As the early season losses pile up for the Cleveland Indians like iTunes charges on your credit card, manager Eric Wedge is sounding more and more like former Cleveland Browns’ head coach Romeo Crennel. As he watches one leak after another spring in the good ship Tribe, Wedge is starting to take on the demeanor of someone who knows not every leak can be patched but he’s baling as fast as he can anyway. Kind of like Crennel.
Wedge doesn’t skirt the fact that his team is losing and finding new ways to do it each game. But the silver linings he sees are the same Crennel saw even as Crennel was losing his grip on the only head coaching job he ever had, kind of like Wedge.
“Our effort is good, our attitude is good, our energy level is good, but we just have to start performing,” Wedge told the media after Monday night’s loss. It sounded like a Crennel press conference on Monday morning after a Pittsburgh beatdown. And just like a Crennel quote, it would be easy to break down Wedge’s assessment and say, somewhat snidely but nevertheless truthfully, “well, they did just come out of spring training, didn’t they? If the attitude and effort aren’t there now, when would they be?”
Maybe this is just what happens when a team with lofty expectations can’t live up to them. You look for the little bit of sunlight in the storm clouds. But despite how much Wedge is sounding and acting like Crennel, there are major differences.
Wedge is the kind of coach the Browns should have looked for instead of hiring Crennel. Wedge was a young up and comer, clearly in tune with the changing nature of the game and was brought in specifically to grow with the team. That he did. Crennel was the lifetime assistant whom no other team but the Browns ever envisioned as a head coach. They were right.
Where Crennel never seemed to have a firm handle on any aspect of his job, Wedge is supremely confident and clearly in charge. The kinds of players he has to coach have far less character issues than what former general manager Phil Savage gave Crennel, but Wedge has nonetheless kept the lid on any insurrections. Discipline, except at the plate of course, doesn’t seem to be an issue with the Tribe.
While both men clearly command the respect of the players, Crennel’s team could never quite translate that respect into performance. With Wedge, the jury is still out. There have been times when Wedge seems to have wrung every last bit of potential out of some of his players. At other times, the converse seems to be the case. That may be due to the subtle nature of the game and the very thin line between success and failure, but there also is a sense that at times the players simply tune Wedge out, content to follow their own path.
Some have suggested that last season was Wedge’s real test as a manager. He managed to make a little chicken salad out of the chicken droppings he had to work with. There is some truth in that and that will buy him plenty of goodwill with the front office for now. But if the early season is any indication then this season is really shaping up as a true test. The team isn’t wracked with injuries, just top to bottom ineffectiveness. The season isn’t close to getting away from them yet, but any time would be a good time for this team to start finding its groove. On a team with no real leaders, it’s going to be up to Wedge to be the big toe. His ability to avoid stubbing it is going to be directly related to his ability to keep his job.
**
Here’s how I know there is too much sports programming on television. On Tuesday night ESPN devoted two full hours to revealing the 2009-2010 NFL schedules. Outside of someone who is bedridden in front of a television that only gets one channel, there should be no one alive who claims he watched that entire broadcast.
To a certain extent, and then just barely, I can understand making the NFL draft a broadcast event. But the NFL has been taking its so-called branding to an extreme under the misguided assumption that the fans’ appetites for anything NFL is insatiable. It’s the reason, for example, the NFL continues to cling to the theory that some day enough fans will storm the offices of Time Warner or Comcast demanding that the NFL Network be on basic cable. It hasn’t happened yet and it isn’t going to happen ever. Until the NFL gets a bit more realistic on the relative lack of value of its in-house network and/or provides more than late season meaningless games as its showcase programming, most fans will continue to live rich and full lives not having to contemplate that there actually is a channel out there in the ether broadcasting another NFL roundtable on a Thursday night where the relative merits of the three-point stance are debated for two hours.
The Browns got their final verdict on their schedule Wednesday and the one thing that stands out most is that the league seems intent on embarrassing the Browns for its misplaced faith in them last season. By granting the team two prime time appearances, one each against the Ravens and the Steelers, the NFL picked the two teams on the Browns’ schedule most likely to publicly take them to the woodshed. For good measure, the NFL made sure they were late season games, knowing that by then the Browns will have their usual 20 or so players on injured reserve while both the Ravens and Steelers buckle down for the final push toward their battle for the AFC North title.
If you see a scheduling perk in the fact that the Browns finish the season with two home games, good for you. I hope you’re enjoying that perk at a half-filled stadium freezing under a blanket while a steady 20 MPH wind, gusting to 45 MPH, whips across your cheeks like a worn razor blade.
There are some other interesting side notes to the schedule. Three times during the season the Browns have consecutive away games and each time the second of those two games is against a divisional rival. The bye week comes exactly in the middle of the schedule. There is a two-week stretch where the Browns play the Lions and the Bengals, although both on the road. That’s a real chance to build a modest win streak as it follows the Monday night home game against the Ravens. Finally, there was a time when playing in January meant your team was heading to the playoffs. Now it just means that the regular season is too long as the Browns will again play in January irrespective of their actual record. The regular season doesn’t end until January 3rd.
**
There are a number of cautionary tales in the world of sports. The death of Anaheim Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was senseless and sad. The legal problems facing Donte Stallworth are crushing and tragic. But for a truly pathetic story, consider Travis Henry.
Earlier this week Henry signed a plea agreement admitting to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in exchange for other charges being dropped. It’s a plea agreement that should put Henry, the former running back for the Denver Broncos, behind bars for a minimum of 10 years.
But in some ways, prison, no matter how harsh the terms, may be a vacation of sorts from Henry’s main problems. According to a story that appeared last month in the New York Times, Henry is financially destitute, crushed by the weight of having to support 9 children by 9 different mothers. Henry makes Shawn Kemp look positively responsible by comparison.
Henry’s seed-spreading ways began in high school when he fathered his first child. He impregnated two more women while at the University of Tennessee and another six while a professional, one apparently for each full season he spent in the league. Not surprisingly, Henry played the victim card with respect to at least four of the pregnancies, saying, in essence that he was duped by evil women.
All told, Henry is responsible for around $170,000 a year in child support payments. In context, that doesn’t strike me as all that much, especially considering the millions he received and apparently completely squandered. In 2007 he signed a $25 million, 5-year contract. It wasn’t all guaranteed, certainly, but the multi-million dollar signing bonus he did get is long gone. Henry says he’s now broke.
Adding to the financial straits, of course, is the recent plea deal which will indebt him to the federal government for another $4 million. The chance that anyone Henry owes will see another dime is nil.
The innocent victims in all this are the 9 children, of course. In living large and acting small, Henry perpetuated enough stereotypes to keep sociologists up to their ears in spiral notebooks for many years to come. But what this mostly reveals is why having players with character and integrity is so critical to one’s team.
Henry had more talent than most. He ran for 1,200 yards in three separate seasons. But he’s broke, out of the league and on his way to prison because there is no content to his character. In turn, the Broncos and the teammates that relied on him, not to mention the fans that buy the season tickets, end up having to deal with a problem they didn’t create. Poor Mike Shanahan. No wonder he lost his job.
**
I come back to these character issues from time to time because it reminds me that the challenge for teams like the Browns is that the need to win can seem so overwhelming at times that taking short cuts to accomplish the goal seem necessary.
When talking about character, receiver Braylon Edwards naturally gets implicated. He’s certainly not a criminal like Henry. Far from it, in fact. His legal troubles have been minimal. On the other hand, he’s been active in the community and has donated large sums of money to those in need, both here and in Michigan. On that level, the league needs more people like Edwards, not less.
But where Edwards lacks character is in his approach to football. He displays all the drive and initiative that deadbeat kid you went to high school with who still hangs out at the CVS. The difference, though, is that Edward’s lackadaisical approach is the polar end opposite of his expectations. By virtue of his God-given speed and occasional flash of brilliance, Edwards possesses an outsized entitlement attitude that doesn’t come close to matching what he’s either accomplished or deserves. On that level, if the Browns were to part with Edwards it would be the ultimate “great trade, who’d we get?” transaction.
If the Browns do trade Edwards, and rumors have him heading to the New York Giants for former University of Akron star Domenick Hixon and some draft choices, undoubtedly the Giants will sell it to their fans with the disclaimer that all Edwards needs is a change of scenery. Hardly. All he needs is a healthy dose of professionalism, something a trade isn’t going to create. They’d have a far easier time selling their fans on Anquan Boldin.
That’s the real challenge head coach Eric Mangini has when it comes to Edwards. Can he and his coaching staff (by the way, Mangini has yet to hire a wide receivers coach, so there is that) find a way to reach Edwards when those before him have not? Crennel certainly failed but so too did a boat load of veterans who reached out to Edwards and tried to school him to no avail. Maybe Mangini and company can, but with all the other problems on their plate is this one they want to take on, especially since Edwards is in the last season of his contract anyway and probably wouldn’t resign under any circumstances? The question basically answers itself. Look for the trade to happen sooner rather than later. Who’d we get? Does it matter?
**
With the Indians stumbling their way through such heavyweights as Texas, Toronto and Kansas City, this week’s question to ponder: How much would you have wagered that the Indians would have had a worse record after 8 games than the 2008 Browns?
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Sentimental Journey
Who knew that Manny Ramirez was such a sentimental fool? Or Jim Thome, for that matter? But fools they are just the same.
According to a report in Monday’s USA Today, Ramirez and Thome were talking recently and were getting positively misty-eyed about the possibility of eventually making their final curtain call as ballplayers with the team that nurtured them through thick and thin, like Broadway Danny Rose, only to see them eventually turn their backs on them when the light shined the brightest.
Ramirez and Thome were two key players most responsible for the resurgence of the Indians in the mid-1990s. What made them both so beloved is that they grew up in the Indians’ farm system and went on to establish their reputations with the Indians. Playing together from 1993-2000, collectively the two had 441 home runs and 1485 RBI. During that stretch, the Indians were 703-525 and were in the playoffs 6 times, going to two World Series. An impressive run even if it didn’t pay off in the ultimate prize.
But if the Cleveland fans benefited from this golden age, it’s not as if the two players didn’t realize there was something in it for them. While each professed their great appreciation for Cleveland, and still do, it was hardly enough to convince them to give Cleveland a hometown discount of sorts in order to ensure that each would be here for the remainder of their careers.
Maybe it’s awfully naïve anyway to think that a hometown discount was coming from either player or even that it should. What the average fan doesn’t appreciate is the enormous pressure that each player (and those similarly situated) is under from both their colleagues and the players union to get that last dollar, the hell with loyalty. It’s the essence of free agency and the Marvin Miller Doctrine: the high tide raises all ships.
If players like Thome or Ramirez turn down precedent setting deals then, the theory goes, the rest of the players suffer from depressed salaries as well. As an economic theory, it has some merit. Setting salaries is at its core an exercise of comparisons and the lower the top, the lower the middle and the lower the bottom.
But it’s just these kinds of economic theories that are the reason the sport is in such financial and competitive straits in the first place. I don’t need to rehash the same rant, but the truth is that only certain teams can afford to pay top dollar and Cleveland isn’t one of them. And when only certain teams can sustain certain payrolls, the health of the league suffers.
Ah, but the health of the league has never once been a concern for the players union, which is why that never factored into their coercion of Ramirez, Thome and others. It can be argued that when Miller was in charge, the league owners needed to be reigned in. Miller fought against the reserve clause because it basically treated players like indentured servants. In that sense, Miller’s moves were for the benefit of the league overall. Free agency, in and of itself, is probably better for a sports league than not.
But the overall good of the sport was hardly Miller’s chief concern. As he said on many occasions, he represented the players, not the league and not the fans. If in making things better for his clients it had the unintended consequence of also making things better for the sport and its fans that was just a happy coincidence. Miller could have cared less.
Donald Fehr and the rest of the power brokers at the players union are worthy heirs to Miller’s legacy. The next time they do something for the good of the league, let alone the fans, will be the first time. Thus, the fact that they pushed players like Ramirez and Thome to turn their backs on a mid-market team like Cleveland for the benefit of the players overall plays into this dynamic.
But that doesn’t mean that Ramirez and Thome had to act like lemmings at the behest of the union. There was a middle ground in each case that would have greatly enriched each of them millions of times over without having to turn their back on the Cleveland fans. It just doesn’t happen to be a route either chose. It’s understandable, certainly, and personally I don’t hold any animosity to either for choosing the path they did.
Having chosen that path, now’s not the time to express regrets, mild though they may be. Both seem to be looking back at their Cleveland years with the kind of twinkle of some Grandpa Jones rocking on the front porch telling stories about when he was young. If it doesn’t strike you as more of a backhanded compliment than anything else, your ability to be offended has been blunted by the years of abuse that comes with being an Indians fan.
What’s really happening in both cases is that Ramirez and Thome, like Ken Griffey, Jr., are nearing the end of stellar careers. With that they know the days of multi-year contracts at $15-20 million per season are a thing of the past. Ramirez, for all his accomplishments last season, struggled to get just a two-year deal out of the Dodgers. In doing so, he took less pay than he wanted but did get an opt-out clause after this year. More importantly, the Dodgers were the only bidders. That might be due to a massive miscalculation on the part of his agents, but it’s also due in no small part to his age, 37, and the state of the economy. Thome is in his final year of his contract that took him from Cleveland to Philadelphia and then to the White Sox. He may come across as a combination of Woody Boyd and Lil Abner, but even Thome can see what’s happened to Ramirez and the free agent market when it comes to aging veterans.
The sentimentality that makes them wistful for Cleveland will no doubt get some fans anxious for a return to those glory years. Who wouldn’t want to see Ramirez and that sweet swing back in Cleveland? Well, for one, me. I’ve long since come to grips with the reality that in order to maintain your sanity when it comes to sport, love the game not the players. Both will break your heart, but the players will do it deliberately. That’s the difference.
The other thing to remember in all of this is that the reason both can now talk openly about coming to Cleveland is that the union doesn’t much care about them anymore. With their prime earning years behind them, the union’s interest in maintaining salary integrity (a nice euphuism for pushing for exorbitant salaries) is significantly less. It’s a nice bit of freedom for Ramirez and Thome but it’s also a freedom that comes too late to really benefit Cleveland fans. I wanted Ramirez and Thome during their primes, not the ones playing out the string.
If you want to get sentimental about a player, what about Omar Vizquel? He left Cleveland because he was forced to. General manager Mark Shapiro had no interest in signing him to a 3-year deal like the San Francisco Giants did. Shapiro was thinking about the development of Peralta and his upside. It was an understandable business decision.
But Vizquel had two good years in San Francisco and a third when he was hurt. It’s what happens when you get older. But Vizquel is still viable in some role, which is why the Texas Rangers signed him to be a bench player and part time sensi to the younger players on the roster.
It’s interesting that only the Texas Rangers bothered to sign this future hall of famer. Maybe he doesn’t fit in with the Indians are currently constructed, but it’s hard for me to imagine the downside of him doing for Cleveland what he’s doing for Texas. Jhonny Peralta and Asdrubal Cabrera and a host of others at the major and minor league levels can do for a little Vizquel in their lives. Vizquel, come back anytime. Stay as long as you’d like.
As Thome said to the USA Today, baseball is a funny sport and anything can happen. Indeed, it’s as likely as not that either or both of Ramirez and Thome will make a final stand in Cleveland. And if they do, they’ll probably be warmly embraced, like a favorite son returning home. That may be a nice coda to their careers, but then again every Cleveland fan has a bit of battered spouse syndrome coursing in their veins. Just once it would be nice for the Cleveland fans to realize that they always deserved better than having to be constantly reminded of why their good players left in the first place.
According to a report in Monday’s USA Today, Ramirez and Thome were talking recently and were getting positively misty-eyed about the possibility of eventually making their final curtain call as ballplayers with the team that nurtured them through thick and thin, like Broadway Danny Rose, only to see them eventually turn their backs on them when the light shined the brightest.
Ramirez and Thome were two key players most responsible for the resurgence of the Indians in the mid-1990s. What made them both so beloved is that they grew up in the Indians’ farm system and went on to establish their reputations with the Indians. Playing together from 1993-2000, collectively the two had 441 home runs and 1485 RBI. During that stretch, the Indians were 703-525 and were in the playoffs 6 times, going to two World Series. An impressive run even if it didn’t pay off in the ultimate prize.
But if the Cleveland fans benefited from this golden age, it’s not as if the two players didn’t realize there was something in it for them. While each professed their great appreciation for Cleveland, and still do, it was hardly enough to convince them to give Cleveland a hometown discount of sorts in order to ensure that each would be here for the remainder of their careers.
Maybe it’s awfully naïve anyway to think that a hometown discount was coming from either player or even that it should. What the average fan doesn’t appreciate is the enormous pressure that each player (and those similarly situated) is under from both their colleagues and the players union to get that last dollar, the hell with loyalty. It’s the essence of free agency and the Marvin Miller Doctrine: the high tide raises all ships.
If players like Thome or Ramirez turn down precedent setting deals then, the theory goes, the rest of the players suffer from depressed salaries as well. As an economic theory, it has some merit. Setting salaries is at its core an exercise of comparisons and the lower the top, the lower the middle and the lower the bottom.
But it’s just these kinds of economic theories that are the reason the sport is in such financial and competitive straits in the first place. I don’t need to rehash the same rant, but the truth is that only certain teams can afford to pay top dollar and Cleveland isn’t one of them. And when only certain teams can sustain certain payrolls, the health of the league suffers.
Ah, but the health of the league has never once been a concern for the players union, which is why that never factored into their coercion of Ramirez, Thome and others. It can be argued that when Miller was in charge, the league owners needed to be reigned in. Miller fought against the reserve clause because it basically treated players like indentured servants. In that sense, Miller’s moves were for the benefit of the league overall. Free agency, in and of itself, is probably better for a sports league than not.
But the overall good of the sport was hardly Miller’s chief concern. As he said on many occasions, he represented the players, not the league and not the fans. If in making things better for his clients it had the unintended consequence of also making things better for the sport and its fans that was just a happy coincidence. Miller could have cared less.
Donald Fehr and the rest of the power brokers at the players union are worthy heirs to Miller’s legacy. The next time they do something for the good of the league, let alone the fans, will be the first time. Thus, the fact that they pushed players like Ramirez and Thome to turn their backs on a mid-market team like Cleveland for the benefit of the players overall plays into this dynamic.
But that doesn’t mean that Ramirez and Thome had to act like lemmings at the behest of the union. There was a middle ground in each case that would have greatly enriched each of them millions of times over without having to turn their back on the Cleveland fans. It just doesn’t happen to be a route either chose. It’s understandable, certainly, and personally I don’t hold any animosity to either for choosing the path they did.
Having chosen that path, now’s not the time to express regrets, mild though they may be. Both seem to be looking back at their Cleveland years with the kind of twinkle of some Grandpa Jones rocking on the front porch telling stories about when he was young. If it doesn’t strike you as more of a backhanded compliment than anything else, your ability to be offended has been blunted by the years of abuse that comes with being an Indians fan.
What’s really happening in both cases is that Ramirez and Thome, like Ken Griffey, Jr., are nearing the end of stellar careers. With that they know the days of multi-year contracts at $15-20 million per season are a thing of the past. Ramirez, for all his accomplishments last season, struggled to get just a two-year deal out of the Dodgers. In doing so, he took less pay than he wanted but did get an opt-out clause after this year. More importantly, the Dodgers were the only bidders. That might be due to a massive miscalculation on the part of his agents, but it’s also due in no small part to his age, 37, and the state of the economy. Thome is in his final year of his contract that took him from Cleveland to Philadelphia and then to the White Sox. He may come across as a combination of Woody Boyd and Lil Abner, but even Thome can see what’s happened to Ramirez and the free agent market when it comes to aging veterans.
The sentimentality that makes them wistful for Cleveland will no doubt get some fans anxious for a return to those glory years. Who wouldn’t want to see Ramirez and that sweet swing back in Cleveland? Well, for one, me. I’ve long since come to grips with the reality that in order to maintain your sanity when it comes to sport, love the game not the players. Both will break your heart, but the players will do it deliberately. That’s the difference.
The other thing to remember in all of this is that the reason both can now talk openly about coming to Cleveland is that the union doesn’t much care about them anymore. With their prime earning years behind them, the union’s interest in maintaining salary integrity (a nice euphuism for pushing for exorbitant salaries) is significantly less. It’s a nice bit of freedom for Ramirez and Thome but it’s also a freedom that comes too late to really benefit Cleveland fans. I wanted Ramirez and Thome during their primes, not the ones playing out the string.
If you want to get sentimental about a player, what about Omar Vizquel? He left Cleveland because he was forced to. General manager Mark Shapiro had no interest in signing him to a 3-year deal like the San Francisco Giants did. Shapiro was thinking about the development of Peralta and his upside. It was an understandable business decision.
But Vizquel had two good years in San Francisco and a third when he was hurt. It’s what happens when you get older. But Vizquel is still viable in some role, which is why the Texas Rangers signed him to be a bench player and part time sensi to the younger players on the roster.
It’s interesting that only the Texas Rangers bothered to sign this future hall of famer. Maybe he doesn’t fit in with the Indians are currently constructed, but it’s hard for me to imagine the downside of him doing for Cleveland what he’s doing for Texas. Jhonny Peralta and Asdrubal Cabrera and a host of others at the major and minor league levels can do for a little Vizquel in their lives. Vizquel, come back anytime. Stay as long as you’d like.
As Thome said to the USA Today, baseball is a funny sport and anything can happen. Indeed, it’s as likely as not that either or both of Ramirez and Thome will make a final stand in Cleveland. And if they do, they’ll probably be warmly embraced, like a favorite son returning home. That may be a nice coda to their careers, but then again every Cleveland fan has a bit of battered spouse syndrome coursing in their veins. Just once it would be nice for the Cleveland fans to realize that they always deserved better than having to be constantly reminded of why their good players left in the first place.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Is It Still Early?
There’s nothing like a 5-game losing streak at the start of the season to get the blood flowing early. With the Cleveland Indians threatening to drop to 0-6 and thus record the worst start since, I think, the New York Nine’s abysmal showing against the their cross-town rivals, the New York Knickerbockers in 1846, the Eric Wedge haters have gotten an unexpected early boost to their prospects. Generally, it’s not until mid-May when the Wedge haters hit their stride.
Wedge’s sins to date apparently range from not shaving enough on a consistent basis to leaving Cliff Lee in longer than he deserved in the season’s opening game. If someone could find a link between Wedge and Kenny Perry, I’m sure Wedge would get blamed for Perry’s meltdown on the 71st and 72nd holes Sunday at the Masters. Give them time.
In trying to gauge fan animosity toward Wedge, a usual barometer is the predictable launching of Fire[Name of Coach here].com website. There is a FireEricWedge website, but it’s not up and running as of yet. It’s owned not by a Clevelander but by some guy sitting in Atlanta hoping to eventually capitalize on the $11.99 he pays GoDaddy.com to register the website name each year. Good luck.
The evidence that Wedge is somehow responsible for what’s taken place to this point is minimal, except in a larger sense. But let’s talk about the details, first.
Lee has looked lousy in his first two starts. He’s locating his pitches like he did in 2007 and getting exactly the same results as he did then. It may be a game of inches, but these are very important inches when your success relies far more on location than speed.
As for Fausto Carmona, he’s got what the scouts like to say “nasty stuff.” The problem is that Carmona can’t yet get full command of his stuff. His ball dances like a really hard knuckler, but he’s not getting ahead of enough batters just yet to make it work for him. When pitching from behind, like almost any other pitcher, he has to rely on a more pedestrian repertoire and hope that the batter isn’t hitting it where the players ain’t.
Scott Lewis is, I guess, injured. But far more than whatever minor soreness is ailing him at the moment, he’s simply got to learn how to keep the ball in the park. Even when he’s winning it’s been a problem. It’s a growth process, certainly, and Indians fans apparently are going to have to be satisfied living with the occasional pains that a growing process brings. The only fans smiling about Carl Pavano are those living in New York and watching Yankees games. Now I know why.
Then there’s the bullpen. The Rafael brothers, Perez and Bentancort, have made a smooth transition from 2008 into this season, much to everyone’s dismay. Meanwhile, there just haven’t been enough opportunities for Kerry Wood to showcase the reason for the substantial offseason investment.
To paraphrase, “it’s the pitching, stupid.” In that sense, unless Wedge can suddenly become Professor Vernon K. Simpson in “It Happens Every Spring” and doctor the ball with a secret elixir that repels wood, it’s hard to know exactly why Wedge is to blame, as least when you look at the fine print.
Indeed, if you want to blame someone, blame general manager Mark Shapiro. He’s the one that constructed the starting rotation. But even blaming Shapiro at this point is awfully premature. Sure, the trends are disturbing, but there’s a big difference in a 10-game trend and a 50-game trend. If it’s early June and Lee and Pavano are still essentially throwing batting practice to the opposition and Carmona has twice as many walks as strike outs and still no fifth starter has emerged, then the criticism of Shapiro should start.
The details notwithstanding, however, the one thing that fans can point to is how slow Wedge teams start each season, other than 2007. To that there is some truth and there is some trend. Through Sunday’s victory against the Toronto Blue Jays, the Indians are a collective 66-87 in April under Wedge. That’s nearly an entire season of games.
While the 2007 stands as the lone exception, when the Indians ran out to a 14-8 record, it’s undeniable that Wedge’s teams start slowly. It is an issue.
It’s easy to look at each tree when you want to come to Wedge’s defense. But yet if we’re always pointing at every tree without realizing the forest we’re in, then that’s just as big a mistake in the other direction. Put another way, if it’s fair to criticize former Browns head coach Romeo Crennel for his team’s lack of preparation going into last season (or any season, for that matter), and it was, then why shouldn’t Wedge face the same scrutiny?
Despite the apples and pineapples differences between spring training and the regular season, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that the Indians are playing just as lousy now as they did then, except that Carmona is worse. In fact, only two teams in the entire major leagues had a worse spring, Arizona and San Diego. That’s not necessarily a marker for anything but when it continues into the regular season, then it’s time to start figuring out exactly if there is a problem to be rooted out or an aberration to ignore.
When the Browns went into the tank early and often last season, much of the blame was directly related to Crennel’s country club approach to the preseason. By not pushing the players more forcefully and relying on the players to police themselves for discipline and professionalism issues, Crennel ended up with a team with only slightly more unity than one consisting of Shiites and Sunnis.
It showed in the little things. Throws usually made were missed. Balls usually caught were dropped. Penalties of omission, like false starts, proliferated. Assignments were routinely missed. Sure, it was easy in each case to lay the blame on the players, but at some point didn’t the buck stop with Crennel? Of course.
In the same sense, Wedge has to shoulder that same responsibility. Wedge, like Crennel, is a stand up guy and would always point the finger at himself first. At some point, though, it becomes an empty gesture if it doesn’t eventually lead to tangible change in results.
Wedge isn’t directly to blame for Lee’s control problems, Shin-Soo Choo losing a ball in the sun, or Victor Martinez striking out with the bases loaded. But if he hasn’t created an atmosphere in the first instance that places a premium on preparation, where every pitch and every at bat counts, then he’s as much to blame as if he threw the fat pitch or missed connecting on a hanging curve himself.
The question, though, is whether Wedge’s teams are unprepared. In this regard, baseball is far more subtle than football, making those conclusions harder to draw. Far more often than not, football’s preseason is a series of practices with an occasional game thrown in for good measure. Baseball is mostly about games with an occasional off day. Practice confined mostly to the first 10 days. Players end up mostly being judged on their performance in these games and less on what they may be doing behind the scenes. In football, it’s the exact opposite.
But the measure of success or failure is the same for both sports, the regular season. In this instance, the Indians have played about 4 percent of their schedule. That isn’t going to tell you much. In football terms, 4 percent of the season gets you to early third quarter of the first game, which seems like an apt comparison for how little can possibly be known thus far. But before I get a spate of emails about this, I do realize that the Browns had done enough bad by the third quarter of their 2008 season opener against the Dallas Cowboys to make some conclusions, but that’s only in hindsight. There’s a lot of baseball between now and then before a similar claim can be made with respect to the Indians.
But if what fans are seeing now continues for any real length of time, then Shapiro is going to start questioning Wedge’s stewardship of the team he built. And in the same way Phil Savage eventually threw his handpicked head coach under the bus, Shapiro will end up doing the same. And since the book on Wedge, both good and bad, is fairly well established at this point, just like Crennel, no one is going to criticize Shapiro too much for that, either.
Wedge’s sins to date apparently range from not shaving enough on a consistent basis to leaving Cliff Lee in longer than he deserved in the season’s opening game. If someone could find a link between Wedge and Kenny Perry, I’m sure Wedge would get blamed for Perry’s meltdown on the 71st and 72nd holes Sunday at the Masters. Give them time.
In trying to gauge fan animosity toward Wedge, a usual barometer is the predictable launching of Fire[Name of Coach here].com website. There is a FireEricWedge website, but it’s not up and running as of yet. It’s owned not by a Clevelander but by some guy sitting in Atlanta hoping to eventually capitalize on the $11.99 he pays GoDaddy.com to register the website name each year. Good luck.
The evidence that Wedge is somehow responsible for what’s taken place to this point is minimal, except in a larger sense. But let’s talk about the details, first.
Lee has looked lousy in his first two starts. He’s locating his pitches like he did in 2007 and getting exactly the same results as he did then. It may be a game of inches, but these are very important inches when your success relies far more on location than speed.
As for Fausto Carmona, he’s got what the scouts like to say “nasty stuff.” The problem is that Carmona can’t yet get full command of his stuff. His ball dances like a really hard knuckler, but he’s not getting ahead of enough batters just yet to make it work for him. When pitching from behind, like almost any other pitcher, he has to rely on a more pedestrian repertoire and hope that the batter isn’t hitting it where the players ain’t.
Scott Lewis is, I guess, injured. But far more than whatever minor soreness is ailing him at the moment, he’s simply got to learn how to keep the ball in the park. Even when he’s winning it’s been a problem. It’s a growth process, certainly, and Indians fans apparently are going to have to be satisfied living with the occasional pains that a growing process brings. The only fans smiling about Carl Pavano are those living in New York and watching Yankees games. Now I know why.
Then there’s the bullpen. The Rafael brothers, Perez and Bentancort, have made a smooth transition from 2008 into this season, much to everyone’s dismay. Meanwhile, there just haven’t been enough opportunities for Kerry Wood to showcase the reason for the substantial offseason investment.
To paraphrase, “it’s the pitching, stupid.” In that sense, unless Wedge can suddenly become Professor Vernon K. Simpson in “It Happens Every Spring” and doctor the ball with a secret elixir that repels wood, it’s hard to know exactly why Wedge is to blame, as least when you look at the fine print.
Indeed, if you want to blame someone, blame general manager Mark Shapiro. He’s the one that constructed the starting rotation. But even blaming Shapiro at this point is awfully premature. Sure, the trends are disturbing, but there’s a big difference in a 10-game trend and a 50-game trend. If it’s early June and Lee and Pavano are still essentially throwing batting practice to the opposition and Carmona has twice as many walks as strike outs and still no fifth starter has emerged, then the criticism of Shapiro should start.
The details notwithstanding, however, the one thing that fans can point to is how slow Wedge teams start each season, other than 2007. To that there is some truth and there is some trend. Through Sunday’s victory against the Toronto Blue Jays, the Indians are a collective 66-87 in April under Wedge. That’s nearly an entire season of games.
While the 2007 stands as the lone exception, when the Indians ran out to a 14-8 record, it’s undeniable that Wedge’s teams start slowly. It is an issue.
It’s easy to look at each tree when you want to come to Wedge’s defense. But yet if we’re always pointing at every tree without realizing the forest we’re in, then that’s just as big a mistake in the other direction. Put another way, if it’s fair to criticize former Browns head coach Romeo Crennel for his team’s lack of preparation going into last season (or any season, for that matter), and it was, then why shouldn’t Wedge face the same scrutiny?
Despite the apples and pineapples differences between spring training and the regular season, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that the Indians are playing just as lousy now as they did then, except that Carmona is worse. In fact, only two teams in the entire major leagues had a worse spring, Arizona and San Diego. That’s not necessarily a marker for anything but when it continues into the regular season, then it’s time to start figuring out exactly if there is a problem to be rooted out or an aberration to ignore.
When the Browns went into the tank early and often last season, much of the blame was directly related to Crennel’s country club approach to the preseason. By not pushing the players more forcefully and relying on the players to police themselves for discipline and professionalism issues, Crennel ended up with a team with only slightly more unity than one consisting of Shiites and Sunnis.
It showed in the little things. Throws usually made were missed. Balls usually caught were dropped. Penalties of omission, like false starts, proliferated. Assignments were routinely missed. Sure, it was easy in each case to lay the blame on the players, but at some point didn’t the buck stop with Crennel? Of course.
In the same sense, Wedge has to shoulder that same responsibility. Wedge, like Crennel, is a stand up guy and would always point the finger at himself first. At some point, though, it becomes an empty gesture if it doesn’t eventually lead to tangible change in results.
Wedge isn’t directly to blame for Lee’s control problems, Shin-Soo Choo losing a ball in the sun, or Victor Martinez striking out with the bases loaded. But if he hasn’t created an atmosphere in the first instance that places a premium on preparation, where every pitch and every at bat counts, then he’s as much to blame as if he threw the fat pitch or missed connecting on a hanging curve himself.
The question, though, is whether Wedge’s teams are unprepared. In this regard, baseball is far more subtle than football, making those conclusions harder to draw. Far more often than not, football’s preseason is a series of practices with an occasional game thrown in for good measure. Baseball is mostly about games with an occasional off day. Practice confined mostly to the first 10 days. Players end up mostly being judged on their performance in these games and less on what they may be doing behind the scenes. In football, it’s the exact opposite.
But the measure of success or failure is the same for both sports, the regular season. In this instance, the Indians have played about 4 percent of their schedule. That isn’t going to tell you much. In football terms, 4 percent of the season gets you to early third quarter of the first game, which seems like an apt comparison for how little can possibly be known thus far. But before I get a spate of emails about this, I do realize that the Browns had done enough bad by the third quarter of their 2008 season opener against the Dallas Cowboys to make some conclusions, but that’s only in hindsight. There’s a lot of baseball between now and then before a similar claim can be made with respect to the Indians.
But if what fans are seeing now continues for any real length of time, then Shapiro is going to start questioning Wedge’s stewardship of the team he built. And in the same way Phil Savage eventually threw his handpicked head coach under the bus, Shapiro will end up doing the same. And since the book on Wedge, both good and bad, is fairly well established at this point, just like Crennel, no one is going to criticize Shapiro too much for that, either.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Lingering Items--Stupid Is as Stupid Does Edition
It’s not hard to figure out why the Cleveland Browns have been lousy for the last 10 years. Dysfunction starts at the top and has run through the organization like a plate of bad clams through the digestive system. But while the Browns have been busy spending the last decade chasing their tales, the one positive is that at least they aren’t the Cincinnati Bengals.
In case it escaped your notice while fitfully watching the onset of a new baseball season, the Bengals signed defensive lineman Tank Johnson to a free agent contract. Apparently the relative lack of criminal element on the Dallas Cowboys (!) wouldn’t allow Johnson to perform at a high enough level and thus the search for a team with an atmosphere that was more to his liking.
Johnson fits right in with the Bengals and that has nothing to do with whatever ability he brings to their pass rush. As a convicted criminal who has served time in jail and been suspended by the league, signing Johnson allowed the Bengals to apparently check off every criteria they have on the job spec they keep for prospective free agents. Repeated arrests? Check. Jail time? Check. Illegal guns? Check. Traffic infractions? Check. League suspension? Check. Said he’s really, really sorry this time, I’m not kidding, I mean it? Check. With this signing the Bengals solidified their line-up, assuming their intention was to play and win a game against the guards at the Marion Correctional Institution in a third remake of “The Longest Yard.” Now all they need to do is sign Todd Marinovich and they’ll have their version of Paul Crew.
If the Bengals aren’t working on a remake of “The Longest Yard” then maybe what sealed the Johnson signing it was the fact that receiver Chris Henry has managed to string together almost 12 consecutive months without another arrest. As most may remember (and if you don’t, feel free to re-read my rant on that signing) the Bengals had publicly parted ways with Henry after his fifth arrest only to re-sign him to a two-year agreement months later when they needed more receivers. I suppose when they initially cut him following that arrest the had their fingers crossed behind their backs. Besides, what’s a token gesture about taking a stand against employing recidivists if it’s not truly token?
This latest signing, coupled with the arrest on Wednesday of Bengals’ starting cornerback Leon Hall for drunk driving, more than solidifies the Bengals as the last outpost for all of the league’s reprobates and miscreants. But in every dark cloud a silver lining of sorts does emerge. By comparison the Browns look positively well run, no matter who’s in charge.
**
Kellen Winslow is now at least $20 million richer, which either makes the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the second dumbest or the second most desperate team in the NFL (as to the leader in both categories, see the first item).
Winslow has his issues, certainly, but that’s not what makes his new 6-year contract so bizarre. Simply, it’s his injury history. He’s been hurt more than he’s been healthy and he’s now going on his sixth season in the NFL. The contract’s length, no doubt, is a function of amortizing the guaranteed money over a longer period of time to cushion the impact on the Baccaneers’ salary cap. But still, is there a person anywhere that thinks Winslow will last six more years in the NFL? The over and under in Vegas is probably three seasons and even then smart money says to take the under.
I’ve always felt in the minority in supporting Winslow. But it’s always struck me that most fan animosity toward him was the result of his abject stupidity when it came to motorcycles. His foray into stunt riding didn’t just basically cost him his career, it almost cost him his life. That understood, he took his lumps from the media and from Phil Savage who squeezed him into a more club-friendly contract. And he did work hard to get himself back into shape. He always played hard, when he played. The problem is that his body is so beat up that it prevents him from playing his best football. If that beat up body is the result of self-inflicted wounds, so be it. At least he gave the Browns a good effort while he was here.
None of that explains though why the Buccaneers would make Winslow the highest paid tight end in NFL history. It’s not a distinction Winslow’s earned yet by any measure and probably never will. He’s an excellent receiver but a lousy and half-hearted blocker. Signing Winslow wasn’t something Tampa Bay needed to do right now, either. Winslow was still under contract. What’s wrong with waiting to see whether he can even approach something resembling that level of confidence?
The contract extension does in large measure justify the Browns trading Winslow. He clearly wasn’t going to get that kind of reward here and it’s also pretty clear that he was ready to be disruptive, in the form of holding out if necessary, in order to make that happen. In that sense, Winslow was a problem the Browns didn’t need.
**
Maybe it’s because the Cavs are having a magical season or maybe it’s because baseball season just started (someone tell the Indians), but the NFL draft is only a few weeks away and it’s barely making more noise than the ground floor of a campus library on a Friday night.
The lack of enthusiasm to this point is just more evidence that a good portion of fans have drifted from anger to indifference. It’s what happens when a team isn’t successful and has just embarked on another rebuild.
The draft is filled with enough intriguing prospects that the 5th pick this year should be a layup. Of course, the Browns have blown their share of layups, including the consecutive years in which Mike Junkin and Clifford Charlton were there first round picks. Feel free to pick your favorites. The question is whether a new regime, still trying to get the fresh paint of Berea out of their slacks, can find a way to make this year’s draft a real foundation of this team. That’s always the promise, isn’t it?
I’ve never been a huge fan of the NFL draft. It’s got every bit the feel of a Civil War era slave auction and the appeal of a one hour episode of Facts of Life. The day grinds on endlessly while Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, Mel Kuiper, and a gaggle of others strive to find something, anything to say to fill the interminably long period between picks. Let’s look at more film, shall we?
With limited exceptions, there’s very little drama involved unless your idea of fun is to watch Brady Quinn twist in the wind. The Browns have so many holes at the moment it doesn’t really matter whether they take a receiver (always a mistake in the first round), a linebacker (a better idea) or a defensive lineman (the best idea). The only thing that does matter is that the Browns actually do use the draft to build a foundation for this team. They need players that will be around and contribute now and for the next several years. They don’t need any more projects. I’m still trying to figure out Beau Bell, Martin Rucker, Ahtyba Rubin and Paul Hubbard. My guess is that general manager George Kokinis and head coach Eric Mangini are doing the same thing.
**
The NFL will release its team by team schedule this week and with it will come the inevitable discussions about how easy or difficult it will be. At this juncture, there is no way to tell. Teams that you think will be good won’t be and vice versa. Moreover, the order in which you play teams is critical. Catching a good team on a short week is far better than catching it after a bye week.
Though the NFL makes much of its schedule being released, what they really are doing is releasing the order of the games. The schedule, in terms of which teams the Browns will play, has been known for months.
In addition to the usual two games against each divisional team, the Browns play Oakland, San Diego, Jacksonville, Green Bay and Minnesota at home and Denver, Kansas City, Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit on the road. When the NFL’s only prime time games were on Monday night, you could pretty much bank on a 4-12 season as an automatic disqualification from the league’s marquee game. But now the NFL plays prime time games on Thursday, some Saturdays, Sunday night and Monday night. If they could, they’d find a way to schedule games on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, too. That means the Browns are probably going to find themselves featured at least once.
If the league is smart, they’ll make the Browns’ feature game Thanksgiving Day against Detroit. With the Lions losing their grip on their traditional Thanksgiving Day spot, a competitive game this year is a must for them. Who better to fit their needs than the Browns?
But don’t’ make your Thanksgiving plans just yet. More likely, we’ll see the Browns on the NFL Network some Thursday night late in the season, meaning that outside of Cleveland, the only folks that will see the game are those who subscribe to satellite or to some mom-and-pop cable outfit that the NFL bullied into carrying their sub par programming. At this point, it serves as a form of punishment and the NFL brass may be in the mood to punish a team they foolishly featured 5 times last season.
Personally, I’m glad the Browns will not see their share of prime time games this season for two reasons, one of which is completely selfish. In the grand scheme, the Browns need to stay off the radar screen for awhile. They are rebuilding and they need to focus on the task at hand and not worry about the added pressure of performing in front of a national audience. Selfishly, I’m sick of losing sleep during the week. But it wasn’t all lost. Without that game against Buffalo how would we have known that Savage was such a whiz with email?
**
Since I haven’t touched on the Indians, and there is plenty there to touch on, we’ll just use them as the launching pad for this week’s question to ponder: Simply, now what?
In case it escaped your notice while fitfully watching the onset of a new baseball season, the Bengals signed defensive lineman Tank Johnson to a free agent contract. Apparently the relative lack of criminal element on the Dallas Cowboys (!) wouldn’t allow Johnson to perform at a high enough level and thus the search for a team with an atmosphere that was more to his liking.
Johnson fits right in with the Bengals and that has nothing to do with whatever ability he brings to their pass rush. As a convicted criminal who has served time in jail and been suspended by the league, signing Johnson allowed the Bengals to apparently check off every criteria they have on the job spec they keep for prospective free agents. Repeated arrests? Check. Jail time? Check. Illegal guns? Check. Traffic infractions? Check. League suspension? Check. Said he’s really, really sorry this time, I’m not kidding, I mean it? Check. With this signing the Bengals solidified their line-up, assuming their intention was to play and win a game against the guards at the Marion Correctional Institution in a third remake of “The Longest Yard.” Now all they need to do is sign Todd Marinovich and they’ll have their version of Paul Crew.
If the Bengals aren’t working on a remake of “The Longest Yard” then maybe what sealed the Johnson signing it was the fact that receiver Chris Henry has managed to string together almost 12 consecutive months without another arrest. As most may remember (and if you don’t, feel free to re-read my rant on that signing) the Bengals had publicly parted ways with Henry after his fifth arrest only to re-sign him to a two-year agreement months later when they needed more receivers. I suppose when they initially cut him following that arrest the had their fingers crossed behind their backs. Besides, what’s a token gesture about taking a stand against employing recidivists if it’s not truly token?
This latest signing, coupled with the arrest on Wednesday of Bengals’ starting cornerback Leon Hall for drunk driving, more than solidifies the Bengals as the last outpost for all of the league’s reprobates and miscreants. But in every dark cloud a silver lining of sorts does emerge. By comparison the Browns look positively well run, no matter who’s in charge.
**
Kellen Winslow is now at least $20 million richer, which either makes the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the second dumbest or the second most desperate team in the NFL (as to the leader in both categories, see the first item).
Winslow has his issues, certainly, but that’s not what makes his new 6-year contract so bizarre. Simply, it’s his injury history. He’s been hurt more than he’s been healthy and he’s now going on his sixth season in the NFL. The contract’s length, no doubt, is a function of amortizing the guaranteed money over a longer period of time to cushion the impact on the Baccaneers’ salary cap. But still, is there a person anywhere that thinks Winslow will last six more years in the NFL? The over and under in Vegas is probably three seasons and even then smart money says to take the under.
I’ve always felt in the minority in supporting Winslow. But it’s always struck me that most fan animosity toward him was the result of his abject stupidity when it came to motorcycles. His foray into stunt riding didn’t just basically cost him his career, it almost cost him his life. That understood, he took his lumps from the media and from Phil Savage who squeezed him into a more club-friendly contract. And he did work hard to get himself back into shape. He always played hard, when he played. The problem is that his body is so beat up that it prevents him from playing his best football. If that beat up body is the result of self-inflicted wounds, so be it. At least he gave the Browns a good effort while he was here.
None of that explains though why the Buccaneers would make Winslow the highest paid tight end in NFL history. It’s not a distinction Winslow’s earned yet by any measure and probably never will. He’s an excellent receiver but a lousy and half-hearted blocker. Signing Winslow wasn’t something Tampa Bay needed to do right now, either. Winslow was still under contract. What’s wrong with waiting to see whether he can even approach something resembling that level of confidence?
The contract extension does in large measure justify the Browns trading Winslow. He clearly wasn’t going to get that kind of reward here and it’s also pretty clear that he was ready to be disruptive, in the form of holding out if necessary, in order to make that happen. In that sense, Winslow was a problem the Browns didn’t need.
**
Maybe it’s because the Cavs are having a magical season or maybe it’s because baseball season just started (someone tell the Indians), but the NFL draft is only a few weeks away and it’s barely making more noise than the ground floor of a campus library on a Friday night.
The lack of enthusiasm to this point is just more evidence that a good portion of fans have drifted from anger to indifference. It’s what happens when a team isn’t successful and has just embarked on another rebuild.
The draft is filled with enough intriguing prospects that the 5th pick this year should be a layup. Of course, the Browns have blown their share of layups, including the consecutive years in which Mike Junkin and Clifford Charlton were there first round picks. Feel free to pick your favorites. The question is whether a new regime, still trying to get the fresh paint of Berea out of their slacks, can find a way to make this year’s draft a real foundation of this team. That’s always the promise, isn’t it?
I’ve never been a huge fan of the NFL draft. It’s got every bit the feel of a Civil War era slave auction and the appeal of a one hour episode of Facts of Life. The day grinds on endlessly while Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, Mel Kuiper, and a gaggle of others strive to find something, anything to say to fill the interminably long period between picks. Let’s look at more film, shall we?
With limited exceptions, there’s very little drama involved unless your idea of fun is to watch Brady Quinn twist in the wind. The Browns have so many holes at the moment it doesn’t really matter whether they take a receiver (always a mistake in the first round), a linebacker (a better idea) or a defensive lineman (the best idea). The only thing that does matter is that the Browns actually do use the draft to build a foundation for this team. They need players that will be around and contribute now and for the next several years. They don’t need any more projects. I’m still trying to figure out Beau Bell, Martin Rucker, Ahtyba Rubin and Paul Hubbard. My guess is that general manager George Kokinis and head coach Eric Mangini are doing the same thing.
**
The NFL will release its team by team schedule this week and with it will come the inevitable discussions about how easy or difficult it will be. At this juncture, there is no way to tell. Teams that you think will be good won’t be and vice versa. Moreover, the order in which you play teams is critical. Catching a good team on a short week is far better than catching it after a bye week.
Though the NFL makes much of its schedule being released, what they really are doing is releasing the order of the games. The schedule, in terms of which teams the Browns will play, has been known for months.
In addition to the usual two games against each divisional team, the Browns play Oakland, San Diego, Jacksonville, Green Bay and Minnesota at home and Denver, Kansas City, Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit on the road. When the NFL’s only prime time games were on Monday night, you could pretty much bank on a 4-12 season as an automatic disqualification from the league’s marquee game. But now the NFL plays prime time games on Thursday, some Saturdays, Sunday night and Monday night. If they could, they’d find a way to schedule games on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, too. That means the Browns are probably going to find themselves featured at least once.
If the league is smart, they’ll make the Browns’ feature game Thanksgiving Day against Detroit. With the Lions losing their grip on their traditional Thanksgiving Day spot, a competitive game this year is a must for them. Who better to fit their needs than the Browns?
But don’t’ make your Thanksgiving plans just yet. More likely, we’ll see the Browns on the NFL Network some Thursday night late in the season, meaning that outside of Cleveland, the only folks that will see the game are those who subscribe to satellite or to some mom-and-pop cable outfit that the NFL bullied into carrying their sub par programming. At this point, it serves as a form of punishment and the NFL brass may be in the mood to punish a team they foolishly featured 5 times last season.
Personally, I’m glad the Browns will not see their share of prime time games this season for two reasons, one of which is completely selfish. In the grand scheme, the Browns need to stay off the radar screen for awhile. They are rebuilding and they need to focus on the task at hand and not worry about the added pressure of performing in front of a national audience. Selfishly, I’m sick of losing sleep during the week. But it wasn’t all lost. Without that game against Buffalo how would we have known that Savage was such a whiz with email?
**
Since I haven’t touched on the Indians, and there is plenty there to touch on, we’ll just use them as the launching pad for this week’s question to ponder: Simply, now what?
Monday, April 06, 2009
The Land of Hopes and Dreams
To those of you that still read newspapers, you’ve no doubt noticed two things and they’re both related: advertising is down and hence so are the number of pages. The good news for advertisers is that it becomes increasingly more likely their ad will get noticed. The bad news though is that it becomes increasingly more likely that their ad will get noticed.
On Monday, Major League Baseball dipped into its dwindling reserves and bought a full page ad at the cost of at least $178,000 to announce its new season. A charming little ad, it featured a baseball as a metaphor for a rising sun with the nostalgic sentiment that opening day is special because it’s about hope, faith and unbridled optimism. If that sounds like a synopsis for Rochelle, Rochelle¸ The Musical, it’s probably just coincidental.
Even if opening day does represent the high watermark of fan optimism, the underlying question I have is whether what baseball is still selling in that regard is true. I used to believe it was; now I’m not so sure.
On the same day USA Today ran the ad, it also published the salary of every player on a major league roster along with a story that nearly half of the teams have cut back their payroll this season from last, 10 of them by at least $10 million. As Jerry Reinsdorf, the chairman of the Chicago White Sox rightly pointed out, this reduction isn’t just about the economy in general but about the number of owners who can no longer afford to have their side businesses, which also are suffering, subsidize their baseball teams.
Undoubtedly this newfound payroll discipline is being driven in some places by the larger economy. But even as you take note of that remember that two of those teams that cut back are the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees’ payroll is still over $200 million and the Red Sox are at $121 million. Those are still pretty big numbers, particularly when compared to the San Diego Padres or the Pittsburgh Pirates, teams with payrolls of $48 million and $43 million, respectively.
Still the contraction of the world’s economy is doing more for bringing payroll parity to baseball than anything that Commissioner Bud Selig could ever have found the spine to accomplish. Whether that will be short-lived or whether it represents the beginning of some real fiscal discipline in a sport desperate for some has a direct bearing on whether opening day will still carry the same promise to all for the next generation of fans.
For too many years now the only optimism that opening day carried for fans in most cities was the chance to lead the league in something, if only for one day. But as the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets and Cubs, and a smattering of others, have continued their personal game of Risk at the expense of the rest of the league, the chance that any other team can compete for a championship on a consistent basis becomes more and more illusory.
In some ways, the Indians are the embodiment of the false promises that the major leagues have become. After an amazing run in the mid 1990s, the Indians have been inconsistent since. Because their business model is based on a mid-market budget, they simply can’t compete for front level talent on the free agency market. Their success or failure is far more organic and hence iffier.
CC Sabathia is a nice example. For many years, the Indians were able to retain Sabathia as they nurtured him from raw rookie to one of the game’s premier pitcher. In that time, they watched helplessly as his continued success made it all the more likely that his future would be in New York.
The presence of Sabathia on the roster, particularly in the last few years, made it easier to build a pitching staff. Like second string quarterbacks and middling starters in the NFL, the major leagues are filled with players that can be a fourth or fifth starter. Finding that front-line number one starter is every bit as difficult and usually as expensive as finding a top line starting quarterback.
With Sabathia gone, the Indians suddenly find themselves struggling to build a staff. Cliff Lee may not quite have the emotional makeup to be the number one starter and Fausto Carmona is still far too raw. That leaves the entire starting pitching unsettled, to say the least. Unless the bullpen is terrific, and the presence of reliever Kerry Wood makes that more likely than a year ago, the rest of the team will struggle.
There’s no reason to rehash why Sabathia is gone or even whether he should be. But whatever your view of the Dolans’ financial wherewithal, there is no question that the Indians cannot compete economically with New York, Chicago or Boston. Thus they say goodbye to Sabathia and have to find another way to bring promise to a city that hasn’t since a World Series title in over 50 years. It isn’t easy.
It’s a story that’s been repeated all over the league, from Oakland to Pittsburgh and a host of cities in between. And as it plays out year after agonizing year, opening day becomes nothing more than a reason for the average fan to call in sick.
It’s hard to know just yet what fortunes or failures are in store for this year’s Indians but it’s recent past more than tell the story of what it’s like for a team that has to play the numbers game each year. You really never do know what you’re going to get. And the Indians are a team with a good front office. There are fans in many other cities that don’t even have it that good.
The point though is that as the economic disparities between clubs have widened the expectations that fans dreamed of having have contracted proportionately. It’s just not true that every team starts opening day with unbridled optimism.
Maybe, on the other hand, that’s always been the case. The Indians of my youth, which is to say the vintage of somewhere from around the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s were never going to win and that was well known before the vans left for Tucson each winter. For those fans, and I’m one of them, opening day was akin to a holiday, something to be celebrated for a discrete moment for what it was and not what it promised to bring.
But at that time, the differences between teams related more to abject incompetence than payrolls run amok. The Indians had severe financial challenges, but mostly they were bad because they had bad owners, played in a lousy ballpark, and had a front office that never met a trade it didn’t like.
These days, teams no longer simply compete for talent on the basis of shrewdness. When it is superstar talent that is in issue, money talks. Meanwhile the rest of the league looks for other ways to build a roster by promoting young players that may not be quite ready and trying to wring out one more year of production from an aging veteran just trying to hang on.
Baseball has always been the quintessential metaphor for life and maybe that’s the way to view its current state. As the economy forces everyone to re-examine their own overhead in a vain attempt to cut expenses until things improve, baseball ends up being forced to do the same thing. But where most believe that life still holds promise for those willing to work hard to achieve, baseball is still falling short.
But if the one outcome of this latest economic mess is to further bundle teams around similar payrolls, then baseball has a real chance to live up to the promise of its 2009 ad. Let’s just hope that it isn’t 2020 before that promise actually gets delivered.
On Monday, Major League Baseball dipped into its dwindling reserves and bought a full page ad at the cost of at least $178,000 to announce its new season. A charming little ad, it featured a baseball as a metaphor for a rising sun with the nostalgic sentiment that opening day is special because it’s about hope, faith and unbridled optimism. If that sounds like a synopsis for Rochelle, Rochelle¸ The Musical, it’s probably just coincidental.
Even if opening day does represent the high watermark of fan optimism, the underlying question I have is whether what baseball is still selling in that regard is true. I used to believe it was; now I’m not so sure.
On the same day USA Today ran the ad, it also published the salary of every player on a major league roster along with a story that nearly half of the teams have cut back their payroll this season from last, 10 of them by at least $10 million. As Jerry Reinsdorf, the chairman of the Chicago White Sox rightly pointed out, this reduction isn’t just about the economy in general but about the number of owners who can no longer afford to have their side businesses, which also are suffering, subsidize their baseball teams.
Undoubtedly this newfound payroll discipline is being driven in some places by the larger economy. But even as you take note of that remember that two of those teams that cut back are the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees’ payroll is still over $200 million and the Red Sox are at $121 million. Those are still pretty big numbers, particularly when compared to the San Diego Padres or the Pittsburgh Pirates, teams with payrolls of $48 million and $43 million, respectively.
Still the contraction of the world’s economy is doing more for bringing payroll parity to baseball than anything that Commissioner Bud Selig could ever have found the spine to accomplish. Whether that will be short-lived or whether it represents the beginning of some real fiscal discipline in a sport desperate for some has a direct bearing on whether opening day will still carry the same promise to all for the next generation of fans.
For too many years now the only optimism that opening day carried for fans in most cities was the chance to lead the league in something, if only for one day. But as the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets and Cubs, and a smattering of others, have continued their personal game of Risk at the expense of the rest of the league, the chance that any other team can compete for a championship on a consistent basis becomes more and more illusory.
In some ways, the Indians are the embodiment of the false promises that the major leagues have become. After an amazing run in the mid 1990s, the Indians have been inconsistent since. Because their business model is based on a mid-market budget, they simply can’t compete for front level talent on the free agency market. Their success or failure is far more organic and hence iffier.
CC Sabathia is a nice example. For many years, the Indians were able to retain Sabathia as they nurtured him from raw rookie to one of the game’s premier pitcher. In that time, they watched helplessly as his continued success made it all the more likely that his future would be in New York.
The presence of Sabathia on the roster, particularly in the last few years, made it easier to build a pitching staff. Like second string quarterbacks and middling starters in the NFL, the major leagues are filled with players that can be a fourth or fifth starter. Finding that front-line number one starter is every bit as difficult and usually as expensive as finding a top line starting quarterback.
With Sabathia gone, the Indians suddenly find themselves struggling to build a staff. Cliff Lee may not quite have the emotional makeup to be the number one starter and Fausto Carmona is still far too raw. That leaves the entire starting pitching unsettled, to say the least. Unless the bullpen is terrific, and the presence of reliever Kerry Wood makes that more likely than a year ago, the rest of the team will struggle.
There’s no reason to rehash why Sabathia is gone or even whether he should be. But whatever your view of the Dolans’ financial wherewithal, there is no question that the Indians cannot compete economically with New York, Chicago or Boston. Thus they say goodbye to Sabathia and have to find another way to bring promise to a city that hasn’t since a World Series title in over 50 years. It isn’t easy.
It’s a story that’s been repeated all over the league, from Oakland to Pittsburgh and a host of cities in between. And as it plays out year after agonizing year, opening day becomes nothing more than a reason for the average fan to call in sick.
It’s hard to know just yet what fortunes or failures are in store for this year’s Indians but it’s recent past more than tell the story of what it’s like for a team that has to play the numbers game each year. You really never do know what you’re going to get. And the Indians are a team with a good front office. There are fans in many other cities that don’t even have it that good.
The point though is that as the economic disparities between clubs have widened the expectations that fans dreamed of having have contracted proportionately. It’s just not true that every team starts opening day with unbridled optimism.
Maybe, on the other hand, that’s always been the case. The Indians of my youth, which is to say the vintage of somewhere from around the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s were never going to win and that was well known before the vans left for Tucson each winter. For those fans, and I’m one of them, opening day was akin to a holiday, something to be celebrated for a discrete moment for what it was and not what it promised to bring.
But at that time, the differences between teams related more to abject incompetence than payrolls run amok. The Indians had severe financial challenges, but mostly they were bad because they had bad owners, played in a lousy ballpark, and had a front office that never met a trade it didn’t like.
These days, teams no longer simply compete for talent on the basis of shrewdness. When it is superstar talent that is in issue, money talks. Meanwhile the rest of the league looks for other ways to build a roster by promoting young players that may not be quite ready and trying to wring out one more year of production from an aging veteran just trying to hang on.
Baseball has always been the quintessential metaphor for life and maybe that’s the way to view its current state. As the economy forces everyone to re-examine their own overhead in a vain attempt to cut expenses until things improve, baseball ends up being forced to do the same thing. But where most believe that life still holds promise for those willing to work hard to achieve, baseball is still falling short.
But if the one outcome of this latest economic mess is to further bundle teams around similar payrolls, then baseball has a real chance to live up to the promise of its 2009 ad. Let’s just hope that it isn’t 2020 before that promise actually gets delivered.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Lingering Items--Balance Sheet Edition
One of the easier things for a professional sports fan to do is complain about an owner not spending enough money. Most fans still think of professional sports as a hobby for rich owners rather than the multi-billion dollar business it really is.
And like any business of its size, it faces its challenges even in the best of times. And like any business of any size, when the broader economy tanks, a whole new set of challenges develops.
Fans are seeing the fringes of this with both the Browns and the Indians. If things don’t improve dramatically, they’ll see more than just the fringes. The Cavs, with LeBron James, is nearly economy-proof, but that’s far more the exception than the rule these days. It’s as much a reason as any why signing him to an extension remains the highest priority of owner Dan Gilbert.
The Indians have made some cutbacks in their operations but did so under the radar. The Browns, on the other hand, laid off several employees in a far more public way. It didn’t help their case in the court of public opinion that at around the same time they were paring themselves of public relations types and admins, the team also was redecorating its complex in Berea in order to meet the specific likes of their need head coach.
But the business structure of professional sports is more complex than just a few isolated layoffs that happen one day and are forgotten the next. They are the outward manifestation of business challenges lying just below the surface where most fans don’t bother to look.
Whatever else one might think of either the Indians or the Browns, it’s best to always remember that each is a business first. Like any business, they produce a product and have various revenue streams through which this product is sold. A team can be profitable while losing and unprofitable while winning. Like any business, though, there are certain fundamental metrics to which every professional sports team eventually must adhere.
One of those metrics is keeping the revenue streams flowing while opening up new ones. Some count more than others but every one is important. An interesting article in Friday’s Plain Dealer shed some light on a key revenue source that isn’t producing what it needs to for both the Indians and the Browns. If these streams don’t get opened back up it will most certainly impact operations in a significantly negative way. That source is the so-called luxury revenue, the real and substantial costs that corporations and well-funded individuals pay to entertain clients and impress friends.
The Indians’ situation is particularly precarious. There are 121 luxury suites at Progressive Field. The average annual lease costs is in the neighborhood of $150,000. If they are all sold, that brings in over $18 million, or the cost of a front line pitcher. That’s before food and beverage are factored in. Figure at least another $300 in food and drink per game and over an 81 game season that’s an additional $3 million, and that’s a conservative estimate. To an organization like the Indians with a mid-market budget, having access to that $21 or so million each and every year is critical.
Unfortunately for the Indians, only 78 of their suites are rented for the entire year. That’s $6 million in lost revenue upfront, just in lease payments. Lost food and beverage revenues, again using the conservative estimate of $300/game, is around $1 million. For a team like the Indians, that’s a substantial drop.
The Browns’ situation is a little harder to peg. There are 145 suites and prices can vary dramatically, depending on location. According to the Plain Dealer, most if not all of those suites were subject to initial 10-year leases commencing with when the Browns returned in 1999. That means all or at least a good portion is now up for renewal.
While the Browns aren’t giving specifics, they are acknowledging cancellations. Likely there will be more, presenting the real chance that some suites won’t be leased for the 2009 season.
The problem both teams face, in addition to a brutal economy that’s hitting areas like Cleveland even harder, is on-field performance. Here the Indians have a slight advantage owing to a more stable franchise where ownership and leadership have been in place for several years. It helps, too, that the team has enjoyed very recent success. For now, they are probably worth the benefit of the doubt.
The Browns, on the other hand, have been a mess for most of the last 10 years. Their success has been very modest, to say the least. They’ve also almost deliberately taken steps to alienate the fan base through a series of questionable front office and player moves. It’s an environment that makes anyone, particularly a corporation trying to determine where to allocate its dwindling client entertainment budget, pause for more than a few moments.
To say that winning cures all or that you have to spend money to make money only goes so far. There’s an underlying confidence that the consumer has to have and a leap of faith he has to make that his purchase won’t be wasted. Corporations using tickets and loges to entertain clients need to be convinced that those clients want to even bother with seeing either team. The Cavs right now have that value. The Indians are far more iffy and the Browns are almost at the complete other end of that spectrum. And for both teams, there isn’t a LeBron James equivalent to paper over all the other problems. This is the paradigm in which both teams are now living.
What this all means is that in the standings and at the box office, these really will be make or break seasons for both the Indians and the Browns. Winning championships may not be necessary, but progress will be. Neither team can afford further erosion of their corporate ticket base, for while winning may not cure all, losing can start a death spiral from which escape will take years.
**
The Worst Free Agent Signing Ever™ just got worse (if that’s even possible) this past week when Browns receiver Donte Stallworth was formally charged with vehicular manslaughter in the death of Mario Reyes last month.
Stallworth has apologized for his actions and no doubt is contrite. Only a sociopath couldn’t be. But the most troubling aspect of all of this centers around the circumstances that conspired to make Stallworth a member of the Browns in the first place. It was a similar set of circumstances that conspired to make Andre Rison a member of the Browns years ago, with similar results.
Then, it was Bill Belichick, fascinated as he could be sometimes, with the physical gifts of a player despite what some might call “reputational” issues. Rison, though, unlike Stallworth, was at least credentialed. By the time he came to the Browns, Rison had been averaging more than 1,000 reception yards per season for six years and nearly double digits in touchdown catches, missing only a handful of games in all those years.
Stallworth’s been in the league for seven years and has never had a 1,000 yard season. He’s never caught more than 8 touchdowns in a season. He’s averaged less than 10 starts per season.
True, Stallworth wasn’t signed to be the number one receiver for the Browns, but that’s only because he lacks that kind of talent. He is and always was a role player who the Browns nevertheless enriched far beyond what even his agent could have imagined and even though the league’s free agent bin is literally littered with such players each off season.
That’s bad enough. But with Stallworth already in a substance abuse program, Savage’s decision to sign him looks even dumber. It’s unlikely that Savage didn’t know about Stallworth’s prior troubles since they are in the public record. But then again Savage’s computer skills have always been questionable. More likely is that Savage was well aware of the problem but rationalized it away.
Ultimately, that’s where teams get into trouble. Red flags are like red lights. Keep ignoring them and eventually you’ll crash. When Belichick signed Rison, he rationalized away Rison’s chaotic off-field issues and in some sense it literally cost the city of Cleveland its franchise. When Savage signed Stallworth, he ignored about a dozen red flags and in some sense it literally cost Savage his job.
Now Stallworth becomes the worst kind of problem, an inherited one that can’t be extricated easily. The Miami county justice system, if not the league, will take care of some of the more immediately pressing issues such as whether or not he ever plays again. But the impact on the Browns’ roster and its payroll will take longer to sort through.
David Patten may have been a hedge signing, but it was under the assumption that Stallworth would still be contributing at his usual 7 games, 12 catches and 1 touchdown level. Without Stallworth, Patten will move up a slot where he’s probably ill-suited and force the Browns to make a move at that position they may not have been anticipating.
The sooner the book is closed on TWFASE™ the better. In the meantime count your blessings that Savage isn’t still here. Otherwise, it would only be a matter of time before Plaxico Burress would be trotted out in front of the media for a photo-op holding his new Browns’ jersey.
**
One of my more consistent emailers, “Old Chuck” presented a compelling set of possibilities following Denver’s trade of Jay Cutler to Chicago. Chuck’s theory, and it makes sense, is that the Cutler trade set a benchmark of sorts on what the Browns should be able to get for their strong-armed quarterback, Derek Anderson.
Chuck isn’t of the view, like some of my other, more vocal emailers, that Anderson should be able to bring two first rounders. But a first and a third rounder, that’s far more likely.
In terms of teams with quarterback needs that might be willing to part with those two picks for Anderson, Chuck lays out four possibilities: Detroit (using the second of its two first round picks), Tampa Bay (#19), San Francisco (#10) and Washington (#13). And, as Chuck notes, if Denver really is gunning for Mark Sanchez, who is unlikely to be available when Denver picks (#12), they can always trade with Cleveland for the 5th pick plus their 12th pick in the second round. In all, those two transactions would garner the Browns five picks on the draft’s first day and restore their third round pick. That’s intriguing.
Frankly, this isn’t nearly as unlikely a scenario as others that have been advanced. But despite the Pro Bowl season Anderson put together in 2007, there are two factors working against it: pedigree and performance and they’re both related. New England’s Tom Brady overcame being a 6th round pick but it didn’t happen overnight. It happened because once he got a hold of the reigns, he performed at a consistently high level, game after game and season after season.
Anderson has been far more inconsistent and isn’t yet close to overcoming his 6th round status. He doesn’t have to perform like Brady to warrant a first and third rounder in a trade, but he has to do more than he’s shown to this point. He can’t be fire one game and ice the next.
A much more likely candidate for the kind of trade Chuck posits is Brady Quinn. But to do that, head coach Eric Mangini needs to be convinced that Anderson is far more the player from 2007 than the one from 2008. Mangini doesn’t reveal much of what he’s thinking but it would be hard to imagine that he’s reached that conclusion. If he had the Browns might actually played the role of broker in the Cutler trade.
**
We’re running long and thus we’ll keep this week’s question to ponder short: If Indians’ pitchers were plagued by the dry air of Arizona, why weren’t the pitchers on the opposing teams likewise affected?
And like any business of its size, it faces its challenges even in the best of times. And like any business of any size, when the broader economy tanks, a whole new set of challenges develops.
Fans are seeing the fringes of this with both the Browns and the Indians. If things don’t improve dramatically, they’ll see more than just the fringes. The Cavs, with LeBron James, is nearly economy-proof, but that’s far more the exception than the rule these days. It’s as much a reason as any why signing him to an extension remains the highest priority of owner Dan Gilbert.
The Indians have made some cutbacks in their operations but did so under the radar. The Browns, on the other hand, laid off several employees in a far more public way. It didn’t help their case in the court of public opinion that at around the same time they were paring themselves of public relations types and admins, the team also was redecorating its complex in Berea in order to meet the specific likes of their need head coach.
But the business structure of professional sports is more complex than just a few isolated layoffs that happen one day and are forgotten the next. They are the outward manifestation of business challenges lying just below the surface where most fans don’t bother to look.
Whatever else one might think of either the Indians or the Browns, it’s best to always remember that each is a business first. Like any business, they produce a product and have various revenue streams through which this product is sold. A team can be profitable while losing and unprofitable while winning. Like any business, though, there are certain fundamental metrics to which every professional sports team eventually must adhere.
One of those metrics is keeping the revenue streams flowing while opening up new ones. Some count more than others but every one is important. An interesting article in Friday’s Plain Dealer shed some light on a key revenue source that isn’t producing what it needs to for both the Indians and the Browns. If these streams don’t get opened back up it will most certainly impact operations in a significantly negative way. That source is the so-called luxury revenue, the real and substantial costs that corporations and well-funded individuals pay to entertain clients and impress friends.
The Indians’ situation is particularly precarious. There are 121 luxury suites at Progressive Field. The average annual lease costs is in the neighborhood of $150,000. If they are all sold, that brings in over $18 million, or the cost of a front line pitcher. That’s before food and beverage are factored in. Figure at least another $300 in food and drink per game and over an 81 game season that’s an additional $3 million, and that’s a conservative estimate. To an organization like the Indians with a mid-market budget, having access to that $21 or so million each and every year is critical.
Unfortunately for the Indians, only 78 of their suites are rented for the entire year. That’s $6 million in lost revenue upfront, just in lease payments. Lost food and beverage revenues, again using the conservative estimate of $300/game, is around $1 million. For a team like the Indians, that’s a substantial drop.
The Browns’ situation is a little harder to peg. There are 145 suites and prices can vary dramatically, depending on location. According to the Plain Dealer, most if not all of those suites were subject to initial 10-year leases commencing with when the Browns returned in 1999. That means all or at least a good portion is now up for renewal.
While the Browns aren’t giving specifics, they are acknowledging cancellations. Likely there will be more, presenting the real chance that some suites won’t be leased for the 2009 season.
The problem both teams face, in addition to a brutal economy that’s hitting areas like Cleveland even harder, is on-field performance. Here the Indians have a slight advantage owing to a more stable franchise where ownership and leadership have been in place for several years. It helps, too, that the team has enjoyed very recent success. For now, they are probably worth the benefit of the doubt.
The Browns, on the other hand, have been a mess for most of the last 10 years. Their success has been very modest, to say the least. They’ve also almost deliberately taken steps to alienate the fan base through a series of questionable front office and player moves. It’s an environment that makes anyone, particularly a corporation trying to determine where to allocate its dwindling client entertainment budget, pause for more than a few moments.
To say that winning cures all or that you have to spend money to make money only goes so far. There’s an underlying confidence that the consumer has to have and a leap of faith he has to make that his purchase won’t be wasted. Corporations using tickets and loges to entertain clients need to be convinced that those clients want to even bother with seeing either team. The Cavs right now have that value. The Indians are far more iffy and the Browns are almost at the complete other end of that spectrum. And for both teams, there isn’t a LeBron James equivalent to paper over all the other problems. This is the paradigm in which both teams are now living.
What this all means is that in the standings and at the box office, these really will be make or break seasons for both the Indians and the Browns. Winning championships may not be necessary, but progress will be. Neither team can afford further erosion of their corporate ticket base, for while winning may not cure all, losing can start a death spiral from which escape will take years.
**
The Worst Free Agent Signing Ever™ just got worse (if that’s even possible) this past week when Browns receiver Donte Stallworth was formally charged with vehicular manslaughter in the death of Mario Reyes last month.
Stallworth has apologized for his actions and no doubt is contrite. Only a sociopath couldn’t be. But the most troubling aspect of all of this centers around the circumstances that conspired to make Stallworth a member of the Browns in the first place. It was a similar set of circumstances that conspired to make Andre Rison a member of the Browns years ago, with similar results.
Then, it was Bill Belichick, fascinated as he could be sometimes, with the physical gifts of a player despite what some might call “reputational” issues. Rison, though, unlike Stallworth, was at least credentialed. By the time he came to the Browns, Rison had been averaging more than 1,000 reception yards per season for six years and nearly double digits in touchdown catches, missing only a handful of games in all those years.
Stallworth’s been in the league for seven years and has never had a 1,000 yard season. He’s never caught more than 8 touchdowns in a season. He’s averaged less than 10 starts per season.
True, Stallworth wasn’t signed to be the number one receiver for the Browns, but that’s only because he lacks that kind of talent. He is and always was a role player who the Browns nevertheless enriched far beyond what even his agent could have imagined and even though the league’s free agent bin is literally littered with such players each off season.
That’s bad enough. But with Stallworth already in a substance abuse program, Savage’s decision to sign him looks even dumber. It’s unlikely that Savage didn’t know about Stallworth’s prior troubles since they are in the public record. But then again Savage’s computer skills have always been questionable. More likely is that Savage was well aware of the problem but rationalized it away.
Ultimately, that’s where teams get into trouble. Red flags are like red lights. Keep ignoring them and eventually you’ll crash. When Belichick signed Rison, he rationalized away Rison’s chaotic off-field issues and in some sense it literally cost the city of Cleveland its franchise. When Savage signed Stallworth, he ignored about a dozen red flags and in some sense it literally cost Savage his job.
Now Stallworth becomes the worst kind of problem, an inherited one that can’t be extricated easily. The Miami county justice system, if not the league, will take care of some of the more immediately pressing issues such as whether or not he ever plays again. But the impact on the Browns’ roster and its payroll will take longer to sort through.
David Patten may have been a hedge signing, but it was under the assumption that Stallworth would still be contributing at his usual 7 games, 12 catches and 1 touchdown level. Without Stallworth, Patten will move up a slot where he’s probably ill-suited and force the Browns to make a move at that position they may not have been anticipating.
The sooner the book is closed on TWFASE™ the better. In the meantime count your blessings that Savage isn’t still here. Otherwise, it would only be a matter of time before Plaxico Burress would be trotted out in front of the media for a photo-op holding his new Browns’ jersey.
**
One of my more consistent emailers, “Old Chuck” presented a compelling set of possibilities following Denver’s trade of Jay Cutler to Chicago. Chuck’s theory, and it makes sense, is that the Cutler trade set a benchmark of sorts on what the Browns should be able to get for their strong-armed quarterback, Derek Anderson.
Chuck isn’t of the view, like some of my other, more vocal emailers, that Anderson should be able to bring two first rounders. But a first and a third rounder, that’s far more likely.
In terms of teams with quarterback needs that might be willing to part with those two picks for Anderson, Chuck lays out four possibilities: Detroit (using the second of its two first round picks), Tampa Bay (#19), San Francisco (#10) and Washington (#13). And, as Chuck notes, if Denver really is gunning for Mark Sanchez, who is unlikely to be available when Denver picks (#12), they can always trade with Cleveland for the 5th pick plus their 12th pick in the second round. In all, those two transactions would garner the Browns five picks on the draft’s first day and restore their third round pick. That’s intriguing.
Frankly, this isn’t nearly as unlikely a scenario as others that have been advanced. But despite the Pro Bowl season Anderson put together in 2007, there are two factors working against it: pedigree and performance and they’re both related. New England’s Tom Brady overcame being a 6th round pick but it didn’t happen overnight. It happened because once he got a hold of the reigns, he performed at a consistently high level, game after game and season after season.
Anderson has been far more inconsistent and isn’t yet close to overcoming his 6th round status. He doesn’t have to perform like Brady to warrant a first and third rounder in a trade, but he has to do more than he’s shown to this point. He can’t be fire one game and ice the next.
A much more likely candidate for the kind of trade Chuck posits is Brady Quinn. But to do that, head coach Eric Mangini needs to be convinced that Anderson is far more the player from 2007 than the one from 2008. Mangini doesn’t reveal much of what he’s thinking but it would be hard to imagine that he’s reached that conclusion. If he had the Browns might actually played the role of broker in the Cutler trade.
**
We’re running long and thus we’ll keep this week’s question to ponder short: If Indians’ pitchers were plagued by the dry air of Arizona, why weren’t the pitchers on the opposing teams likewise affected?
Thursday, April 02, 2009
I Love You, Man
Infatuation can be an alluring emotion. It can make you giddy. It can make you do stupid things, too. A case in point is the latest column, the second in two weeks, by the Plain Dealer’s Bud Shaw imploring the Browns to essentially move heaven and earth to get Jay Cutler on the roster. Now that Cutler’s off to Chicago, one can only imagine Bud’s next column.
Clearly Shaw has a case of man-love for Cutler. That’s all well and good. We all have our crushes. But this was is just puzzling.
Shaw makes his case by going straight for the jugular of Browns fans, invoking the one person who still is the object of more man-love from modern day Browns fans than any other player, Bernie Kosar. Shaw says that Cutler possesses the same swagger that made Kosar so successful. Not so fast, Bud.
Cutler is a nice player. But he’s a nice player like Derek Anderson is a nice player. The only difference between the two right now is that Cutler’s had two relatively decent years while Anderson has had one good year and one not so good year that ended prematurely with an injury.
Anderson and Cutler are the same age, although Anderson entered the league a year earlier than Cutler. Both quarterbacks have what the scouts like to call a “big arm.” Cutler was a 1st round pick of the Broncos in 2006 out of Vanderbilt and became somewhat of a “flavor of the month” to NFL scouts during the combine, akin to Joe Flacco last season. As a first round pick, Cutler brought with him all the usual pressures that come with it, including the desire of fans to rush him into action.
Anderson played for pass happy Oregon State, which seemed to cause scouts to discount his somewhat gaudy statistics. But it is noteworthy that Anderson was only the 6th person in the PAC-10 to throw for more than 10,000 yards in his career. Anderson also holds pretty much every Oregon State passing record.
But Anderson stayed under the radar screen throughout the combine. He ended up being drafted in the sixth round by Baltimore in the 2005 draft which means the Ravens’ investment in him was only slightly more than their investment in new water coolers. That status accorded him little pressure from the fans and little respect from the coaching staff. But when Anderson was cut by the Ravens in September, 2005, former Browns’ general manager, Phil Savage, grabbed him. Anderson spent the 2005 season watching Trent Dilfer and Charlie Frye.
While Anderson technically had a year of experience on Cutler, the first game action for each came during the 2006 season. Cutler started 5 games, Anderson 3. Both showed some promise, Cutler perhaps a bit more. In Cutler’s 5 starts, he through 9 touchdowns against interceptions. In Anderson’s 5 games, 3 of which were starts, he had 5 touchdowns against 8 interceptions.
Cutler was all but set to be the Broncos starter in 2006. Anderson was in a training camp battle with Charlie Frye that Frye ostensibly won. Frye’s victory lasted all of about one quarter in the team’s first game when all the traits that made fans wonder why Frye got the start were exposed against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Anderson quickly replaced Frye (who was traded the next day) and embarked on one of the most magical seasons of any quarterback in Cleveland Browns’ history.
Indeed, the 2007 season was the coming out party for both players. Cutler led his team to a 7-9 record. Cutler, though, had a breakout year. He completed over 63% of his passes, through 20 touchdowns to 14 interceptions, and ended the year with a rating of 88.1. He also averaged 7.5 yards per attempt. The one downside of Cutler’s year was the number of sacks, 27.
But Anderson was even better. After the disaster of the opening game, Anderson helped lead the team to a 10-6 record while throwing 29 touchdown passes against 19 interceptions. He ended the season with a 82.5 rating and his yards per attempt was similar to Cutler’s at 7.2. Anderson was sacked only 14 times, or less than once per game, and made the Pro Bowl.
Maybe it was the pressure of the previous season, maybe it was the inability to make adjustments after teams had made adjustments to him, or maybe it was a little of both, but Anderson had an awful 2008 season, by almost any measure. Anderson too often looked confused and too reliant on just flinging the ball deep, hoping something good would happen. It didn’t help Anderson either that Joe Jurevicius was out the whole season or that Braylon Edwards played like he was. The Browns’ running attack wasn’t particularly effective and the line, without Ryan Tucker, struggled far more than it did in 2007.
Cutler, by contrast, put up another good season personally and made the Pro Bowl even as he wasn’t able to move the needle much on the team’s overall performance. More damming though for Cutler was the fact that his team entered it’s final 3 games with a 8-5 record and really needed only to win one of them to make the playoffs. They lost all 3. The Broncos’ defense was awful last season and that accounts for a large part of it, but Cutler wasn’t exactly brilliant either. While he threw for over 300 yards in the last two games, that was more a function of the fact that he attempted nearly 50 passes in each game. What ever leadership he brought to the team generally wasn’t enough to help it get over the hump when it needed to most.
This isn’t to damn Cutler at the expense of Anderson. It’s just to underscore the reality that is Cutler. Like Anderson, he still hasn’t led a team to the playoffs. He’s put up some nice numbers in his first two seasons as a starter and probably will get better. If your team is lacking a quarterback, he’d be a decent pick up. But all that doesn’t make him the “sure thing” that Shaw seems to think.
In Shaw’s world, the Browns should do whatever it takes to get Cutler. I wonder if that means swinging a trade now with Chicago? Shaw doesn’t offer whether it should be at the expense of Anderson or Brady Quinn, but the clear implication is that it doesn’t really matter because Cutler would be a far better choice to lead this team.
It might be true that Cutler eventually becomes a sure thing and it might be true that he will have a better career than either Anderson or Quinn, but there aren’t enough facts on which to base those suppositions. The full depth of Anderson’s potential isn’t really known. About the only conclusion you can really draw is that he’s a fire or ice kind of player.
But putting Anderson aside, what’s the push to simply dump an unknown commodity in Quinn? Shaw never explains. Quinn had very little opportunity with an objectively poor team last season. That he would get injured given the scattered play of the line was almost a foregone conclusion. But in his relatively limited playing time covering the last few seasons all Quinn ever has done is show he belongs in the NFL. Exactly where, it’s hard to say. But he is a NFL quarterback.
The fact that head coach Eric Mangini is conducting open auditions for the starting quarterback as if he was casting the road show production of “A Chorus Line” shouldn’t be taken as confirmation that neither Quinn nor Anderson is a viable starter. Giving Mangini the full benefit of the doubt at this point, it simply means that he sees what everyone else does: the book on Anderson is only about 1/3 written and we’ve barely gotten past the preface in Quinn’s.
Even more to the point though, as I’ve been constantly preaching, it isn’t going to matter whether the Browns have Cutler, Quinn or Joe Montana in his prime. If there’s no one to throw to that can actually catch, Mangini would do just as well to dig up the corpse of George Plimpton.
The real barometer for whether or not the Browns should make a run at Cutler is whether by adding him, whatever the cost, the Browns are a better team. If the answer to that is “yes,” and I struggle to see how anyone could even make that conclusion, then you have to ask the next question, “is the value he adds worth the cost?”
Chicago paid a fairly hefty price, in the form of two first round picks and Kyle Orton, though they did get a third rounder back this year. Bravo to the Broncos for exploiting a desperate market and we’ll leave it to the discerning fans of Chicago to skewer their front office for giving into the frenzy by overpaying. But even if what Chicago paid is an accurate barometer of Cutler’s market value, it clearly would have cost them Anderson or Quinn. Thus, two first round picks and one of your quarterbacks for another quarterback that doesn’t appear to be much, if any, of an upgrade is simply too steep for a team that has numerous holes to plug.
But then again, infatuation can make a person do stupid things. Just be glad Shaw isn’t running the Browns these days. He’d have them filling a hole that no one’s sure yet is even cracked all the while missing the fact that the rest of the team is as bumpy and pockmarked as Euclid Avenue in March.
Clearly Shaw has a case of man-love for Cutler. That’s all well and good. We all have our crushes. But this was is just puzzling.
Shaw makes his case by going straight for the jugular of Browns fans, invoking the one person who still is the object of more man-love from modern day Browns fans than any other player, Bernie Kosar. Shaw says that Cutler possesses the same swagger that made Kosar so successful. Not so fast, Bud.
Cutler is a nice player. But he’s a nice player like Derek Anderson is a nice player. The only difference between the two right now is that Cutler’s had two relatively decent years while Anderson has had one good year and one not so good year that ended prematurely with an injury.
Anderson and Cutler are the same age, although Anderson entered the league a year earlier than Cutler. Both quarterbacks have what the scouts like to call a “big arm.” Cutler was a 1st round pick of the Broncos in 2006 out of Vanderbilt and became somewhat of a “flavor of the month” to NFL scouts during the combine, akin to Joe Flacco last season. As a first round pick, Cutler brought with him all the usual pressures that come with it, including the desire of fans to rush him into action.
Anderson played for pass happy Oregon State, which seemed to cause scouts to discount his somewhat gaudy statistics. But it is noteworthy that Anderson was only the 6th person in the PAC-10 to throw for more than 10,000 yards in his career. Anderson also holds pretty much every Oregon State passing record.
But Anderson stayed under the radar screen throughout the combine. He ended up being drafted in the sixth round by Baltimore in the 2005 draft which means the Ravens’ investment in him was only slightly more than their investment in new water coolers. That status accorded him little pressure from the fans and little respect from the coaching staff. But when Anderson was cut by the Ravens in September, 2005, former Browns’ general manager, Phil Savage, grabbed him. Anderson spent the 2005 season watching Trent Dilfer and Charlie Frye.
While Anderson technically had a year of experience on Cutler, the first game action for each came during the 2006 season. Cutler started 5 games, Anderson 3. Both showed some promise, Cutler perhaps a bit more. In Cutler’s 5 starts, he through 9 touchdowns against interceptions. In Anderson’s 5 games, 3 of which were starts, he had 5 touchdowns against 8 interceptions.
Cutler was all but set to be the Broncos starter in 2006. Anderson was in a training camp battle with Charlie Frye that Frye ostensibly won. Frye’s victory lasted all of about one quarter in the team’s first game when all the traits that made fans wonder why Frye got the start were exposed against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Anderson quickly replaced Frye (who was traded the next day) and embarked on one of the most magical seasons of any quarterback in Cleveland Browns’ history.
Indeed, the 2007 season was the coming out party for both players. Cutler led his team to a 7-9 record. Cutler, though, had a breakout year. He completed over 63% of his passes, through 20 touchdowns to 14 interceptions, and ended the year with a rating of 88.1. He also averaged 7.5 yards per attempt. The one downside of Cutler’s year was the number of sacks, 27.
But Anderson was even better. After the disaster of the opening game, Anderson helped lead the team to a 10-6 record while throwing 29 touchdown passes against 19 interceptions. He ended the season with a 82.5 rating and his yards per attempt was similar to Cutler’s at 7.2. Anderson was sacked only 14 times, or less than once per game, and made the Pro Bowl.
Maybe it was the pressure of the previous season, maybe it was the inability to make adjustments after teams had made adjustments to him, or maybe it was a little of both, but Anderson had an awful 2008 season, by almost any measure. Anderson too often looked confused and too reliant on just flinging the ball deep, hoping something good would happen. It didn’t help Anderson either that Joe Jurevicius was out the whole season or that Braylon Edwards played like he was. The Browns’ running attack wasn’t particularly effective and the line, without Ryan Tucker, struggled far more than it did in 2007.
Cutler, by contrast, put up another good season personally and made the Pro Bowl even as he wasn’t able to move the needle much on the team’s overall performance. More damming though for Cutler was the fact that his team entered it’s final 3 games with a 8-5 record and really needed only to win one of them to make the playoffs. They lost all 3. The Broncos’ defense was awful last season and that accounts for a large part of it, but Cutler wasn’t exactly brilliant either. While he threw for over 300 yards in the last two games, that was more a function of the fact that he attempted nearly 50 passes in each game. What ever leadership he brought to the team generally wasn’t enough to help it get over the hump when it needed to most.
This isn’t to damn Cutler at the expense of Anderson. It’s just to underscore the reality that is Cutler. Like Anderson, he still hasn’t led a team to the playoffs. He’s put up some nice numbers in his first two seasons as a starter and probably will get better. If your team is lacking a quarterback, he’d be a decent pick up. But all that doesn’t make him the “sure thing” that Shaw seems to think.
In Shaw’s world, the Browns should do whatever it takes to get Cutler. I wonder if that means swinging a trade now with Chicago? Shaw doesn’t offer whether it should be at the expense of Anderson or Brady Quinn, but the clear implication is that it doesn’t really matter because Cutler would be a far better choice to lead this team.
It might be true that Cutler eventually becomes a sure thing and it might be true that he will have a better career than either Anderson or Quinn, but there aren’t enough facts on which to base those suppositions. The full depth of Anderson’s potential isn’t really known. About the only conclusion you can really draw is that he’s a fire or ice kind of player.
But putting Anderson aside, what’s the push to simply dump an unknown commodity in Quinn? Shaw never explains. Quinn had very little opportunity with an objectively poor team last season. That he would get injured given the scattered play of the line was almost a foregone conclusion. But in his relatively limited playing time covering the last few seasons all Quinn ever has done is show he belongs in the NFL. Exactly where, it’s hard to say. But he is a NFL quarterback.
The fact that head coach Eric Mangini is conducting open auditions for the starting quarterback as if he was casting the road show production of “A Chorus Line” shouldn’t be taken as confirmation that neither Quinn nor Anderson is a viable starter. Giving Mangini the full benefit of the doubt at this point, it simply means that he sees what everyone else does: the book on Anderson is only about 1/3 written and we’ve barely gotten past the preface in Quinn’s.
Even more to the point though, as I’ve been constantly preaching, it isn’t going to matter whether the Browns have Cutler, Quinn or Joe Montana in his prime. If there’s no one to throw to that can actually catch, Mangini would do just as well to dig up the corpse of George Plimpton.
The real barometer for whether or not the Browns should make a run at Cutler is whether by adding him, whatever the cost, the Browns are a better team. If the answer to that is “yes,” and I struggle to see how anyone could even make that conclusion, then you have to ask the next question, “is the value he adds worth the cost?”
Chicago paid a fairly hefty price, in the form of two first round picks and Kyle Orton, though they did get a third rounder back this year. Bravo to the Broncos for exploiting a desperate market and we’ll leave it to the discerning fans of Chicago to skewer their front office for giving into the frenzy by overpaying. But even if what Chicago paid is an accurate barometer of Cutler’s market value, it clearly would have cost them Anderson or Quinn. Thus, two first round picks and one of your quarterbacks for another quarterback that doesn’t appear to be much, if any, of an upgrade is simply too steep for a team that has numerous holes to plug.
But then again, infatuation can make a person do stupid things. Just be glad Shaw isn’t running the Browns these days. He’d have them filling a hole that no one’s sure yet is even cracked all the while missing the fact that the rest of the team is as bumpy and pockmarked as Euclid Avenue in March.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Lingering Items--Man at the Top Edition
Is it possible that a team with the reigning Cy Young award winner in its midst doesn’t have an ace on its pitching staff? That’s the burning question that the Cleveland Indians are facing with less than two weeks before the season starts.
Cliff Lee, the putative number one pitcher on the Indians’ staff, has looked like anything but an ace in spring training. While that isn’t necessarily cause for great concern, the fact that he has been getting shelled most of the spring is raising a few eyebrows among the likes of manager Eric Wedge, general manager Mark Shapiro and, frankly, most of the rest of the league.
Lee came out of nowhere, literally, to win the Cy Young last year. His 2007 was nothing short of a disaster. It was a combination of physical injury and mental duress that made Lee a very shaky “yes” to make the team last season. While his spring 2008 wasn’t anything great, his contract and his track record gave him the edge for the last starting spot.
It proved to be faith rewarded. All Lee did was out-pitch CC Sabathia and the rest of the major leagues. It was one of the most surprising and satisfying season-long performances by any player in any sport wearing a Cleveland uniform ever.
Lee is a well-grounded player. He is mostly unemotional and seems to accept with equal aplomb the ups and downs that baseball delivers on a daily basis. Like golf, baseball is a game predicated more on failure than success. For a pitcher, far more balls are hit than are missed. For the hitter, far more balls are caught than not. To play and prosper at the highest levels, it is absolutely imperative that a player have the gift of perspective and the emotions of Bjorn Borg. Lee is that kind of pitcher.
But if there is one area of concern about his spring, more so than last spring, is the fact that he entered it lacking the hunger of last year. He was no longer fighting for his professional life but instead attempting to prepare himself to be “the guy,” a role he’s never occupied in the major leagues.
Lee was successful last season mostly because he had pinpoint control from almost the first pitch of the season until the last. He also benefited for most of the season from the simple fact that more eyes were on Sabathia. To the extent a pitcher carrying a miniscule ERA for an entire season can fall under the radar, Lee was that pitcher.
This season will be far different. There is no Sabathia. It’s Lee and a bunch of question marks. To put it in perspective, remember Lee was the last pitcher to make the team last year. Scott Lewis is this year’s Lee. Lee now finds himself having to serve as the role model, the stopper and the stud for a pitching staff that will be watching his every move. It’s far more pressure than he’s ever been under.
Sabathia was always being groomed as a number one starter. That’s never been true of Lee. Indeed, it’s unlikely Lee ever saw himself in that role. Based on his spot in the rotation, though, that’s exactly where he finds himself. He’ll be relegated to taking on the other team’s number one starter nearly every time out. That’s even more pressure.
Lee’s effectiveness is dictated by his control. His career has been the base case for what it looks like when control comes, goes and comes again. And that was without any of the added responsibilities.
That’s not to say that Lee’s lackluster spring is the result of his inability to cope with his new role. It may be simply the result, as he said, of using spring training this year to work on certain aspects of his game rather than trying to replicate an actual start. But time is starting to run short. He has one more start this spring. He doesn’t need to be great. He doesn’t even need to prove he was a worthy recipient of the Cy Young. He just needs to start showing that he’s the guy that can step up and lead a starting pitching staff that for the first time in years doesn’t have an obvious leader.
**
It was nice to see someone associated with the Cleveland Browns actually sit down and give a somewhat comprehensive interview. It wasn’t general manager, George Kokinis or head coach Eric Mangini, both logical choices. And it wasn’t the increasingly more mysterious owner, Randy Lerner. It was Mike Kennan, the team’s new president.
Tony Grossi’s interview had some interesting moments and Grossi hit Kennan with some pretty pointed questions, including questions related to the Browns’ spending to upgrade the Berea complex to meet Mangini’s needs while simultaneously laying off a boatload of low paid employees.
I thought Keenan came off pretty well in the interview overall. I do think he’s understandably downplaying what looks to be a hard economy for the Browns. There are several loges unsold that will go unsold. There will be plenty of season ticket holders that won’t be able to re-up. Sponsors will be lost. And this would be true even if this was a winning team, or at least a potentially winning team. The economy has had that kind of effect. On top of that, if Mangini can’t come in and immediately turn things around, 2010 isn’t going to be any better either on the business side of the operations.
But all that aside, the one thing that did come out of the interview was a clarification of the Browns’ organizational chart. Essentially, Lerner has three direct reports: Keenan, Kokinis and Mangini. It’s a somewhat atypical arrangement in that on most teams the head coach reports to the general manager. It’s also fairly typical for the general manager, in turn, to report to the club president. Thus the Browns are bucking some trends in that respect as well.
That doesn’t mean that there’s inherently anything wrong with Lerner’s org chart but it does signal in a significant way that he plans to stay far closer to the team than perhaps he was just a year ago. By having the three top operational employees in the organization report to him, Lerner doesn’t have a choice but to stay closely connected. If he maintains the kind of distance he’s been used to maintaining, then the organization is headed for potentially destructive and unresolved infighting sooner rather than later.
Any business is an amalgamation of the people running it. When they get along, org charts are irrelevant. But when disputes arise, org charts become a necessity. If a consensus can’t be reached, someone has to call the question. Consider, for example, how this could play out on draft day.
Presumably, Kokinis is in charge of the draft. Mangini is certainly going to have a prominent role in which players are selected as well as what kind of deals may be swung. But what if they end up in a legitimate disagreement that they can’t resolve themselves? By vesting himself with the final word, given how he’s arranged the offices, Lerner will make the call. If he sides with Kokinis, Mangini will be upset and vice versa. The more something like this plays out, the pricklier the atmosphere inside Berea will become.
It would be interesting to know why Lerner willingly put himself and his team in this kind of position when it’s a role he seems uniquely ill-suited to take on. Why is it that he believes this is the best path forward for his team? Kennan could have been asked those questions, but his answers would have been speculative. They really are better left for Lerner. The problem, though, is Lerner’s not talking these days so, as with so much associated with the Browns these days, it’s up to the fans to fill in the blanks.
**
If Kellen Winslow thought leaving Cleveland was going to be his ticket to a new contract, then he better think again. According to reports out of Tampa Bay, new general manager Mark Dominik is in no hurry to give Winslow a new deal, much to the chagrin of Winslow’s new agent, Drew Rosenhaus.
Apparently Dominik is concerned about Winslow’s longevity, which would hardly be a surprise except for the fact that he traded for Winslow in the first place. The Browns got a second round pick in this year’s draft and a fifth round pick next year from the Buccaneers. That may not seem like much but it is enough to suggest that the Buccaneers see Winslow sticking around for awhile anyway.
Winslow never is going to make back all the money he lost because of his foolish foray into stunt motorcycle riding. He can hire 10 Drew Rosenhauses and they’ll never be able to get him the kind of contract that a relatively injury-free career would have delivered.
There were rumblings that one of the reasons the Browns parted with Winslow now is that they had no intention of extending his contract and no appetite for a potential holdout. Kokinis may not have gotten as much as some fans would have liked for Winslow, but considering the business problems he divested himself of, it’s doubtful that Kokinis is second-guessing himself either.
**
With a playoff season that nearly rivals the length of its regular season, basketball is in the position of straddling both the football and the baseball seasons. This year could bring the real possibility of the Cavs playing into June and the Browns, with heightened interest due to a new regime, starting about a month after that. The Indians have about a month to prove themselves to the fans. Thus, this week’s question to ponder is simple: Will anyone even notice the Indians this year?
Cliff Lee, the putative number one pitcher on the Indians’ staff, has looked like anything but an ace in spring training. While that isn’t necessarily cause for great concern, the fact that he has been getting shelled most of the spring is raising a few eyebrows among the likes of manager Eric Wedge, general manager Mark Shapiro and, frankly, most of the rest of the league.
Lee came out of nowhere, literally, to win the Cy Young last year. His 2007 was nothing short of a disaster. It was a combination of physical injury and mental duress that made Lee a very shaky “yes” to make the team last season. While his spring 2008 wasn’t anything great, his contract and his track record gave him the edge for the last starting spot.
It proved to be faith rewarded. All Lee did was out-pitch CC Sabathia and the rest of the major leagues. It was one of the most surprising and satisfying season-long performances by any player in any sport wearing a Cleveland uniform ever.
Lee is a well-grounded player. He is mostly unemotional and seems to accept with equal aplomb the ups and downs that baseball delivers on a daily basis. Like golf, baseball is a game predicated more on failure than success. For a pitcher, far more balls are hit than are missed. For the hitter, far more balls are caught than not. To play and prosper at the highest levels, it is absolutely imperative that a player have the gift of perspective and the emotions of Bjorn Borg. Lee is that kind of pitcher.
But if there is one area of concern about his spring, more so than last spring, is the fact that he entered it lacking the hunger of last year. He was no longer fighting for his professional life but instead attempting to prepare himself to be “the guy,” a role he’s never occupied in the major leagues.
Lee was successful last season mostly because he had pinpoint control from almost the first pitch of the season until the last. He also benefited for most of the season from the simple fact that more eyes were on Sabathia. To the extent a pitcher carrying a miniscule ERA for an entire season can fall under the radar, Lee was that pitcher.
This season will be far different. There is no Sabathia. It’s Lee and a bunch of question marks. To put it in perspective, remember Lee was the last pitcher to make the team last year. Scott Lewis is this year’s Lee. Lee now finds himself having to serve as the role model, the stopper and the stud for a pitching staff that will be watching his every move. It’s far more pressure than he’s ever been under.
Sabathia was always being groomed as a number one starter. That’s never been true of Lee. Indeed, it’s unlikely Lee ever saw himself in that role. Based on his spot in the rotation, though, that’s exactly where he finds himself. He’ll be relegated to taking on the other team’s number one starter nearly every time out. That’s even more pressure.
Lee’s effectiveness is dictated by his control. His career has been the base case for what it looks like when control comes, goes and comes again. And that was without any of the added responsibilities.
That’s not to say that Lee’s lackluster spring is the result of his inability to cope with his new role. It may be simply the result, as he said, of using spring training this year to work on certain aspects of his game rather than trying to replicate an actual start. But time is starting to run short. He has one more start this spring. He doesn’t need to be great. He doesn’t even need to prove he was a worthy recipient of the Cy Young. He just needs to start showing that he’s the guy that can step up and lead a starting pitching staff that for the first time in years doesn’t have an obvious leader.
**
It was nice to see someone associated with the Cleveland Browns actually sit down and give a somewhat comprehensive interview. It wasn’t general manager, George Kokinis or head coach Eric Mangini, both logical choices. And it wasn’t the increasingly more mysterious owner, Randy Lerner. It was Mike Kennan, the team’s new president.
Tony Grossi’s interview had some interesting moments and Grossi hit Kennan with some pretty pointed questions, including questions related to the Browns’ spending to upgrade the Berea complex to meet Mangini’s needs while simultaneously laying off a boatload of low paid employees.
I thought Keenan came off pretty well in the interview overall. I do think he’s understandably downplaying what looks to be a hard economy for the Browns. There are several loges unsold that will go unsold. There will be plenty of season ticket holders that won’t be able to re-up. Sponsors will be lost. And this would be true even if this was a winning team, or at least a potentially winning team. The economy has had that kind of effect. On top of that, if Mangini can’t come in and immediately turn things around, 2010 isn’t going to be any better either on the business side of the operations.
But all that aside, the one thing that did come out of the interview was a clarification of the Browns’ organizational chart. Essentially, Lerner has three direct reports: Keenan, Kokinis and Mangini. It’s a somewhat atypical arrangement in that on most teams the head coach reports to the general manager. It’s also fairly typical for the general manager, in turn, to report to the club president. Thus the Browns are bucking some trends in that respect as well.
That doesn’t mean that there’s inherently anything wrong with Lerner’s org chart but it does signal in a significant way that he plans to stay far closer to the team than perhaps he was just a year ago. By having the three top operational employees in the organization report to him, Lerner doesn’t have a choice but to stay closely connected. If he maintains the kind of distance he’s been used to maintaining, then the organization is headed for potentially destructive and unresolved infighting sooner rather than later.
Any business is an amalgamation of the people running it. When they get along, org charts are irrelevant. But when disputes arise, org charts become a necessity. If a consensus can’t be reached, someone has to call the question. Consider, for example, how this could play out on draft day.
Presumably, Kokinis is in charge of the draft. Mangini is certainly going to have a prominent role in which players are selected as well as what kind of deals may be swung. But what if they end up in a legitimate disagreement that they can’t resolve themselves? By vesting himself with the final word, given how he’s arranged the offices, Lerner will make the call. If he sides with Kokinis, Mangini will be upset and vice versa. The more something like this plays out, the pricklier the atmosphere inside Berea will become.
It would be interesting to know why Lerner willingly put himself and his team in this kind of position when it’s a role he seems uniquely ill-suited to take on. Why is it that he believes this is the best path forward for his team? Kennan could have been asked those questions, but his answers would have been speculative. They really are better left for Lerner. The problem, though, is Lerner’s not talking these days so, as with so much associated with the Browns these days, it’s up to the fans to fill in the blanks.
**
If Kellen Winslow thought leaving Cleveland was going to be his ticket to a new contract, then he better think again. According to reports out of Tampa Bay, new general manager Mark Dominik is in no hurry to give Winslow a new deal, much to the chagrin of Winslow’s new agent, Drew Rosenhaus.
Apparently Dominik is concerned about Winslow’s longevity, which would hardly be a surprise except for the fact that he traded for Winslow in the first place. The Browns got a second round pick in this year’s draft and a fifth round pick next year from the Buccaneers. That may not seem like much but it is enough to suggest that the Buccaneers see Winslow sticking around for awhile anyway.
Winslow never is going to make back all the money he lost because of his foolish foray into stunt motorcycle riding. He can hire 10 Drew Rosenhauses and they’ll never be able to get him the kind of contract that a relatively injury-free career would have delivered.
There were rumblings that one of the reasons the Browns parted with Winslow now is that they had no intention of extending his contract and no appetite for a potential holdout. Kokinis may not have gotten as much as some fans would have liked for Winslow, but considering the business problems he divested himself of, it’s doubtful that Kokinis is second-guessing himself either.
**
With a playoff season that nearly rivals the length of its regular season, basketball is in the position of straddling both the football and the baseball seasons. This year could bring the real possibility of the Cavs playing into June and the Browns, with heightened interest due to a new regime, starting about a month after that. The Indians have about a month to prove themselves to the fans. Thus, this week’s question to ponder is simple: Will anyone even notice the Indians this year?
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Existentially Speaking
Let’s see. Last time we heard about an open quarterback competition with the Cleveland Browns, the head coach was so flummoxed by the logistics of it all that he had to flip a coin just to find a starter for a meaningless preseason game. Here’s hoping that, with the benefit of several months planning, the Browns’ new regime is a little better prepared.
Actually, the impression from new Browns general manager George Kokinis that the team plans on keeping both Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson is probably just Kokinis being Mangini, or is it the other way around? With obfuscation being the modus operandi for now and until another new regime enters the fray for the next phase of a Browns reclamation project with a completion date that rivals that of the atom smasher, it’s hard to know what Kokinis and head coach Eric Mangini really think.
As an aside here, it’s worth examining a little why Kogini (which is a far more polite and “G” rated way to refer to this two-headed hydra than “Mankok”) play so much “hide the sausage” with even the most basic of information. Ostensibly they do it to retain a competitive advantage, but against whom, exactly? At least since 1999, the Browns have been mostly a mess as a franchise to the point that they are often a punch line to a joke, usually one involving the Los Angeles Clippers and the movie “Heaven’s Gate.”
If there is even one team remotely interested in what the Browns might be up to that would be a surprise on the level of Adam Miller being the Indians’ opening day starter. Let me put it in an existential context: if Kogini were to stand up in the middle of the NFL’s spring meetings and detail each and every plan they have for the Browns and no one bothered to stick around and listen, would they really have said anything?
Kogini may see themselves as brilliant tacticians and crafty strategists, but if the rest of the league’s response to whatever they’re cooking up is merely to yawn, why then would they ever bother to guard the information like it’s the secret recipe of herbs and spices used in making Kentucky Fried Chicken?
Though the rest of the league is entirely agnostic about the Browns’ plans at any given moment, there is still a fan base with an almost unquenchable thirst for information about their team. To the extent that anyone cares it’s them and yet from all early indications, rebuilding credibility with that group doesn’t seem to be high on the priority list.
End of aside. Back to the main show.
If Kogini does stick with both Anderson and Quinn in the near term, it’s more or less where former general manager Phil Savage was with the whole thing as well. There is the allure of Anderson’s arm that makes them paper over his accuracy and mechanical blunders. There is the allure of Quinn’s presence and leadership that make them paper over his relative lack of arm strength. (Ok, another quick aside. Quinn doesn’t have a weak arm. Ken Dorsey has a weak arm. Miguel Dilone had a weak arm. Quinn’s arm is just fine. It’s just not as strong as Anderson’s.)
But as I hastened to remind, when last I visited this issue I noted that none of this much matters unless and until a credible receiving corps is being built. That’s really the point here. Don’t get lost in all the Anderson and Quinn talk while losing sight of the ugliness taking place with the receiving corps.
Kellen Winslow is gone. Joe Jurevicius is gone. Right now there is Braylon Edwards, recently signed David Patten (a “possession” receiver, which means he can catch, he just can’t run) and a bunch of others that might, just might, have a future if the Arena Football League ever actually restarts. (Ok, still another quick aside. During the season I get several emails from Al. I like Al. He always has something interesting to say. But Al is oddly enamored with Paul Hubbard for reasons that are unclear to me to this day. I don’t know why Savage traded a fifth round pick in this year’s draft to get Hubbard in the 6th round last season, only to put him on the practice squad and then re-sign him later in the season. That’s never been adequately explained and probably never could be. Nonetheless, I, too, remain fascinated with Hubbard, but solely because we share the same birth date, even if there are dozens of years difference in our ages.)
The rumors are swirling now that Edwards is being shopped, though Kogini deny it in the kind of specific way that seems like hedging. (“Did you say ‘shopped’? No, he’s not being ‘shopped.’ You didn’t ask if I’d listen to offers.”) Maybe that’s all just wishful thinking out there in the free-for-all no-accountability fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants wild west that is the internets. But I tend to think that there is something to it.
Edwards seems as connected to the Browns as Keith Hernandez was to the Indians. He carries himself like a germaphobe at a tattoo parlor. He’s a whiner whose every action says “how long before I’m a free agent?” But is that any reason to simply part ways, especially when there aren’t any viable alternatives? It depends on your perspective.
There are some (ok, many) that feel that cutting Edwards would be addition by subtraction. Consequently almost anything in return via trade is a bonus. There are also some (ok, few) who think that this is a misunderstood genius who, with a little help from the rest of his team, would be among the elite receivers in the league.
It’s a little of both, really. Edwards is certainly a Pro Bowl caliber receiver. He’s got good size and decent speed. In 2007 he had 80 catches for more than 1200 yards and 16 touchdowns. He’s also a truculent borderline malcontent with a huge entitlement need that can never be satisfied. At times he demonstrates the concentration level of a puppy and drops way too many passes to ever be considered a true number one receiver.
That’s the dilemma Kogini face. Which Edwards do they get and when? No one, I suspect, wants a repeat of 2008. Everyone, I believe, would like a return to 2007. But the abject inability to predict at any given moment which you’ll get is vexing. It makes it hard to plan or build a credible and sustainable offense. Indeed, the only reason he gets this level of consideration is his size and speed and the unfilled potential of his 2007 season. Take away just one of those elements and he’s Steve Holden.
If Kogini really are thinking of trading Edwards, it will end up being for the same reason that Mark Shapiro traded Bartolo Colon: it’s a team that’s rebuilding and Edwards monetized into draft choices is more valuable than Edwards dropping passes during the 2009 season. And that’s really how to approach this situation. Kogini haven’t said so, mainly because that would violate every precept by which they live their sneaky little lives, but they are rebuilding this team.
The free agent signings to this point are notable for two reasons: the number of ex-Jets and the age of the players signed. Kogini see the roster as lacking in established NFL-caliber veterans and are adding the ol’ “crafty veterans” by the carload as a stop gap measure. That’s not a bad plan as long as they aren’t silly enough to believe that these players, all with a shelf life of one or two more seasons, tops, can lead this team anywhere but back to a .500 record at best. But I do think that they believe that having them around for a few years will, at some level, obscure the rebuilding process taking place around them.
Frankly, I have no problem with any of this. A team that goes 4-12 should have few if any untouchables. It’s a team whose needs are vast and the best way to address it is to address it in the proper way.
But where I do have a problem is the lack of faith Kogini seem to have in the fans. By keeping the fans at arms length with their lack of candor, they place at risk everything they are trying to do. To put it in existential terms: If Kogini rebuild this team and no one cares, have they really done anything? If you think about it, it’s kind of how Bernie Madoff dealt with his investors. It worked, but only for awhile.
Actually, the impression from new Browns general manager George Kokinis that the team plans on keeping both Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson is probably just Kokinis being Mangini, or is it the other way around? With obfuscation being the modus operandi for now and until another new regime enters the fray for the next phase of a Browns reclamation project with a completion date that rivals that of the atom smasher, it’s hard to know what Kokinis and head coach Eric Mangini really think.
As an aside here, it’s worth examining a little why Kogini (which is a far more polite and “G” rated way to refer to this two-headed hydra than “Mankok”) play so much “hide the sausage” with even the most basic of information. Ostensibly they do it to retain a competitive advantage, but against whom, exactly? At least since 1999, the Browns have been mostly a mess as a franchise to the point that they are often a punch line to a joke, usually one involving the Los Angeles Clippers and the movie “Heaven’s Gate.”
If there is even one team remotely interested in what the Browns might be up to that would be a surprise on the level of Adam Miller being the Indians’ opening day starter. Let me put it in an existential context: if Kogini were to stand up in the middle of the NFL’s spring meetings and detail each and every plan they have for the Browns and no one bothered to stick around and listen, would they really have said anything?
Kogini may see themselves as brilliant tacticians and crafty strategists, but if the rest of the league’s response to whatever they’re cooking up is merely to yawn, why then would they ever bother to guard the information like it’s the secret recipe of herbs and spices used in making Kentucky Fried Chicken?
Though the rest of the league is entirely agnostic about the Browns’ plans at any given moment, there is still a fan base with an almost unquenchable thirst for information about their team. To the extent that anyone cares it’s them and yet from all early indications, rebuilding credibility with that group doesn’t seem to be high on the priority list.
End of aside. Back to the main show.
If Kogini does stick with both Anderson and Quinn in the near term, it’s more or less where former general manager Phil Savage was with the whole thing as well. There is the allure of Anderson’s arm that makes them paper over his accuracy and mechanical blunders. There is the allure of Quinn’s presence and leadership that make them paper over his relative lack of arm strength. (Ok, another quick aside. Quinn doesn’t have a weak arm. Ken Dorsey has a weak arm. Miguel Dilone had a weak arm. Quinn’s arm is just fine. It’s just not as strong as Anderson’s.)
But as I hastened to remind, when last I visited this issue I noted that none of this much matters unless and until a credible receiving corps is being built. That’s really the point here. Don’t get lost in all the Anderson and Quinn talk while losing sight of the ugliness taking place with the receiving corps.
Kellen Winslow is gone. Joe Jurevicius is gone. Right now there is Braylon Edwards, recently signed David Patten (a “possession” receiver, which means he can catch, he just can’t run) and a bunch of others that might, just might, have a future if the Arena Football League ever actually restarts. (Ok, still another quick aside. During the season I get several emails from Al. I like Al. He always has something interesting to say. But Al is oddly enamored with Paul Hubbard for reasons that are unclear to me to this day. I don’t know why Savage traded a fifth round pick in this year’s draft to get Hubbard in the 6th round last season, only to put him on the practice squad and then re-sign him later in the season. That’s never been adequately explained and probably never could be. Nonetheless, I, too, remain fascinated with Hubbard, but solely because we share the same birth date, even if there are dozens of years difference in our ages.)
The rumors are swirling now that Edwards is being shopped, though Kogini deny it in the kind of specific way that seems like hedging. (“Did you say ‘shopped’? No, he’s not being ‘shopped.’ You didn’t ask if I’d listen to offers.”) Maybe that’s all just wishful thinking out there in the free-for-all no-accountability fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants wild west that is the internets. But I tend to think that there is something to it.
Edwards seems as connected to the Browns as Keith Hernandez was to the Indians. He carries himself like a germaphobe at a tattoo parlor. He’s a whiner whose every action says “how long before I’m a free agent?” But is that any reason to simply part ways, especially when there aren’t any viable alternatives? It depends on your perspective.
There are some (ok, many) that feel that cutting Edwards would be addition by subtraction. Consequently almost anything in return via trade is a bonus. There are also some (ok, few) who think that this is a misunderstood genius who, with a little help from the rest of his team, would be among the elite receivers in the league.
It’s a little of both, really. Edwards is certainly a Pro Bowl caliber receiver. He’s got good size and decent speed. In 2007 he had 80 catches for more than 1200 yards and 16 touchdowns. He’s also a truculent borderline malcontent with a huge entitlement need that can never be satisfied. At times he demonstrates the concentration level of a puppy and drops way too many passes to ever be considered a true number one receiver.
That’s the dilemma Kogini face. Which Edwards do they get and when? No one, I suspect, wants a repeat of 2008. Everyone, I believe, would like a return to 2007. But the abject inability to predict at any given moment which you’ll get is vexing. It makes it hard to plan or build a credible and sustainable offense. Indeed, the only reason he gets this level of consideration is his size and speed and the unfilled potential of his 2007 season. Take away just one of those elements and he’s Steve Holden.
If Kogini really are thinking of trading Edwards, it will end up being for the same reason that Mark Shapiro traded Bartolo Colon: it’s a team that’s rebuilding and Edwards monetized into draft choices is more valuable than Edwards dropping passes during the 2009 season. And that’s really how to approach this situation. Kogini haven’t said so, mainly because that would violate every precept by which they live their sneaky little lives, but they are rebuilding this team.
The free agent signings to this point are notable for two reasons: the number of ex-Jets and the age of the players signed. Kogini see the roster as lacking in established NFL-caliber veterans and are adding the ol’ “crafty veterans” by the carload as a stop gap measure. That’s not a bad plan as long as they aren’t silly enough to believe that these players, all with a shelf life of one or two more seasons, tops, can lead this team anywhere but back to a .500 record at best. But I do think that they believe that having them around for a few years will, at some level, obscure the rebuilding process taking place around them.
Frankly, I have no problem with any of this. A team that goes 4-12 should have few if any untouchables. It’s a team whose needs are vast and the best way to address it is to address it in the proper way.
But where I do have a problem is the lack of faith Kogini seem to have in the fans. By keeping the fans at arms length with their lack of candor, they place at risk everything they are trying to do. To put it in existential terms: If Kogini rebuild this team and no one cares, have they really done anything? If you think about it, it’s kind of how Bernie Madoff dealt with his investors. It worked, but only for awhile.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Lngering Items--Madness Edition
If published reports are true, and they appear to be, then Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth can forget about his quadriceps for awhile. He’s got much bigger problems to deal with and they have nothing to do with football.
Stallworth, the enigmatic receiver signed by former general manager Phil Savage before last season, is soon to be in a fight for his freedom, let alone a spot on the Browns’ 2009 roster, as he gets ready to face vehicular manslaughter charges stemming from his striking and killing a pedestrian with his Bentley on a causeway in Miami Beach last week.
Various reports say Stallworth was well over the legal limit for blood alcohol at the time of the accident. If true, Stallworth’s incredibly bad judgment will serve as the marker for the dramatic and tragic turnaround of several lives.
Of immediate concern is the family of Mario Reyes, the person who was killed by an inattentive Stallworth. Reyes had just left work minutes before the accident. How anyone copes with a tragedy so random is hard to know. And while the Reyes family will undoubtedly be compensated for their loss, really is there any amount that will ease the pain of a wife who lost her husband of a child who lost his father?
The next victims are Stallworth’s family. As innocent bystanders, they are forced, too, to endure the loss of a loved one who may very well end up in prison for a very long time. Even if Stallworth somehow avoids prison that can never change the permanent impact that the events of last Saturday morning will have on them. They will forever be branded by a punishing public eye.
As for Stallworth, one never knows what to make of a person caught in such circumstances. Certainly, there are those who will feel that he gets what he deserves. It’s hard to argue against it. Stallworth was an obscenely overpaid football player living the life of privilege. The day of the accident he had just been paid nearly $5 million from the Browns as the second installment on an equally obscene contract. We don’t know all the facts, but it’s not hard to conclude that at roughly 7 a.m. and with a blood alcohol well over the legal limit, Stallworth wasn’t starting a new day but finishing an old one. Paid his money, he took his chances.
But there’s also a certain amount of “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling about the whole thing. The truth is most of those who will have no trouble feeling indignant about Stallworth have themselves probably driven more than a few times with a little too much alcohol in their system. On any of those occasions, a child could have darted out from between parked cars or tried to beat the traffic as he crossed a busy street. Even under the best of circumstances, let alone impaired circumstances, tragedy could result and lives forever changed.
There’s no excuse for what Stallworth did. There never is. It’s just an acknowledgement that it is hardly ever a simple case of evil is as evil does. I’m certain Stallworth’s grief is real but it will hardly suffice. It won’t bring back Mario Reyes and it isn’t likely to save his career.
At this point, no one associated with the Browns has said much. But really, what could they say anyway? It’s too soon to deal with football issues. Undoubtedly, though, the chances of Stallworth ever suiting up again for the Browns, or anyone else in the NFL, are unlikely at this point.
At the very least, Stallworth will be suspended by the league. It’s just a question for how long. Then it will be up to the Browns whether or not to sever its ties with Stallworth. He may be working out right now with the team, but that doesn’t mean much. Had it not been for the salary cap impact cutting him would have had, Stallworth probably would have been released instead of being paid the bonus last week. If the Browns release him now, the cap hit will be even worse unless they can find a way to void that bonus payment. That will be difficult, but not impossible.
Should the Browns keep Stallworth around, he’ll be nothing but a distraction. As difficult as the media scrutiny will be, the fan scrutiny will be far more unrelenting, especially on the road. This tragedy will forever define Stallworth, both on and away from the playing field. Besides, Stallworth isn’t a fan favorite in the first place and now he’s given a reason for fans to like him even less, if that’s even possible.
This saga will play out over the next several weeks and months. But as an interim matter, and not to make light of the real life implications of this tragedy, the Browns now officially have a major problem at wide receiver. Assuming Stallworth is gone, that leaves the Browns with exactly five wide receivers on the roster: Braylon Edwards, Syndric Steptoe, Paul Hubbard, Lance Leggett, and Josh Cribbs. That outlook makes it officially irrelevant who quarterbacks this team next year. With no one to throw to anyone, including Ken Dorsey, is perfectly capable of handing off the ball.
That roster bonus and 2009 salary to Joe Jurevicius suddenly isn’t looking all that expensive, is it?
**
The Browns’ first “voluntary” workouts under new head coach Eric Mangini began this past week and, per the Belichick manual, they are off limits to the media. In fact, they are so off limits that the entire Browns’ organization is officially forbidden from commenting on who exactly is and is not at these workouts. We do know Stallworth is there, according to his attorney. Perhaps his attorney didn’t get the two word memo from Mangini that says “acknowledge nothing.”
Mangini tends to approach these kinds of activities like the CIA approaches covert operations. If they are never acknowledged, then whatever actually takes place can be easily denied. And let’s dispense right now with the notion that these workouts are voluntary. That’s just a legal word to get the team in compliance with the collective bargaining agreement. In actuality, the workouts are about as voluntary as attendance at the boss’s Christmas party.
That’s why it’s fascinating that defensive tackle Shaun Rogers is not attending. This was as predictable as a Mangini press conference. Rogers is walking around with a giant chip on his shoulder over perceived slights at the hands of Mangini. It’s his alpha way of saying “you may be the coach, but you aren’t the boss of me.” It’s also his business way of saying “do you know how much money I could make if they cut me?”
The fact that Rogers is tweaking Mangini in this manner has to be gnawing at him like a flesh-eating virus. It’s as if you can hear the pinwheels turning in Mangini’s head even as he downplays the whole matter.
But if Rogers thinks this little test of manhood is over, he should think twice. Mangini isn’t the kind of guy to forgive such transgressions, even if his ego figures prominently into the reason this little stare down started in the first place. That doesn’t mean that Rogers will be sent packing anytime soon. That would be giving Rogers what he apparently wants, which means that Mangini will do the opposite. Besides, Mangini has a roster full of more holes than the economy and isn’t about to open another one just to placate a player with a grudge who also now thinks he may be a tad underpaid.
Instead, Mangini will find other ways to extract his revenge. Maybe it will be an extra set of gassers or two for the entire defensive line, particularly when he sees Rogers bent over trying to catch his breath from the last set. Maybe he’ll figure out what Rogers’ favorite meal is in the Browns’ cafeteria and eliminate from the menu. Maybe he’ll just keep calling Rogers’ cell phone and then hang up. Who knows since this whole thing is so childish in the first place.
One thing, though, is certain. When it comes time for Rogers to make his next move, you can already pretty much count on what it will be. Once the draft is over, the Browns will have their first mandatory off season workouts. Rogers will be there. And when the weigh-in comes, you just know that he’ll be overweight. Not grossly overweight, mind you, but just enough to send Mangini back into his office to crawl into a fetal position for a few hours.
**
Corey Ivy? Really?
**
Noah Herron? Really?
**
As I told you previously, don’t expect the Browns to be anything but fringe players in free agency this off season. That’s certainly been true. Thus far, the Browns have signed a bunch of no-name former Jets and a few no-name others. To say that as a result the roster has been improved would be only slightly less outrageous than reporting that AIG just paid another round of employee bonuses.
The Browns need depth, certainly, but if the likes of Ivy, Herron, John St. Clair, David Bowens, C.J. Mosely and Robert Royal are what passes for depth, then all Mangini’s done is replace one set of rickety deck chairs on this Titanic with another. It’s hard to see exactly how any of these signings really advance the team’s overall interests and, not surprisingly, Mangini isn’t commenting.
With an offseason that is going about as well at this point as last season, Mangini and Kokinis better have something dramatic planned for the draft. Otherwise, with an economy that’s hitting this area as hard as any, owner Randy Lerner is going to find a lot of season ticket holders dressed up as empty seats come September.
**
Apropos to nothing, this week’s question to ponder is specifically directed at fans of Fox’s 24: Knowing that few teams in the NFL employ Level 6 analysts, will Mangini start encrypting his weekly game plans with Blowfish 148? On second thought, maybe he already does.
Stallworth, the enigmatic receiver signed by former general manager Phil Savage before last season, is soon to be in a fight for his freedom, let alone a spot on the Browns’ 2009 roster, as he gets ready to face vehicular manslaughter charges stemming from his striking and killing a pedestrian with his Bentley on a causeway in Miami Beach last week.
Various reports say Stallworth was well over the legal limit for blood alcohol at the time of the accident. If true, Stallworth’s incredibly bad judgment will serve as the marker for the dramatic and tragic turnaround of several lives.
Of immediate concern is the family of Mario Reyes, the person who was killed by an inattentive Stallworth. Reyes had just left work minutes before the accident. How anyone copes with a tragedy so random is hard to know. And while the Reyes family will undoubtedly be compensated for their loss, really is there any amount that will ease the pain of a wife who lost her husband of a child who lost his father?
The next victims are Stallworth’s family. As innocent bystanders, they are forced, too, to endure the loss of a loved one who may very well end up in prison for a very long time. Even if Stallworth somehow avoids prison that can never change the permanent impact that the events of last Saturday morning will have on them. They will forever be branded by a punishing public eye.
As for Stallworth, one never knows what to make of a person caught in such circumstances. Certainly, there are those who will feel that he gets what he deserves. It’s hard to argue against it. Stallworth was an obscenely overpaid football player living the life of privilege. The day of the accident he had just been paid nearly $5 million from the Browns as the second installment on an equally obscene contract. We don’t know all the facts, but it’s not hard to conclude that at roughly 7 a.m. and with a blood alcohol well over the legal limit, Stallworth wasn’t starting a new day but finishing an old one. Paid his money, he took his chances.
But there’s also a certain amount of “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling about the whole thing. The truth is most of those who will have no trouble feeling indignant about Stallworth have themselves probably driven more than a few times with a little too much alcohol in their system. On any of those occasions, a child could have darted out from between parked cars or tried to beat the traffic as he crossed a busy street. Even under the best of circumstances, let alone impaired circumstances, tragedy could result and lives forever changed.
There’s no excuse for what Stallworth did. There never is. It’s just an acknowledgement that it is hardly ever a simple case of evil is as evil does. I’m certain Stallworth’s grief is real but it will hardly suffice. It won’t bring back Mario Reyes and it isn’t likely to save his career.
At this point, no one associated with the Browns has said much. But really, what could they say anyway? It’s too soon to deal with football issues. Undoubtedly, though, the chances of Stallworth ever suiting up again for the Browns, or anyone else in the NFL, are unlikely at this point.
At the very least, Stallworth will be suspended by the league. It’s just a question for how long. Then it will be up to the Browns whether or not to sever its ties with Stallworth. He may be working out right now with the team, but that doesn’t mean much. Had it not been for the salary cap impact cutting him would have had, Stallworth probably would have been released instead of being paid the bonus last week. If the Browns release him now, the cap hit will be even worse unless they can find a way to void that bonus payment. That will be difficult, but not impossible.
Should the Browns keep Stallworth around, he’ll be nothing but a distraction. As difficult as the media scrutiny will be, the fan scrutiny will be far more unrelenting, especially on the road. This tragedy will forever define Stallworth, both on and away from the playing field. Besides, Stallworth isn’t a fan favorite in the first place and now he’s given a reason for fans to like him even less, if that’s even possible.
This saga will play out over the next several weeks and months. But as an interim matter, and not to make light of the real life implications of this tragedy, the Browns now officially have a major problem at wide receiver. Assuming Stallworth is gone, that leaves the Browns with exactly five wide receivers on the roster: Braylon Edwards, Syndric Steptoe, Paul Hubbard, Lance Leggett, and Josh Cribbs. That outlook makes it officially irrelevant who quarterbacks this team next year. With no one to throw to anyone, including Ken Dorsey, is perfectly capable of handing off the ball.
That roster bonus and 2009 salary to Joe Jurevicius suddenly isn’t looking all that expensive, is it?
**
The Browns’ first “voluntary” workouts under new head coach Eric Mangini began this past week and, per the Belichick manual, they are off limits to the media. In fact, they are so off limits that the entire Browns’ organization is officially forbidden from commenting on who exactly is and is not at these workouts. We do know Stallworth is there, according to his attorney. Perhaps his attorney didn’t get the two word memo from Mangini that says “acknowledge nothing.”
Mangini tends to approach these kinds of activities like the CIA approaches covert operations. If they are never acknowledged, then whatever actually takes place can be easily denied. And let’s dispense right now with the notion that these workouts are voluntary. That’s just a legal word to get the team in compliance with the collective bargaining agreement. In actuality, the workouts are about as voluntary as attendance at the boss’s Christmas party.
That’s why it’s fascinating that defensive tackle Shaun Rogers is not attending. This was as predictable as a Mangini press conference. Rogers is walking around with a giant chip on his shoulder over perceived slights at the hands of Mangini. It’s his alpha way of saying “you may be the coach, but you aren’t the boss of me.” It’s also his business way of saying “do you know how much money I could make if they cut me?”
The fact that Rogers is tweaking Mangini in this manner has to be gnawing at him like a flesh-eating virus. It’s as if you can hear the pinwheels turning in Mangini’s head even as he downplays the whole matter.
But if Rogers thinks this little test of manhood is over, he should think twice. Mangini isn’t the kind of guy to forgive such transgressions, even if his ego figures prominently into the reason this little stare down started in the first place. That doesn’t mean that Rogers will be sent packing anytime soon. That would be giving Rogers what he apparently wants, which means that Mangini will do the opposite. Besides, Mangini has a roster full of more holes than the economy and isn’t about to open another one just to placate a player with a grudge who also now thinks he may be a tad underpaid.
Instead, Mangini will find other ways to extract his revenge. Maybe it will be an extra set of gassers or two for the entire defensive line, particularly when he sees Rogers bent over trying to catch his breath from the last set. Maybe he’ll figure out what Rogers’ favorite meal is in the Browns’ cafeteria and eliminate from the menu. Maybe he’ll just keep calling Rogers’ cell phone and then hang up. Who knows since this whole thing is so childish in the first place.
One thing, though, is certain. When it comes time for Rogers to make his next move, you can already pretty much count on what it will be. Once the draft is over, the Browns will have their first mandatory off season workouts. Rogers will be there. And when the weigh-in comes, you just know that he’ll be overweight. Not grossly overweight, mind you, but just enough to send Mangini back into his office to crawl into a fetal position for a few hours.
**
Corey Ivy? Really?
**
Noah Herron? Really?
**
As I told you previously, don’t expect the Browns to be anything but fringe players in free agency this off season. That’s certainly been true. Thus far, the Browns have signed a bunch of no-name former Jets and a few no-name others. To say that as a result the roster has been improved would be only slightly less outrageous than reporting that AIG just paid another round of employee bonuses.
The Browns need depth, certainly, but if the likes of Ivy, Herron, John St. Clair, David Bowens, C.J. Mosely and Robert Royal are what passes for depth, then all Mangini’s done is replace one set of rickety deck chairs on this Titanic with another. It’s hard to see exactly how any of these signings really advance the team’s overall interests and, not surprisingly, Mangini isn’t commenting.
With an offseason that is going about as well at this point as last season, Mangini and Kokinis better have something dramatic planned for the draft. Otherwise, with an economy that’s hitting this area as hard as any, owner Randy Lerner is going to find a lot of season ticket holders dressed up as empty seats come September.
**
Apropos to nothing, this week’s question to ponder is specifically directed at fans of Fox’s 24: Knowing that few teams in the NFL employ Level 6 analysts, will Mangini start encrypting his weekly game plans with Blowfish 148? On second thought, maybe he already does.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Trading Places
To those who think former Cleveland Browns general manager Phil Savage blew it when he failed to trade quarterback Derek Anderson prior to the start of last season, there is now more fuel in the fire in the form of disgruntled Denver Broncos quarterback Jay Cutler.
The back story on Cutler is rather straightforward. Despite Cutler having put together a Pro Bowl year in 2008 for the Broncos, new head coach Josh McDaniels isn’t particularly impressed. Indeed, McDaniels is so unimpressed with the former first rounder that he tried to engineer a trade that would ultimately have landed former New England Patriots’ back up, Matt Cassell, in Denver while Cutler went to Tampa Bay. In the parlance of “Cush” from Jerry McGuire, if McDaniels had his way Cutler would surf not ski.
It may end up that way for Cutler but if it does, it will certainly be because the Browns had something to do with it, one way or another. The Browns, too, have a quarterback problem to solve between Anderson and Brady Quinn. As it stands, new head coach Eric Mangini and his hand-picked general manager, George Kokinis, are publicly non-committal on the Anderson/Quinn issue. Of course, Mangini and Kokinis are publicly non-committal on what they had for lunch yesterday so the fact that they aren’t saying much about either quarterback is a marker for nothing.
But the Browns did pay Anderson the roster bonus he was due last week in order to keep their options open as draft day approaches. The most likely option to most fans is that the Browns trade Anderson for draft choices. Exactly what he could garner at this point is hard to say in light of the clunker of a season that Anderson had last year and the relatively paltry sum the Patriots got from the Chiefs for Cassel
That’s where the enmity toward Savage comes in. If Savage hadn’t dithered last season, the Browns would not now find themselves in a scenario in which their ability to move Anderson is impacted by what the Broncos do with Cutler.
Savage, ever the gambler, may have just overplayed his hand. Thinking that two good quarterbacks are always better than one Savage stuck with Anderson and Quinn for an additional season and, in the end, it ended up being part of the reason Savage now has “former” in his title. What Anderson showed last season, more than anything, is that he couldn’t find another path to success when teams figured out the path that he was on. Take away the long passes and expose his inability to throw short. Making adjustments is what separates the Andersons, Kelly Holcombs and Scott Mitchells of the world from the Tom Bradys.
Perhaps that’s what has McDaniels so spooked in Denver as well. While Broncos fans may see Cutler as a first round pick that’s just starting to round into form after only a few seasons, McDaniel obviously sees enough flaws to want to send him packing, at least if the return on it was Cassel. This isn’t the moment to get into McDaniel’s stilted thinking on this issue, but it is worth noting that Cutler with less around him, accomplished just as much as Cassel did with a better supporting cast. But I digress.
Having made what is essentially a “no turning back” decision, it was imperative for McDaniels to get that trade done. He didn’t and now he’s stuck with a player occupying the most important position on the team in whom he has basically and very publicly said he doesn’t have confidence. To tell Cutler “bygones” and act as if it never happened rarely works, which means Cutler will be gone.
The question then is who makes the first move, Cleveland or Denver? It’s an interesting question without an obvious answer. Even with the collateral problems that befall either team if they maintain the status quo, moving a quarterback in each case is probably more of a “nice to do” than a “have to do.” When you factor in the collateral circumstances, though, the Browns’ need to make a move is less immediate. Cutler has been publicly disrespected and has asked for a trade. Neither Anderson nor Quinn has gone that route. Advantage, Denver.
But the suggestion that the Browns can keep both Anderson and Quinn in 2009 without it impacting the team is the kind of folly that coaches often embrace when they can’t make a decision. In the first place, both quarterbacks are paid “starter” money, which means that having both on the roster dedicates too much money to one position for a team that needs to spread the wealth better in order to get better. Secondly, because both quarterbacks are viewed as starters by their teammates, the team will ultimately divide into two camps if/when Mangini lands on one of them. It’s an unhealthy situation on a team that is already sick. In that sense, advantage Browns.
The only saving grace, perhaps, is that there are enough teams with needs at quarterback to accommodate a market where both Anderson and Cutler are available. Right now, Tampa Bay still needs a quarterback. Minnesota has Tarvaris Jackson, which means they, too, need a quarterback. Mangini’s former team, the Jets, could use one as well unless they believe Kellen Clemens is the answer. Of course, if they thought that, why’d they sign Brett Favre last season? Even the Chicago Bears could be in the market. Kyle Orton is a modern-day Mike Phipps. Don’t forget that if Denver does trade Cutler, they develop an immediate need as well.
Interestingly, Denver, by virtue of its draft position (12th and 48th picks) and its needs becomes the most likely trade partner, but probably as part of a multi-team swap. It would be a surprise if McDaniels saw Anderson as a worthy successor to Cutler. That’s like leaving the Hertz office and walking across the street to Avis because you think the color selection on the mini-vans at Avis is better.
The same goes for the Browns. Trading Anderson for Cutler is to substitute one twin of a different mother for the other. As each team probably sees it, there’s a lot of potential to fall in love with and a lot of warts to live with when it comes to each.
Thus, to make it happen with Anderson, either or both teams will have to find a third team. It’s really the same kind of scenario McDaniels was cooking up originally, but this time it’s complicated by the fact that there isn’t a Cassel readily available. Thus McDaniels has to be convinced that he can find a quarterback in the draft or another team has a Cassel-like backup that can step right in. Given the teams with quarterback needs, the chance of finding one from that bunch is nil. There is a chance that other teams have a swan hiding in the background, but none are readily apparent.
That’s where Quinn enters the picture. While McDaniels may not have an interest in Anderson, he may feel much differently about Quinn. Still possessing an impressive pedigree and with a limited body of work to judge, Quinn falls in the alluring category. Frankly it’s a far more plausible scenario to see Denver and Cleveland enter into a multi-person trade featuring Quinn going to Denver and players and picks coming to Cleveland and Cutler landing, for example, in Tampa Bay than any trade involving Anderson.
Are Kokinis and Mangini ready to take that on? They might. Neither has any investment in Quinn. The same goes for the fans. They may like Quinn, but he’s not Bernie Kosar. Kokinis and Mangini won’t have to worry about their flagship radio station hanging them in effigy if they trade Quinn. There will be blowback, but after everything else that’s gone down with this franchise in the last year or so, it will probably feel like a light breeze in comparison.
But if there’s one reason above all others that might make dumping Quinn attractive to Kokinis and Mangini is the signal it would send. Nothing says “new regime” quicker than the public execution of the previous regime’s signature trade.
The back story on Cutler is rather straightforward. Despite Cutler having put together a Pro Bowl year in 2008 for the Broncos, new head coach Josh McDaniels isn’t particularly impressed. Indeed, McDaniels is so unimpressed with the former first rounder that he tried to engineer a trade that would ultimately have landed former New England Patriots’ back up, Matt Cassell, in Denver while Cutler went to Tampa Bay. In the parlance of “Cush” from Jerry McGuire, if McDaniels had his way Cutler would surf not ski.
It may end up that way for Cutler but if it does, it will certainly be because the Browns had something to do with it, one way or another. The Browns, too, have a quarterback problem to solve between Anderson and Brady Quinn. As it stands, new head coach Eric Mangini and his hand-picked general manager, George Kokinis, are publicly non-committal on the Anderson/Quinn issue. Of course, Mangini and Kokinis are publicly non-committal on what they had for lunch yesterday so the fact that they aren’t saying much about either quarterback is a marker for nothing.
But the Browns did pay Anderson the roster bonus he was due last week in order to keep their options open as draft day approaches. The most likely option to most fans is that the Browns trade Anderson for draft choices. Exactly what he could garner at this point is hard to say in light of the clunker of a season that Anderson had last year and the relatively paltry sum the Patriots got from the Chiefs for Cassel
That’s where the enmity toward Savage comes in. If Savage hadn’t dithered last season, the Browns would not now find themselves in a scenario in which their ability to move Anderson is impacted by what the Broncos do with Cutler.
Savage, ever the gambler, may have just overplayed his hand. Thinking that two good quarterbacks are always better than one Savage stuck with Anderson and Quinn for an additional season and, in the end, it ended up being part of the reason Savage now has “former” in his title. What Anderson showed last season, more than anything, is that he couldn’t find another path to success when teams figured out the path that he was on. Take away the long passes and expose his inability to throw short. Making adjustments is what separates the Andersons, Kelly Holcombs and Scott Mitchells of the world from the Tom Bradys.
Perhaps that’s what has McDaniels so spooked in Denver as well. While Broncos fans may see Cutler as a first round pick that’s just starting to round into form after only a few seasons, McDaniel obviously sees enough flaws to want to send him packing, at least if the return on it was Cassel. This isn’t the moment to get into McDaniel’s stilted thinking on this issue, but it is worth noting that Cutler with less around him, accomplished just as much as Cassel did with a better supporting cast. But I digress.
Having made what is essentially a “no turning back” decision, it was imperative for McDaniels to get that trade done. He didn’t and now he’s stuck with a player occupying the most important position on the team in whom he has basically and very publicly said he doesn’t have confidence. To tell Cutler “bygones” and act as if it never happened rarely works, which means Cutler will be gone.
The question then is who makes the first move, Cleveland or Denver? It’s an interesting question without an obvious answer. Even with the collateral problems that befall either team if they maintain the status quo, moving a quarterback in each case is probably more of a “nice to do” than a “have to do.” When you factor in the collateral circumstances, though, the Browns’ need to make a move is less immediate. Cutler has been publicly disrespected and has asked for a trade. Neither Anderson nor Quinn has gone that route. Advantage, Denver.
But the suggestion that the Browns can keep both Anderson and Quinn in 2009 without it impacting the team is the kind of folly that coaches often embrace when they can’t make a decision. In the first place, both quarterbacks are paid “starter” money, which means that having both on the roster dedicates too much money to one position for a team that needs to spread the wealth better in order to get better. Secondly, because both quarterbacks are viewed as starters by their teammates, the team will ultimately divide into two camps if/when Mangini lands on one of them. It’s an unhealthy situation on a team that is already sick. In that sense, advantage Browns.
The only saving grace, perhaps, is that there are enough teams with needs at quarterback to accommodate a market where both Anderson and Cutler are available. Right now, Tampa Bay still needs a quarterback. Minnesota has Tarvaris Jackson, which means they, too, need a quarterback. Mangini’s former team, the Jets, could use one as well unless they believe Kellen Clemens is the answer. Of course, if they thought that, why’d they sign Brett Favre last season? Even the Chicago Bears could be in the market. Kyle Orton is a modern-day Mike Phipps. Don’t forget that if Denver does trade Cutler, they develop an immediate need as well.
Interestingly, Denver, by virtue of its draft position (12th and 48th picks) and its needs becomes the most likely trade partner, but probably as part of a multi-team swap. It would be a surprise if McDaniels saw Anderson as a worthy successor to Cutler. That’s like leaving the Hertz office and walking across the street to Avis because you think the color selection on the mini-vans at Avis is better.
The same goes for the Browns. Trading Anderson for Cutler is to substitute one twin of a different mother for the other. As each team probably sees it, there’s a lot of potential to fall in love with and a lot of warts to live with when it comes to each.
Thus, to make it happen with Anderson, either or both teams will have to find a third team. It’s really the same kind of scenario McDaniels was cooking up originally, but this time it’s complicated by the fact that there isn’t a Cassel readily available. Thus McDaniels has to be convinced that he can find a quarterback in the draft or another team has a Cassel-like backup that can step right in. Given the teams with quarterback needs, the chance of finding one from that bunch is nil. There is a chance that other teams have a swan hiding in the background, but none are readily apparent.
That’s where Quinn enters the picture. While McDaniels may not have an interest in Anderson, he may feel much differently about Quinn. Still possessing an impressive pedigree and with a limited body of work to judge, Quinn falls in the alluring category. Frankly it’s a far more plausible scenario to see Denver and Cleveland enter into a multi-person trade featuring Quinn going to Denver and players and picks coming to Cleveland and Cutler landing, for example, in Tampa Bay than any trade involving Anderson.
Are Kokinis and Mangini ready to take that on? They might. Neither has any investment in Quinn. The same goes for the fans. They may like Quinn, but he’s not Bernie Kosar. Kokinis and Mangini won’t have to worry about their flagship radio station hanging them in effigy if they trade Quinn. There will be blowback, but after everything else that’s gone down with this franchise in the last year or so, it will probably feel like a light breeze in comparison.
But if there’s one reason above all others that might make dumping Quinn attractive to Kokinis and Mangini is the signal it would send. Nothing says “new regime” quicker than the public execution of the previous regime’s signature trade.
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