marshall had hit the shot, fans would be falling all over themselves to compliment James for once again making the right decision and having enough courage to pass to Marshall with the game on the line.
In other words, it matters little how it all actually played out, except for the fact that, ultimately, the Cavs find themselves down one game against a very good and very experienced Detroit Pistons team.
There is recognition that underlying many of the comments today about James and “the pass” is the frustration of fans that a Cleveland team once again came up short. But misdirecting that frustration and the one person who single handedly rescued this franchise from the scrap heap is not the answer. It starts and ends, ultimately, with the recognition that playoffs are generally won by the better team. The Cavs, for all their accomplishments thus far, are still a very flawed team and until Ferry can find a way to eliminate more of those flaws, the deeper rungs of the playoffs will continue to be a struggle.
To recap, as if that was even necessary, the Cavs were down by two with 12 seconds left. James had the ball in his hands and was driving toward the hoop. As the Pistons defense collapsed around him, Marshall was left all alone in the corner with seemingly enough time to order dinner and do a Sudoku puzzle. Rather than put the ball to the hoop against, among others, Rasheed Wallace, who already had about 48 blocks in the game, James instead passed the ball to Marshall. It was one of those moments. Detroit players and fans were holding their breath. The ball was moving in slow motion. As it clanged against the back of the rim and careened from the hoop and the outstretched arms of Sasha Pavlovic, Detroit players and fans could breathe again. Game One was in the books.
The debate on the message boards and talk radio, locally and nationally, are almost singularly focused on that final pass. The position that is now building momentum is that James is, in essence, a coward and not worthy of superstar status. The thinking goes that neither Michael Jordan nor Kobe Bryant would have made that pass and that someone who wants to be known as the King or the Chosen One can only earn those nicknames by taking the shot and finishing the game. It’s how legends are made.
Let’s dispense with the most obvious points first. For the third straight playoff game, the Cavs disappeared in the third quarter. Whatever Head Coach Mike Brown is telling the troops at halftime isn’t working. The team lacks intensity and a game that was in their control was just as suddenly out of their control. There is also the little thing, again, of poor shooting, particularly at the foul line. The Cavs were 11-17, which put them in a huge hole considering the closeness of the game.
But even when these points are disregarded, the rhetoric doesn’t quite hold together. Despite their reputations, Jordan and to a lesser extent Bryant did work hard to get their teammates involved in the game, both during the regular season and in the playoffs. For his career, Bryant averages 4.5 assists per game for the regular season as well as the playoffs. Jordan averaged 5.7 assists during the regular season and 5.7 during the playoffs. Just on that, alone, there is no way to know what either would have done under the same circumstances although one suspects that if the Pistons had left, say, Steve Kerr that open under the same circumstances, the ball would have found its way to him.
In the case of James, he’s always been a different type of player than either of those two anyway. Since high school, he’s had the reputation of someone who is just as content to pass up in favor of a teammate with a better shot as to take the shot himself. That has continued in the pros, which is apparent from the simple fact that he has averaged 6.4 assists per game during the regular season and 8.2 assists per game during the playoffs. But his playoff assists average is hardly the astounding figure it appears to be. While any number of his teammates has stepped up during various playoff games, no one has done it consistently. That has resulted in opposing teams designing a game plan around letting anyone but James beat them. That puts the pressure on those teammates, and, by extension, General Manager Danny Ferry, to make sure that they are the kind of players who can and will make that shot. That just isn’t the case. Not yet, anyway. James hasn’t even had the benefit of a wingman like Steve Kerr, let alone players the caliber of Scottie Pippen or Shaquille O’Neal.
On the surface, that might seem to argue in favor of James taking that shot, but the truth is it underscores why it will always be difficult for James to take that shot. The less players there are to scare the other team, the more players that team can put on James, particularly at crunch time. And until those players step up and assume their roles on a consistent basis, there simply is no reason for opposing teams to do anything different then what they currently are doing to stop the Cavs.
Second, conveniently forgotten in this mix is the fact that James did virtually the same thing last year in the deciding playoff game against the Washington Wizards. With 14 seconds left and the Cavs down by one, Larry Hughes inbounded the pass to James who immediately and expectedly drew the double team. With the clock winding down, James found a wide open (sound familiar?) Damon Jones who hit the jumper with just four seconds left, sending the Cavs to the conference semifinals.
The difference? Jones hit the shot that Marshall didn’t. There was little if any complaining then by anyone that James was a coward or was afraid to take a shot with the game and the series on the line. The recollection is that James proved, once again, to be the consummate team player by finding an open man instead of forcing up a final shot.
But consider the fan reactions that might have been under either of two alternative scenarios. If James takes the shot and misses, fans would have been subjected to countless replays on ESPN and its various iterations, all of which would have drawn a huge circle around the wide-open Marshall, the same guy that scorched the New Jersey Nets the other night from the three-point line. If Marshall had hit the shot, fans would be falling all over themselves to compliment James for once again making the right decision and having enough courage to pass to Marshall with the game on the line.
In other words, it matters little how it all actually played out, except for the fact that, ultimately, the Cavs find themselves down one game against a very good and very experienced Detroit Pistons team.
There is recognition that underlying many of the comments today about James and “the pass” is the frustration of fans that a Cleveland team once again came up short. But misdirecting that frustration and the one person who single handedly rescued this franchise from the scrap heap is not the answer. It starts and ends, ultimately, with the recognition that playoffs are generally won by the better team. The Cavs, for all their accomplishments thus far, are still a very flawed team and until Ferry can find a way to eliminate more of those flaws, the deeper rungs of the playoffs will continue to be a struggle.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Is It That Simple?
If nothing else, you have to give Indians General Manager Mark Shapiro credit for one thing, he certainly knows his team. Going into the season, Shapiro told anyone who would listen that as shortstop Jhonny Peralta goes, so goes the team. Nearly one-quarter into the season, Shapiro couldn’t possibly be more dead-on.
It hardly seems a coincidence that Sunday, Peralta hit his 10th home run of the season and the Indians won their 10th series of the season. In each case, both Peralta and the Indians are months ahead of where they were last season. Peralta didn’t hit his 10th home run until the 88th game last year while the Indians didn’t win their 10th season until mid-August. Can it really be that simple?
Perhaps it is that simple, but if you scratch below the surface, the resurgence of Peralta may be the most visible sign of the turnaround but it is hardly the only reason or even the most critical.
Start with Paul Byrd. Last season, his first with the Tribe, Byrd was the sort of fringe free agent whose signing hardly raised an eyebrow among the fans. Perhaps it was due to circumstances beyond his control. Remember, the Indians had diverted most everyone’s attention by pursuing higher visibility free agents to anchor the back of the bullpen while alienating the reliable but scary closer, Bob Wickman, leaving him to hang in the balance. In the meantime, the Indians couldn’t quite find enough room in the budget for Bob Howry, a key set-up man, showed virtually no interest in re-signing Kevin Millwood after he stabilized the starting rotation the year before, and let Scott Elarton, an iffy fourth or fifth starter, at best, to leave for the pastures of Kansas City. This allowed Byrd to fly a bit under the radar.
But not completely. Tribe fans were told that Byrd was the kind of player, like Millwood, whose steady presence, if lesser pedigree, would too bring stability to a young starting staff. In particular, Byrd was a control pitcher who kept his teams in the game by consistently throwing strikes. But things didn’t quite work out that way for either Byrd or the team. Byrd was up and down from opening day on. Had he not been the recipient of great offensive support, his record would have been far worse than the mediocre 10-9 it was. Byrd was hit hard and often, particularly early in the season. His vaunted control simply wasn’t there.
But as the season wore on, Byrd slowly got better, just not decidedly so. His ERA, which started off in the 10+ range ended at 4.88. Still even with this improvement this was second highest ERA in his career, the highest he had in his last 10 years, and by almost a full run! Peralta, as an everyday player, may have been a more visible target of fan wrath last season but Byrd was no less ineffective.
This year, Byrd has completely turned it around and is the pitcher Shapiro originally envisioned. After Sunday’s win, in which Byrd went eight innings, he is now 4-1. His ERA is 3.55 and he has pitched at least six innings in every start. His control has been phenomenal. He has walked only three batters all season and two of those came in his first official start against Chicago on April 14, a game the Indians won 4-0. In his two no-decisions, he’s given up only three earned runs. Peralta, as an everyday player, may be a more visible reason for the resurgence of the Indians this year, but Byrd has been no less effective.
Next is Casey Blake. At times this season, Blake has reminded fans of Aaron Boone last year, which isn’t a good thing. Early in the season, Blake simply wasn’t hitting. On April 10, following the fourth game of the year, his average was .312. Eleven days later, he was hitting .188. By May 2nd, his average had climbed to .202. But since then, he’s been on a virtual tear (for him). Following yesterday’s game he’s hitting .255, which is essentially equal to his career total of .260.
Though Blake will never be much of an offensive force for the club, what is interesting is that he is hitting .282 batting in the second slot in the order this year. He’s also hitting .267 since being reinserted as the regular third baseman. In the field, Blake’s defense at third base has been terrific, particularly for a defensively-challenged team. Marte, in 13 games, had committed 4 errors. Blake has appeared at third base in more than twice as many games—32--this year and only has four errors. His fielding average is .945, a significant improvement over Marte’s .857. These statistics are the reason the Indians waited until the last possible minute to bring Marte back from his rehabilitation assignment. Simply, Blake, for all his shortcomings, has stabilized the lineup thus far in a way that Marte, whose upside far exceeds Blake, couldn’t.
Next up is Fausto Carmona. His pitching thus far has been the biggest, most pleasant surprise for Indians fans in years, particularly after the way he imploded in such a spectacular fashion last year when he was used in the closer role following the trade of Wickman. This truly is where luck comes in and is why, for all the statistics Shapiro and his staff may want to crunch, success is so difficult to predict. If not for the early season injury to Cliff Lee, followed closely by the eerily similar injury to Jake Westbrook, Carmona would be toiling at Triple A. But since losing his first start on April 13, in which he didn’t make it out of the fifth inning of a game against the White Sox, Carmona has given up only eight earned runs in six starts, culminating in last week’s brilliant shutout of the Twins. When Westbrook returns, the guess is that Jeremy Sowers, who has been ineffective all season, will find his way back to Buffalo while Carmona finds himself pitching in the All Star game.
And if Carmona doesn’t find his way to the All Star game, C.C. Sabathia certainly will. He’s already 6-1 and has pitched at least six innings in every start. His ERA is 3.65. Though he has two no-decisions, the Indians ultimately prevailed in both of those games, meaning that the Tribe has won eight of the nine games he’s pitched. By almost any pitching measure, Sabathia is among the elite in the league this year. When it’s Sabathia’s turn in the rotation, opposing teams go into the game knowing that they are at a disadvantage. In fact, the only thing Sabathia has yet to solve is how to pitch in Oakland, which isn’t much of a problem given the unbalanced major league schedule, unless the Indians face Oakland in the playoffs. But most importantly, this season, more so than in any other, Sabathia has stepped up his performance and established a presence on the mound that the Indians simply haven’t had in years.
Finally, there is the bullpen which, along with defense, was last season’s Achilles’ heel. Last year, the Indians scored almost 90 more runs than they surrendered. Using the Pythagorean Won/Loss statistic as developed by Bill James and published on Baseball-Reference.com, that should have yielded a recorded of 89-73. As we know, the Tribe instead finished at 78-84 and it wasn’t because of the starting pitching, either. But this season the bullpen has made a remarkable turnaround, although the exploits of Fernando Cabrera of late are a source of some concern. Closer Joe Borowski has performed as good as Shapiro hoped and better than most fans have expected. He has 13 saves in 15 opportunities, even if his few meltdowns have been particularly ugly.
But the closer role wasn’t really the problem when it mattered last year as much as it was middle relief. Recall that early in the season the Wickman simply didn’t see many save opportunities. And when he left, well, the season was effectively over anyway and whatever save opportunities came the Indians way were an adventure, to say the least. But one of the more telling statistics about the relief pitching last year is that its earned run average was .4 more than the starting pitching, which isn’t where you want your relief pitching to be. This year, the bullpen’s ERA is now .4 of a run less, which is nearly a run per game difference over the course of a season. That may not seem like much until you consider two things. First, the Indians starting pitching is even better than last year and second, last season the Indians were 18-26 in one-run games while this season they are 8-4.
The remarkable thing about baseball though is that for all the sum of its parts that it really is, sometimes it really is as simple as one player. Maybe Jhonny Peralta is the bellweather for this franchise for this season as Shapiro suggests. Maybe. But the suspicion is that Shapiro knows better, which is why so much time was spent in the off season reconstructing the bullpen. But however Shapiro wants to sell it, the truth is that for Indians fans, they can take at least take decent comfort in knowing that should Peralta regress to the indifferent player on display last season, the Indians, with even better starting pitching and greatly improved middle relief, are much better positioned than last year to withstand such occurrence.
It hardly seems a coincidence that Sunday, Peralta hit his 10th home run of the season and the Indians won their 10th series of the season. In each case, both Peralta and the Indians are months ahead of where they were last season. Peralta didn’t hit his 10th home run until the 88th game last year while the Indians didn’t win their 10th season until mid-August. Can it really be that simple?
Perhaps it is that simple, but if you scratch below the surface, the resurgence of Peralta may be the most visible sign of the turnaround but it is hardly the only reason or even the most critical.
Start with Paul Byrd. Last season, his first with the Tribe, Byrd was the sort of fringe free agent whose signing hardly raised an eyebrow among the fans. Perhaps it was due to circumstances beyond his control. Remember, the Indians had diverted most everyone’s attention by pursuing higher visibility free agents to anchor the back of the bullpen while alienating the reliable but scary closer, Bob Wickman, leaving him to hang in the balance. In the meantime, the Indians couldn’t quite find enough room in the budget for Bob Howry, a key set-up man, showed virtually no interest in re-signing Kevin Millwood after he stabilized the starting rotation the year before, and let Scott Elarton, an iffy fourth or fifth starter, at best, to leave for the pastures of Kansas City. This allowed Byrd to fly a bit under the radar.
But not completely. Tribe fans were told that Byrd was the kind of player, like Millwood, whose steady presence, if lesser pedigree, would too bring stability to a young starting staff. In particular, Byrd was a control pitcher who kept his teams in the game by consistently throwing strikes. But things didn’t quite work out that way for either Byrd or the team. Byrd was up and down from opening day on. Had he not been the recipient of great offensive support, his record would have been far worse than the mediocre 10-9 it was. Byrd was hit hard and often, particularly early in the season. His vaunted control simply wasn’t there.
But as the season wore on, Byrd slowly got better, just not decidedly so. His ERA, which started off in the 10+ range ended at 4.88. Still even with this improvement this was second highest ERA in his career, the highest he had in his last 10 years, and by almost a full run! Peralta, as an everyday player, may have been a more visible target of fan wrath last season but Byrd was no less ineffective.
This year, Byrd has completely turned it around and is the pitcher Shapiro originally envisioned. After Sunday’s win, in which Byrd went eight innings, he is now 4-1. His ERA is 3.55 and he has pitched at least six innings in every start. His control has been phenomenal. He has walked only three batters all season and two of those came in his first official start against Chicago on April 14, a game the Indians won 4-0. In his two no-decisions, he’s given up only three earned runs. Peralta, as an everyday player, may be a more visible reason for the resurgence of the Indians this year, but Byrd has been no less effective.
Next is Casey Blake. At times this season, Blake has reminded fans of Aaron Boone last year, which isn’t a good thing. Early in the season, Blake simply wasn’t hitting. On April 10, following the fourth game of the year, his average was .312. Eleven days later, he was hitting .188. By May 2nd, his average had climbed to .202. But since then, he’s been on a virtual tear (for him). Following yesterday’s game he’s hitting .255, which is essentially equal to his career total of .260.
Though Blake will never be much of an offensive force for the club, what is interesting is that he is hitting .282 batting in the second slot in the order this year. He’s also hitting .267 since being reinserted as the regular third baseman. In the field, Blake’s defense at third base has been terrific, particularly for a defensively-challenged team. Marte, in 13 games, had committed 4 errors. Blake has appeared at third base in more than twice as many games—32--this year and only has four errors. His fielding average is .945, a significant improvement over Marte’s .857. These statistics are the reason the Indians waited until the last possible minute to bring Marte back from his rehabilitation assignment. Simply, Blake, for all his shortcomings, has stabilized the lineup thus far in a way that Marte, whose upside far exceeds Blake, couldn’t.
Next up is Fausto Carmona. His pitching thus far has been the biggest, most pleasant surprise for Indians fans in years, particularly after the way he imploded in such a spectacular fashion last year when he was used in the closer role following the trade of Wickman. This truly is where luck comes in and is why, for all the statistics Shapiro and his staff may want to crunch, success is so difficult to predict. If not for the early season injury to Cliff Lee, followed closely by the eerily similar injury to Jake Westbrook, Carmona would be toiling at Triple A. But since losing his first start on April 13, in which he didn’t make it out of the fifth inning of a game against the White Sox, Carmona has given up only eight earned runs in six starts, culminating in last week’s brilliant shutout of the Twins. When Westbrook returns, the guess is that Jeremy Sowers, who has been ineffective all season, will find his way back to Buffalo while Carmona finds himself pitching in the All Star game.
And if Carmona doesn’t find his way to the All Star game, C.C. Sabathia certainly will. He’s already 6-1 and has pitched at least six innings in every start. His ERA is 3.65. Though he has two no-decisions, the Indians ultimately prevailed in both of those games, meaning that the Tribe has won eight of the nine games he’s pitched. By almost any pitching measure, Sabathia is among the elite in the league this year. When it’s Sabathia’s turn in the rotation, opposing teams go into the game knowing that they are at a disadvantage. In fact, the only thing Sabathia has yet to solve is how to pitch in Oakland, which isn’t much of a problem given the unbalanced major league schedule, unless the Indians face Oakland in the playoffs. But most importantly, this season, more so than in any other, Sabathia has stepped up his performance and established a presence on the mound that the Indians simply haven’t had in years.
Finally, there is the bullpen which, along with defense, was last season’s Achilles’ heel. Last year, the Indians scored almost 90 more runs than they surrendered. Using the Pythagorean Won/Loss statistic as developed by Bill James and published on Baseball-Reference.com, that should have yielded a recorded of 89-73. As we know, the Tribe instead finished at 78-84 and it wasn’t because of the starting pitching, either. But this season the bullpen has made a remarkable turnaround, although the exploits of Fernando Cabrera of late are a source of some concern. Closer Joe Borowski has performed as good as Shapiro hoped and better than most fans have expected. He has 13 saves in 15 opportunities, even if his few meltdowns have been particularly ugly.
But the closer role wasn’t really the problem when it mattered last year as much as it was middle relief. Recall that early in the season the Wickman simply didn’t see many save opportunities. And when he left, well, the season was effectively over anyway and whatever save opportunities came the Indians way were an adventure, to say the least. But one of the more telling statistics about the relief pitching last year is that its earned run average was .4 more than the starting pitching, which isn’t where you want your relief pitching to be. This year, the bullpen’s ERA is now .4 of a run less, which is nearly a run per game difference over the course of a season. That may not seem like much until you consider two things. First, the Indians starting pitching is even better than last year and second, last season the Indians were 18-26 in one-run games while this season they are 8-4.
The remarkable thing about baseball though is that for all the sum of its parts that it really is, sometimes it really is as simple as one player. Maybe Jhonny Peralta is the bellweather for this franchise for this season as Shapiro suggests. Maybe. But the suspicion is that Shapiro knows better, which is why so much time was spent in the off season reconstructing the bullpen. But however Shapiro wants to sell it, the truth is that for Indians fans, they can take at least take decent comfort in knowing that should Peralta regress to the indifferent player on display last season, the Indians, with even better starting pitching and greatly improved middle relief, are much better positioned than last year to withstand such occurrence.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Curious Generosity
Oh to be young, rich and a bundle of contradictions. In the last week or so, Cleveland Browns wide receiver has spent a great deal of time trying to repair a shaky and deserved reputation as a selfish malcontent. Of course, he spent nearly as much time also doing what he could to keep that reputation in tact.
Last Tuesday, Edwards was the prize of sorts in a contest run by the American Dairy Association and Giant Eagle named “Take Braylon Edwards to School.” As a result, there he was at Nordonia Middle School talking to a rapt young audience about the merits of drinking milk and working hard to achieve your goals. (See story here) While Edwards is no doubt a paid endorser for the sponsors, it still was a nice gesture and according to the report, Edwards was generous with his time while at the school. For someone like Edwards who has earned mostly bad publicity, it was a nice, feel good sort of story.
Edwards also has been generous with his money. According to a story this morning on ESPN and elsewhere, Edwards has pledged $1 million of his own money to fund a college scholarship program for Cleveland city school students who maintain at least a 2.5 grade point average through high school. The official announcement and the remainder of the details are expected to be announced on Wednesday. Again, this is more good publicity for someone who clearly needs to repair his image in this town.
Too bad Edwards’ generosity didn’t stop with his time and his money. Unfortunately for his fellow teammates and even Head Coach Romeo Crennel, Edwards was just as generous with his opinions, none of which could have made any of them particularly happy. In Sunday’s Plain Dealer, Tony Grossi reported on an interview Edwards recently gave to a show called “Movin the Chains” on Sirius radio. Among the pearls tossed by Edwards was his declaration that the Browns needed to go 10-6 in this next season to be considered a success.
Most assuredly, a 10-6 season will be considered a success. In fact, it is difficult to understate the seismic shift that would take place in this town if, indeed, the Browns were to miraculously post a 10-6 record next season. But Edwards feels as though even an 8-8 record, which would be a 100% improvement over last year, shouldn’t be considered a success. He cites an improved offense based on recent acquisitions (Joe Thomas, Kyle Brady, Jamal Lewis, Eric Steinbach) and the schemes of new coordinator Rod Chudzinski as the reason that expectations should be higher.
It’s hard to quibble with Edwards on this score and certainly having any player set the bar as high as possible makes great sense. And while it is as tempting as it is easy to detail for Edwards why the Browns would be lucky and hence extremely successful if they could double last year’s win total, particularly since, if the trends set in Crennel’s tenure hold, the Browns are due exactly two victories, we can leave that alone for now.
But if Edwards has any hope of being one of the reasons why the Browns ever win more than they lose in a single season, he’s simply going to have cease his annoying tendency of throwing teammates under the bus. In that same interview, Edwards was complimentary of the play of his quarterback Charlie Frye in the same way one is complimentary of a woman by saying “for a fat girl, she doesn’t sweat much.”
He admitted that Frye was put into a bad situation last year, which is an extreme understatement. With a wildly ineffective offensive line, an uninspired and ineffective running game, and an offensive coordinator situation that really put the function in dysfunctional, the Browns set the standard for placing quarterbacks in bad situations last season. But Edwards doesn’t necessarily attribute all or even most of Frye’s struggles to the “situation.” Instead, it’s an issue of pedigree.
According to Edwards “I saw some growth, but I still saw a kid that was coming from an Akron or a [Mid-American Conference] school and didn't necessarily have the knowledge or preparation of a Brady Quinn-type of collegiate QB. So I saw a guy that’s still learning, still has a long ways to go.”
You have to admire all that Edwards accomplished with that nugget. Utilizing an economy of words that has never suited him well, Edwards trashed Frye and kissed up to Quinn, even before Quinn has thrown his first pass in a pre-season game. It’s clear that Edwards isn’t a Frye fan and may never have been. But the truth is that Edwards is an Edwards fan first and foremost and he undoubtedly sees it in his self-interest to trumpet the arrival of Quinn if only for the belief that Quinn may be able to get the ball to Edwards more frequently than Frye.
Frye has many flaws, but attacking his pedigree as the basis for them is just more of Edwards talking first and thinking second. Frye is from the University of Akron, which is certainly not in the Big Ten. But it is in the MAC, a conference with a knack of producing NFL-caliber quarterbacks like Chad Pennington, Byron Leftwich and Ben Roethlisberger, among others. So it is not as if Frye was plying his trade at Ohio Weslyan. And while the Big Ten and major independents play, generally, a tougher schedule than any MAC team, their schedules often overlap. Moreover, it’s not as if coming from the Big Ten or Notre Dame offers any greater chance of success in the NFL either. There have been dozens of wash outs at quarterback from virtually every kind of school and conference. Look at the starting quarterbacks in this year’s college National Championship Game. One quarterback, the Heisman Trophy winner, wasn’t drafted until the 5th round and the other went undrafted.
While it may be politically astute for Edwards to build a relationship with Quinn given how Edwards trashed his relationship with Frye for good during last year’s Cincinnati game, Edwards wasn’t nearly as astute when he also tossed a few bricks at Crennel, even if Crennel isn’t in it for the long run, either.
Of Crennel he said “I think Charlie Frye and Romeo Crennel are in similar situations. The reason I say that is they both got thrown in situations where it wasn't fair to assess them at that point, especially Romeo Crennel. You give him a team that is starving at different positions, it’s starving for an identity or even a framework. Now that we have the frame, now that we have what we believe to be our identity, now you can begin to assess this man. This is the year that you can look and assess his game.”
It’s rather nice when one who has accomplished so little himself is putting his head coach under the microscope. Crennel has his faults, many of which have been chronicled here and elsewhere. But the man is not lacking in accomplishments even if what made him accomplished is what prevents him from being a good head coach. Wherever one falls on the Crennel question, this much is certain, a player like Edwards who consistently over promises and under delivers should be the last one to call him out, particularly since Edwards is one of those who will help make or ultimately break Crennel’s career in Cleveland.
This off-season, both General Manager Phil Savage and Owner Randy Lerner have said that Edwards will be fine, that he learned a lot from his several outbursts last season and that he really is a good teammate. Maybe that was said in a preemptive way in order to get Edwards back on the reservation. If it was, then it worked, but only to a degree. The gestures Edwards made in being a good citizen this past week do go a long way to building a better relationship with the fans, something he sorely needs. But his takes on Crennel and Frye clearly underscore that Edwards hasn’t gotten the message completely and likely never will. The indifference toward his teammates that caused Edwards to be late for several meetings and to act like a petulant child for all to see during the Cincinnati game is still on display for all to see or hear, or at least for those with a satellite radio.
In many ways, the fact that Edwards isn’t afraid to speak his mind is a positive because it makes excellent fodder for columns like these. But for the Browns and their fans, that’s really the last thing they need. While this may not be a make or break season for the franchise, it’s close. And with all of the good will coming out of the draft last month, the last thing that anyone needed was for Edwards to continue to drop turds in the punchbowl.
Last Tuesday, Edwards was the prize of sorts in a contest run by the American Dairy Association and Giant Eagle named “Take Braylon Edwards to School.” As a result, there he was at Nordonia Middle School talking to a rapt young audience about the merits of drinking milk and working hard to achieve your goals. (See story here) While Edwards is no doubt a paid endorser for the sponsors, it still was a nice gesture and according to the report, Edwards was generous with his time while at the school. For someone like Edwards who has earned mostly bad publicity, it was a nice, feel good sort of story.
Edwards also has been generous with his money. According to a story this morning on ESPN and elsewhere, Edwards has pledged $1 million of his own money to fund a college scholarship program for Cleveland city school students who maintain at least a 2.5 grade point average through high school. The official announcement and the remainder of the details are expected to be announced on Wednesday. Again, this is more good publicity for someone who clearly needs to repair his image in this town.
Too bad Edwards’ generosity didn’t stop with his time and his money. Unfortunately for his fellow teammates and even Head Coach Romeo Crennel, Edwards was just as generous with his opinions, none of which could have made any of them particularly happy. In Sunday’s Plain Dealer, Tony Grossi reported on an interview Edwards recently gave to a show called “Movin the Chains” on Sirius radio. Among the pearls tossed by Edwards was his declaration that the Browns needed to go 10-6 in this next season to be considered a success.
Most assuredly, a 10-6 season will be considered a success. In fact, it is difficult to understate the seismic shift that would take place in this town if, indeed, the Browns were to miraculously post a 10-6 record next season. But Edwards feels as though even an 8-8 record, which would be a 100% improvement over last year, shouldn’t be considered a success. He cites an improved offense based on recent acquisitions (Joe Thomas, Kyle Brady, Jamal Lewis, Eric Steinbach) and the schemes of new coordinator Rod Chudzinski as the reason that expectations should be higher.
It’s hard to quibble with Edwards on this score and certainly having any player set the bar as high as possible makes great sense. And while it is as tempting as it is easy to detail for Edwards why the Browns would be lucky and hence extremely successful if they could double last year’s win total, particularly since, if the trends set in Crennel’s tenure hold, the Browns are due exactly two victories, we can leave that alone for now.
But if Edwards has any hope of being one of the reasons why the Browns ever win more than they lose in a single season, he’s simply going to have cease his annoying tendency of throwing teammates under the bus. In that same interview, Edwards was complimentary of the play of his quarterback Charlie Frye in the same way one is complimentary of a woman by saying “for a fat girl, she doesn’t sweat much.”
He admitted that Frye was put into a bad situation last year, which is an extreme understatement. With a wildly ineffective offensive line, an uninspired and ineffective running game, and an offensive coordinator situation that really put the function in dysfunctional, the Browns set the standard for placing quarterbacks in bad situations last season. But Edwards doesn’t necessarily attribute all or even most of Frye’s struggles to the “situation.” Instead, it’s an issue of pedigree.
According to Edwards “I saw some growth, but I still saw a kid that was coming from an Akron or a [Mid-American Conference] school and didn't necessarily have the knowledge or preparation of a Brady Quinn-type of collegiate QB. So I saw a guy that’s still learning, still has a long ways to go.”
You have to admire all that Edwards accomplished with that nugget. Utilizing an economy of words that has never suited him well, Edwards trashed Frye and kissed up to Quinn, even before Quinn has thrown his first pass in a pre-season game. It’s clear that Edwards isn’t a Frye fan and may never have been. But the truth is that Edwards is an Edwards fan first and foremost and he undoubtedly sees it in his self-interest to trumpet the arrival of Quinn if only for the belief that Quinn may be able to get the ball to Edwards more frequently than Frye.
Frye has many flaws, but attacking his pedigree as the basis for them is just more of Edwards talking first and thinking second. Frye is from the University of Akron, which is certainly not in the Big Ten. But it is in the MAC, a conference with a knack of producing NFL-caliber quarterbacks like Chad Pennington, Byron Leftwich and Ben Roethlisberger, among others. So it is not as if Frye was plying his trade at Ohio Weslyan. And while the Big Ten and major independents play, generally, a tougher schedule than any MAC team, their schedules often overlap. Moreover, it’s not as if coming from the Big Ten or Notre Dame offers any greater chance of success in the NFL either. There have been dozens of wash outs at quarterback from virtually every kind of school and conference. Look at the starting quarterbacks in this year’s college National Championship Game. One quarterback, the Heisman Trophy winner, wasn’t drafted until the 5th round and the other went undrafted.
While it may be politically astute for Edwards to build a relationship with Quinn given how Edwards trashed his relationship with Frye for good during last year’s Cincinnati game, Edwards wasn’t nearly as astute when he also tossed a few bricks at Crennel, even if Crennel isn’t in it for the long run, either.
Of Crennel he said “I think Charlie Frye and Romeo Crennel are in similar situations. The reason I say that is they both got thrown in situations where it wasn't fair to assess them at that point, especially Romeo Crennel. You give him a team that is starving at different positions, it’s starving for an identity or even a framework. Now that we have the frame, now that we have what we believe to be our identity, now you can begin to assess this man. This is the year that you can look and assess his game.”
It’s rather nice when one who has accomplished so little himself is putting his head coach under the microscope. Crennel has his faults, many of which have been chronicled here and elsewhere. But the man is not lacking in accomplishments even if what made him accomplished is what prevents him from being a good head coach. Wherever one falls on the Crennel question, this much is certain, a player like Edwards who consistently over promises and under delivers should be the last one to call him out, particularly since Edwards is one of those who will help make or ultimately break Crennel’s career in Cleveland.
This off-season, both General Manager Phil Savage and Owner Randy Lerner have said that Edwards will be fine, that he learned a lot from his several outbursts last season and that he really is a good teammate. Maybe that was said in a preemptive way in order to get Edwards back on the reservation. If it was, then it worked, but only to a degree. The gestures Edwards made in being a good citizen this past week do go a long way to building a better relationship with the fans, something he sorely needs. But his takes on Crennel and Frye clearly underscore that Edwards hasn’t gotten the message completely and likely never will. The indifference toward his teammates that caused Edwards to be late for several meetings and to act like a petulant child for all to see during the Cincinnati game is still on display for all to see or hear, or at least for those with a satellite radio.
In many ways, the fact that Edwards isn’t afraid to speak his mind is a positive because it makes excellent fodder for columns like these. But for the Browns and their fans, that’s really the last thing they need. While this may not be a make or break season for the franchise, it’s close. And with all of the good will coming out of the draft last month, the last thing that anyone needed was for Edwards to continue to drop turds in the punchbowl.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Steroids Deniers
Baseball and its union talk a good game of trying to clean up the sport by eliminating the scourge of illegal drugs, but as long as the union is really in charge any chance for real reform is unlikely.
The “news” this morning that the Major League Baseball Players Association has refused a request to cooperate with former Sen. George Mitchell’s ongoing probe into steroids by supplying anonymous medical information is a surprise on the magnitude of Paris Hilton appearing drunk in public. The Players Association has long resisted any attempts to rid the sport of performance enhancing drugs for fear, apparently, that a decline in performance would portend a decline in salaries. As if that could ever be the case. As long as baseball is also populated with idiot owners like George Steinbrenner and impotent commissioners like Bud Selig, salaries will continue to rise to the point where there are only two or three franchises that can afford to field a team.
A point to clarify in all of this is that the Mitchell investigation was not seeking the medical records of any particular player, although most observers could easily compile a list of usual suspects if they had to. Instead, Mitchell and his investigators are trying to determine from the medical information the scope of the problem, which makes the request necessary. The union, led by Donald Fehr, has never much cared about the health of its members and the dangerous side effects that accompany the unauthorized use of performance enhancing drugs, thus they played the conspiracy card in rebuking Mitchell. They claim that “players” fear that Mitchell and his staff will spend time trying to use things like age, height, weight and blood type as a means of specifically identifying the users.
While theoretically possible, no one should believe for a moment that the union really harbors any such concerns. They simply don’t like letting anyone else control the agenda in baseball. But whether the Union wants to admit it or not, it is important to the integrity of the game that there is an understanding of the scope of the problem, something an anonymous review of medical records will help accomplish. Recall that folks like admitted users Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti estimated that more than half of all players used some form of steroids. That raises any number of questions not the least of which are whether those numbers are true and, if so, for how long they have been true.
But baseball fans shouldn’t hold out any hope that the Mitchell probe will contain anything substantive as long as Bud Selig is Commission and the union can rely on veterans like the Indians Roberto Hernandez to carry their water on such issues.
While the “news” that the Union wouldn’t cooperate hardly moved the surprise needle, what Hernandez told Paul Hoynes of the Cleveland Plain Dealer earlier this week on this issue was disappointing or at least should be to Indians fans. Hernandez made it clear that he is no fan of the Mitchell probe and particularly the request for medical records. For a 42-year-old pitcher who has supposedly been there and done that, he came across as incredibly short-sighted and uninformed, at best, misguided at worst.
For example, he told Hoynes “One way or the other you're going to look guilty. What are they going to look for? We do have rights. I'm not saying I have anything to hide. But it seems like a witch hunt. It's starting to give baseball a black mark. Once you think it's dying down, two weeks later here it comes again.”
No one is questioning whether the players have “rights,” for whatever that might mean. But Hernandez needs to take a basic civics lesson. This isn’t a government-sponsored or initiated probe and thus any claims that the inquiry somehow violates some sort of Constitutional right to privacy, as his statement implies, is simply wrong. There are statutes that protect the privacy of an individual’s medical records and no one is suggesting that the statutes don’t apply or shouldn’t be respected. But the request is for anonymous information in order to understand the problem and does not constitute some sort of witch hunt.
Hernandez also said that while he doesn’t condone the use of steroids, they were not “illegal then.” Presumably he’s referring to anytime prior to the new drug testing policy that was put into place only when Congress held a gun to the union’s head, but even in that case he would, of course, be wrong. The unauthorized use of controlled substances like steroids or human growth hormone has always been illegal. Whether major league baseball tested for it may be a whole other matter, but use of the drugs was still illegal unless properly described.
Sadly, more laughable than either of these statements was the suggestion by Hernandez that the Mitchell probe is “starting to give baseball a black mark.” If Hernandez, and any other player for that matter, seriously thinks that it’s the investigation that is giving baseball the black mark and not the underlying use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs by the players, then the disconnect that currently exists between the players and fans will never truly be corrected.
But what is truly amazing about the Hernandez remarks was his refusal to even acknowledge that steroids have ever been a problem. He told Hoynes “Were there players [who used steroids]? Mostly likely. . . . You assume, but no one has any proof.” Really? No proof you say? The admissions of Canseco, Caminiti and even former Indian Jason Grimley aren’t proof? What about the several positive tests of both major and minor league players in just the past two years, none of which have been overturned? Or what about former Mets clubhouse assistant Kirk Radomski who pleaded guilty to illegal steroid distribution who said he handed out steroids to players like they were tic tacs? Even for those whose legal training is limited to watching Boston Legal, this constitutes proof.
In some respects, Hernandez and his views can be counted as those of just another knucklehead ballplayer. But Hernandez is or should be different. He’s been around the game longer then some of his teammates have been alive. General Manager Mark Shapiro brought him in specifically to be that veteran presences, someone to help mentor the younger players. If Hernandez is just towing the party line so as not to run afoul of the union, then he is a coward. On the other hand, if he honestly believes that there’s no proof players used steroids, then it’s fair to ask how can he possibly guide the younger players on this Indians team on the pitfalls to avoid. That’s just what that locker room needs, a steroids denier.
But try as the union and its robotized drones like Hernadez might to divert attention away from the problem, it isn’t going away. Barry Bonds’ chase for Hank Aaron’s home run record only highlights the reasons why. Whenever one of the sacrosanct records in any major sport is being threatened, that is usually time for celebration and debates over the merits of the record holder and the person who threatens it. Certainly becoming the all-time home run king should be one of those times. But Bonds’ conduct has completely removed any joy from those proceedings and replaced them with a series of questions that the players and the Union and Bonds are never likely to answer.
Hernandez may think that asking these questions gives baseball a black eye, but the real problem is the fact that the questions keep coming up. Baseball may have made Hernandez a relatively rich man but the game he loves will never fully eliminate its credibility problem until it eliminates the reasons the questions get asked in the first place. For Hernandez and his brethren, the willing or unwitting participation in perpetuating the problems is ultimately a sin they will have to live with.
The “news” this morning that the Major League Baseball Players Association has refused a request to cooperate with former Sen. George Mitchell’s ongoing probe into steroids by supplying anonymous medical information is a surprise on the magnitude of Paris Hilton appearing drunk in public. The Players Association has long resisted any attempts to rid the sport of performance enhancing drugs for fear, apparently, that a decline in performance would portend a decline in salaries. As if that could ever be the case. As long as baseball is also populated with idiot owners like George Steinbrenner and impotent commissioners like Bud Selig, salaries will continue to rise to the point where there are only two or three franchises that can afford to field a team.
A point to clarify in all of this is that the Mitchell investigation was not seeking the medical records of any particular player, although most observers could easily compile a list of usual suspects if they had to. Instead, Mitchell and his investigators are trying to determine from the medical information the scope of the problem, which makes the request necessary. The union, led by Donald Fehr, has never much cared about the health of its members and the dangerous side effects that accompany the unauthorized use of performance enhancing drugs, thus they played the conspiracy card in rebuking Mitchell. They claim that “players” fear that Mitchell and his staff will spend time trying to use things like age, height, weight and blood type as a means of specifically identifying the users.
While theoretically possible, no one should believe for a moment that the union really harbors any such concerns. They simply don’t like letting anyone else control the agenda in baseball. But whether the Union wants to admit it or not, it is important to the integrity of the game that there is an understanding of the scope of the problem, something an anonymous review of medical records will help accomplish. Recall that folks like admitted users Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti estimated that more than half of all players used some form of steroids. That raises any number of questions not the least of which are whether those numbers are true and, if so, for how long they have been true.
But baseball fans shouldn’t hold out any hope that the Mitchell probe will contain anything substantive as long as Bud Selig is Commission and the union can rely on veterans like the Indians Roberto Hernandez to carry their water on such issues.
While the “news” that the Union wouldn’t cooperate hardly moved the surprise needle, what Hernandez told Paul Hoynes of the Cleveland Plain Dealer earlier this week on this issue was disappointing or at least should be to Indians fans. Hernandez made it clear that he is no fan of the Mitchell probe and particularly the request for medical records. For a 42-year-old pitcher who has supposedly been there and done that, he came across as incredibly short-sighted and uninformed, at best, misguided at worst.
For example, he told Hoynes “One way or the other you're going to look guilty. What are they going to look for? We do have rights. I'm not saying I have anything to hide. But it seems like a witch hunt. It's starting to give baseball a black mark. Once you think it's dying down, two weeks later here it comes again.”
No one is questioning whether the players have “rights,” for whatever that might mean. But Hernandez needs to take a basic civics lesson. This isn’t a government-sponsored or initiated probe and thus any claims that the inquiry somehow violates some sort of Constitutional right to privacy, as his statement implies, is simply wrong. There are statutes that protect the privacy of an individual’s medical records and no one is suggesting that the statutes don’t apply or shouldn’t be respected. But the request is for anonymous information in order to understand the problem and does not constitute some sort of witch hunt.
Hernandez also said that while he doesn’t condone the use of steroids, they were not “illegal then.” Presumably he’s referring to anytime prior to the new drug testing policy that was put into place only when Congress held a gun to the union’s head, but even in that case he would, of course, be wrong. The unauthorized use of controlled substances like steroids or human growth hormone has always been illegal. Whether major league baseball tested for it may be a whole other matter, but use of the drugs was still illegal unless properly described.
Sadly, more laughable than either of these statements was the suggestion by Hernandez that the Mitchell probe is “starting to give baseball a black mark.” If Hernandez, and any other player for that matter, seriously thinks that it’s the investigation that is giving baseball the black mark and not the underlying use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs by the players, then the disconnect that currently exists between the players and fans will never truly be corrected.
But what is truly amazing about the Hernandez remarks was his refusal to even acknowledge that steroids have ever been a problem. He told Hoynes “Were there players [who used steroids]? Mostly likely. . . . You assume, but no one has any proof.” Really? No proof you say? The admissions of Canseco, Caminiti and even former Indian Jason Grimley aren’t proof? What about the several positive tests of both major and minor league players in just the past two years, none of which have been overturned? Or what about former Mets clubhouse assistant Kirk Radomski who pleaded guilty to illegal steroid distribution who said he handed out steroids to players like they were tic tacs? Even for those whose legal training is limited to watching Boston Legal, this constitutes proof.
In some respects, Hernandez and his views can be counted as those of just another knucklehead ballplayer. But Hernandez is or should be different. He’s been around the game longer then some of his teammates have been alive. General Manager Mark Shapiro brought him in specifically to be that veteran presences, someone to help mentor the younger players. If Hernandez is just towing the party line so as not to run afoul of the union, then he is a coward. On the other hand, if he honestly believes that there’s no proof players used steroids, then it’s fair to ask how can he possibly guide the younger players on this Indians team on the pitfalls to avoid. That’s just what that locker room needs, a steroids denier.
But try as the union and its robotized drones like Hernadez might to divert attention away from the problem, it isn’t going away. Barry Bonds’ chase for Hank Aaron’s home run record only highlights the reasons why. Whenever one of the sacrosanct records in any major sport is being threatened, that is usually time for celebration and debates over the merits of the record holder and the person who threatens it. Certainly becoming the all-time home run king should be one of those times. But Bonds’ conduct has completely removed any joy from those proceedings and replaced them with a series of questions that the players and the Union and Bonds are never likely to answer.
Hernandez may think that asking these questions gives baseball a black eye, but the real problem is the fact that the questions keep coming up. Baseball may have made Hernandez a relatively rich man but the game he loves will never fully eliminate its credibility problem until it eliminates the reasons the questions get asked in the first place. For Hernandez and his brethren, the willing or unwitting participation in perpetuating the problems is ultimately a sin they will have to live with.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Economic Suicide
If you want to know what’s wrong with baseball economics, look no further than yesterday’s announcement by the New York Yankees that they’ve signed pitcher Roger Clemens to a prorated $28 million contract for the rest of the season.
Yankee fans, of course, are celebrating this event mostly because their pitching has been decimated by early season injuries and they currently have the fourth-worst ERA in the American League. There is also the perception of Yankee fan that Clemens brings the kind of experience, at age 44, that will turn the struggling team into World Series champions, something they haven’t been since 2000.
Red Sox nation, on the other hand, isn’t exactly celebrating, mostly because in their view they came up short again in trying to lure Clemens back to Fenway Park and the team that cast him aside years ago as being in the twilight of his career. Mostly, though, Red Sox fan is against the move for the simple fact that whatever is good for the Yankees is bad for the Red Sox.
In this case, though, the feelings of the Red Sox and their fans have a much greater and general application. The signing isn’t just bad for the Red Sox, it’s bad for baseball. In underscoring why it’s bad for baseball, one need not even get into any of the many side issues surrounding Clemens. For example, it’s always been odd that with Clemens observers have merely whispered about his possible involvement with performance enhancing drugs while simultaneously screaming from the rooftops about Barry Bonds. Of course some have pointed out how Clemens continues to defy odds and put up unbelievable numbers at an age where his skills should otherwise be diminishing, much like Bonds. Those same folks have also pointed out the unbelievable physical changes Clemens body has undergone over the years, again not unlike Bonds. And, of course, those folks continue to point out that by more or less retiring each season and then unretiring when the season is well under way, Clemens seems to avoid any sort of drug testing during the off-season.
It’s also of no consequence to focus on what the Yankees don’t get for their millions, things like leadership, for example. Not only does Clemens get the late reporting date, he also gets the privilege of not having to even be with the team on days he’s not scheduled to pitch. The only thing the Yankees get is about 18 starts and nothing more.
Both of those scenarios don’t enhance the game either, but whatever Clemens’ alleged involvement with performance enhancing drugs may or may not be or whatever his princess treatment entails, they represent only the secondary reasons why his signing is bad for baseball. The first is that it drives home how completely broken baseball’s economics have become and how that breach threatens the game.
Clemens’ salary may be pro-rated to reflect the fact that he is just now returning, but had he been with the Yankees on day one, his $28 million salary would have been higher than the current payroll of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and not just by a little, but by a full $4 million, or the equivalent of what the Indians are currently paying their closer, Joe Borowski.
Ok, you say, “well, that’s Tampa Bay, what do you expect?” But Clemens’ salary is only $2.5 million less than the entire Florida Marlins payroll, or a bit less than the equivalent of what the Indians are collectively paying Rafael Betancourt, Fernando Cabrera, Fausto Carmona, Tom Mastny, Kelly Shoppach and Jeremy Sowers. In fact, for what the Yankees are paying Clemens, they could have almost half of the entire Indians roster, give or take a Josh Barfield.
One can play that game in all sorts of ways, but perhaps one barometer to really consider is the list of the highest paid players in baseball. Considering the Yankees now have a payroll in excess of $200 million, it won’t surprise anyone that the list of the Top 10 highest paid players is dominated by the Yankees. With his new salary, Clemens will top the list, but barely. Close behind is Jason Giambi at $23.4 million, Alex Rodriguez at $22.7 million and Derek Jeter at $21.6 million. Also in the Top 10 is Andy Pettite, another free agent acquisition of the Yankees in the offseason, who is currently 7th on the list with $16 million. In other words, 5 of the top 10 players in all of baseball reside in the Bronx.
Even more astounding is the fact that the collective salaries of just those five players are almost $112 million. If they were a team unto themselves, they’d have the fourth highest payroll in baseball, which is about 84% higher than the Indians current payroll.
You can cut these payroll statistics all day and every day and still find more and more insidious ways in which the disparity works against the best interests of baseball. That may be amusing to some but to most it is fair to ask: where is Commission Bud Selig in all of this? Why doesn’t he step in to put a stop to the insanity for the good of the game?
It wasn’t all that long ago that baseball actually had a commissioner in Bowie Kuhn who viewed his job in the historical context in which it was created and thus stepped into a similar situation before the wheels fell off. The year was 1976 and Oakland As owner Charlie Finley decided to gut his three-time world champs by selling Vida Blue to the Yankees and Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi to the Red Sox. Kuhn vetoed the deals because he believed that they weren’t in the best interests of the game. Finley threatened legal action but Kuhn didn’t relent. Eventually, Kuhn’s decision was upheld in court. Technically, Selig has the same power with respect to the Clemens deal. There is no chance he’d ever consider acting similarly, even though this is an arguably worse situation.
Of course, there are those who will argue that the Clemens signing is actually good for the game. But pressed for a cogent argument, the best that can be mustered is that every major league sport needs a flagship team, a foil, someone that fans in Boise, Idaho can get passionate about, either way. There is some merit to that and one need only consider the parity in pro football that breeds a good deal of disinterest in the casual fan.
It is also true that there is a certain amount of pleasure and satisfaction in knocking off the school yard bully, if only for a game or perhaps a series. It seems like sublime justice that with all the money spent, the Yankees haven’t won a world series since 2000 But beyond such fleeting feelings of superiority, the simple truth is that if that’s the best argument for the Clemens signing, the validity of the arguments against it are further underscored. Simply put, baseball cannot stand such financial disparity and survive healthy and intact.
Consider the impact this signing will have on the Indians and the pending free agency of C.C. Sabathia. The Indians awarded Sabathia with an above-market contract early in his career in order to retain his services for as long as possible while avoiding the scourge of a salary arbitration process that works only to further alienate a player from his current ballclub. But any goodwill the Indians engendered by such a move will become essentially irrelevant when it comes time to negotiate a new contract. When Indians general manager Mark Shapiro sits down with Sabathia’s representatives, the Clemens contract and all that flows from it will be the elephant in the room, even if they never address it directly.
It may be true that Clemens’ current salary isn’t likely to be the starting point in the negotiations with Sabathia, but it’s naïve to believe that it won’t have an impact. As we like to say, a high tide tends to raise all ships and as other pitchers creep up into Clemens’ salary range, the average price for a top of the rotation pitcher will quickly exceed the Indians reach, if it doesn’t already. Even taking out the Dolans factor in this equation, the bottom line issue revolves around the wisdom of devoting a disparate amount of the team’s payroll to one player.
When teams like the Yankees aren’t forced to live within any kind of budget, whether imposed in the form of a salary cap or through common sense business metrics, it makes it very difficult for every other team operating under a different paradigm. Most teams with deep pocket owners, such as the Texas Rangers, still find it difficult to operate successfully when too much of your payroll is devoted singularly. That’s why the Rangers ultimately dumped Alex Rodriguez on the Yankees, the only team that could really afford the contract. A Rod may have been making the Rangers a more marketable team temporarily, allowing them to sell a few more tickets and jerseys, but ultimately it’s wins that matter and with his salary chewing up so much payroll it was difficult for the Rangers to complete the puzzle. In fact, though Rodriguez is long gone from the Rangers, they are still struggling from the forced neglect to the rest of their team that his outsized contract ultimately required, although they are closer now to putting together a more complete team than at any time when they had Rodriguez.
In the end, if Indians fans don’t realize it yet they soon will. The Yankees signing of Clemens and the ripple effect it will have on pitcher salaries throughout the league makes it much less likely today that Sabathia will be an Indian after next season. If anything, it hastens his exit via a trade. And this is a scenario that will no doubt be repeated throughout most of baseball as teams struggle with their own versions of Sabathia. If Selig really thinks this is all good for the game then baseball has an even bigger problem.
Yankee fans, of course, are celebrating this event mostly because their pitching has been decimated by early season injuries and they currently have the fourth-worst ERA in the American League. There is also the perception of Yankee fan that Clemens brings the kind of experience, at age 44, that will turn the struggling team into World Series champions, something they haven’t been since 2000.
Red Sox nation, on the other hand, isn’t exactly celebrating, mostly because in their view they came up short again in trying to lure Clemens back to Fenway Park and the team that cast him aside years ago as being in the twilight of his career. Mostly, though, Red Sox fan is against the move for the simple fact that whatever is good for the Yankees is bad for the Red Sox.
In this case, though, the feelings of the Red Sox and their fans have a much greater and general application. The signing isn’t just bad for the Red Sox, it’s bad for baseball. In underscoring why it’s bad for baseball, one need not even get into any of the many side issues surrounding Clemens. For example, it’s always been odd that with Clemens observers have merely whispered about his possible involvement with performance enhancing drugs while simultaneously screaming from the rooftops about Barry Bonds. Of course some have pointed out how Clemens continues to defy odds and put up unbelievable numbers at an age where his skills should otherwise be diminishing, much like Bonds. Those same folks have also pointed out the unbelievable physical changes Clemens body has undergone over the years, again not unlike Bonds. And, of course, those folks continue to point out that by more or less retiring each season and then unretiring when the season is well under way, Clemens seems to avoid any sort of drug testing during the off-season.
It’s also of no consequence to focus on what the Yankees don’t get for their millions, things like leadership, for example. Not only does Clemens get the late reporting date, he also gets the privilege of not having to even be with the team on days he’s not scheduled to pitch. The only thing the Yankees get is about 18 starts and nothing more.
Both of those scenarios don’t enhance the game either, but whatever Clemens’ alleged involvement with performance enhancing drugs may or may not be or whatever his princess treatment entails, they represent only the secondary reasons why his signing is bad for baseball. The first is that it drives home how completely broken baseball’s economics have become and how that breach threatens the game.
Clemens’ salary may be pro-rated to reflect the fact that he is just now returning, but had he been with the Yankees on day one, his $28 million salary would have been higher than the current payroll of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and not just by a little, but by a full $4 million, or the equivalent of what the Indians are currently paying their closer, Joe Borowski.
Ok, you say, “well, that’s Tampa Bay, what do you expect?” But Clemens’ salary is only $2.5 million less than the entire Florida Marlins payroll, or a bit less than the equivalent of what the Indians are collectively paying Rafael Betancourt, Fernando Cabrera, Fausto Carmona, Tom Mastny, Kelly Shoppach and Jeremy Sowers. In fact, for what the Yankees are paying Clemens, they could have almost half of the entire Indians roster, give or take a Josh Barfield.
One can play that game in all sorts of ways, but perhaps one barometer to really consider is the list of the highest paid players in baseball. Considering the Yankees now have a payroll in excess of $200 million, it won’t surprise anyone that the list of the Top 10 highest paid players is dominated by the Yankees. With his new salary, Clemens will top the list, but barely. Close behind is Jason Giambi at $23.4 million, Alex Rodriguez at $22.7 million and Derek Jeter at $21.6 million. Also in the Top 10 is Andy Pettite, another free agent acquisition of the Yankees in the offseason, who is currently 7th on the list with $16 million. In other words, 5 of the top 10 players in all of baseball reside in the Bronx.
Even more astounding is the fact that the collective salaries of just those five players are almost $112 million. If they were a team unto themselves, they’d have the fourth highest payroll in baseball, which is about 84% higher than the Indians current payroll.
You can cut these payroll statistics all day and every day and still find more and more insidious ways in which the disparity works against the best interests of baseball. That may be amusing to some but to most it is fair to ask: where is Commission Bud Selig in all of this? Why doesn’t he step in to put a stop to the insanity for the good of the game?
It wasn’t all that long ago that baseball actually had a commissioner in Bowie Kuhn who viewed his job in the historical context in which it was created and thus stepped into a similar situation before the wheels fell off. The year was 1976 and Oakland As owner Charlie Finley decided to gut his three-time world champs by selling Vida Blue to the Yankees and Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi to the Red Sox. Kuhn vetoed the deals because he believed that they weren’t in the best interests of the game. Finley threatened legal action but Kuhn didn’t relent. Eventually, Kuhn’s decision was upheld in court. Technically, Selig has the same power with respect to the Clemens deal. There is no chance he’d ever consider acting similarly, even though this is an arguably worse situation.
Of course, there are those who will argue that the Clemens signing is actually good for the game. But pressed for a cogent argument, the best that can be mustered is that every major league sport needs a flagship team, a foil, someone that fans in Boise, Idaho can get passionate about, either way. There is some merit to that and one need only consider the parity in pro football that breeds a good deal of disinterest in the casual fan.
It is also true that there is a certain amount of pleasure and satisfaction in knocking off the school yard bully, if only for a game or perhaps a series. It seems like sublime justice that with all the money spent, the Yankees haven’t won a world series since 2000 But beyond such fleeting feelings of superiority, the simple truth is that if that’s the best argument for the Clemens signing, the validity of the arguments against it are further underscored. Simply put, baseball cannot stand such financial disparity and survive healthy and intact.
Consider the impact this signing will have on the Indians and the pending free agency of C.C. Sabathia. The Indians awarded Sabathia with an above-market contract early in his career in order to retain his services for as long as possible while avoiding the scourge of a salary arbitration process that works only to further alienate a player from his current ballclub. But any goodwill the Indians engendered by such a move will become essentially irrelevant when it comes time to negotiate a new contract. When Indians general manager Mark Shapiro sits down with Sabathia’s representatives, the Clemens contract and all that flows from it will be the elephant in the room, even if they never address it directly.
It may be true that Clemens’ current salary isn’t likely to be the starting point in the negotiations with Sabathia, but it’s naïve to believe that it won’t have an impact. As we like to say, a high tide tends to raise all ships and as other pitchers creep up into Clemens’ salary range, the average price for a top of the rotation pitcher will quickly exceed the Indians reach, if it doesn’t already. Even taking out the Dolans factor in this equation, the bottom line issue revolves around the wisdom of devoting a disparate amount of the team’s payroll to one player.
When teams like the Yankees aren’t forced to live within any kind of budget, whether imposed in the form of a salary cap or through common sense business metrics, it makes it very difficult for every other team operating under a different paradigm. Most teams with deep pocket owners, such as the Texas Rangers, still find it difficult to operate successfully when too much of your payroll is devoted singularly. That’s why the Rangers ultimately dumped Alex Rodriguez on the Yankees, the only team that could really afford the contract. A Rod may have been making the Rangers a more marketable team temporarily, allowing them to sell a few more tickets and jerseys, but ultimately it’s wins that matter and with his salary chewing up so much payroll it was difficult for the Rangers to complete the puzzle. In fact, though Rodriguez is long gone from the Rangers, they are still struggling from the forced neglect to the rest of their team that his outsized contract ultimately required, although they are closer now to putting together a more complete team than at any time when they had Rodriguez.
In the end, if Indians fans don’t realize it yet they soon will. The Yankees signing of Clemens and the ripple effect it will have on pitcher salaries throughout the league makes it much less likely today that Sabathia will be an Indian after next season. If anything, it hastens his exit via a trade. And this is a scenario that will no doubt be repeated throughout most of baseball as teams struggle with their own versions of Sabathia. If Selig really thinks this is all good for the game then baseball has an even bigger problem.
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