Being the worst free agent signing in the history of a franchise doesn’t automatically make one a bad person. Killing a man while you’re under the influence of alcohol pretty gets one a lot closer.
Cleveland Browns receiver Donte Stallworth has been given his notice by Commissioner Roger Goddell that he’ll remain under suspension for the 2009 NFL season. After that, he’s free to re-apply for re-admission to the fraternity. While appearing quite contrite and saying all the right things, at least through his lawyer, Stallworth still has miles to go before the stain of his offenses start to fade. To some, they probably hope that never happens.
Considering the gravity of Stallworth’s criminal behavior, the truth is that the only reason Stallworth isn’t still in jail is the result of the convergence of a moneyed ballplayer, a lenient prosecutor and an overburden edjustice system in Miami’s Dade County. Those presented the exact right recipe to allow Stallworth to escape the harsher punishment he otherwise deserved by throwing around enough millions to escape the kind of justice that has ensnared many others.
Sure, he’s forever barred from driving a motor vehicle (the over and under on how long it will take him to break that restriction once he thinks no one is looking currently stands at 23 days according to Las Vegas oddsmakers). He has a healthy amount of community service to perform, although until I see a picture of him wearing a yellow vest and picking up garbage on the side of I-75 in the middle of the August heat for 8 hours a day that punishment is mostly irrelevant. And he probably surrendered a healthy amount of the millions Randy Lerner was foolishly talked into paying him by deposed general manager Phil Savage. All that did was buy off a desperate family from pushing the case further. It couldn’t and didn’t bring back a life.
But the notion that none of this makes Stallworth a bad guy, as he said recently, is laughable. If anything, it’s the exact definition of what a bad guy is, that is if you think a bad guy is someone who abuses the privileges he’s been given and it ends up in tragedy for someone else.
Let’s put Stallworth in some contemporary context. Is Stallworth’s actions worse than, say, Michael Vick’s? Depends on who you ask, I suppose, but from a pure law and order standpoint Vick spent much more time in jail and much more time in Goodell’s dog house, so to speak. Maybe that says something about how fondly this society thinks of its animals vs. its citizens, but doesn’t it also say something about how this society values the actions of a drunk driver?
Where are the protests? Where is MADD threatening to show up at every Browns game as long as Stallworth is a member of the team? This isn’t about trying to place dots on a sliding scale in order to put a value on the seriousness of one’s offenses, but ask yourself, is Vick really worse than Stallworth?
Terry Pluto, writing in the Plain Dealer, thinks Goodell got it right by suspending Stallworth for a year. Maybe he did, but frankly, if Goodell threw him out of the league permanently I’d be fine with that as well.
I’m less concerned, though, with Goodell at the moment and more concerned with the lack of response from the Browns. Out of the parochial concerns of a salary cap hit that will have absolutely no actual impact on them this season, Stallworth technically remains an employee of the club; albeit an employee in unpaid status.
Allowing Stallworth to maintain any sort of status with this storied franchise is the kind of thing that Savage would have done. He always favored optionality over common senses. But from everything we’ve been led to believe about new head coach Eric Mangini, he’s tolerant like Vladmir Putin is tolerant. Some messages are worth sending to your constituents, in this case the fans and this is one of those times.
Consider for a moment how many deserved public relations hits Lerner has taken in the last year. Unquestionably, he’s the least liked of the owners of the town’s three major professional teams. While standing up publicly for ethics and morals by cutting Stallworth isn’t going to repair Lerner’s image immediately, it would certainly be a good start.
It makes me think of the verse in the Bruce Springsteen song “Long Walk Home.” The song’s voice, remembering a walk through town with his dad, says:
My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town
It's a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
That flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."
Well, that Cleveland Browns flag is flying over the Stadium at the moment, but for each day the Browns continue to hold on to Stallworth over such trivial concerns as this year’s salary cap tells everyone that with this team, nothing is set in stone. They don’t know who they are, have no clue what to do and have no limit to what they won’t do, including keeping a person on the roster who killed an innocent man who, himself, was just taking his own long walk home.
**
Although Mangini has been tongue-tied in how to address the Stallworth situation, other than the ubiquitous “it’s something we continue to evaluate” or some similar nonsense, he was far more verbose, in deed if not word, in dumping serial loudmouth Shaun Smith last week.
This wasn’t about creating a roster spot to sign another lineman to replace Rex Hadnot. It was about much more. On just the surface, Mangini wanted to make Smith an example in order to establish his own sea legs with the team. It’s one thing to talk tough, it’s another thing to be tough. If it’s true that Smith’s Romeo Crennel-like approach to training camp had worn thin after just a few sessions, then cutting him now before Smith can further pollute the atmosphere makes sense.
But you also can’t discount the Brady Quinn factor and in that sense, cutting Smith may be a bit of a signal on where Mangini is on that issue. Smith isn’t just a loudmouth of the first order, he’s a pain in the ass player whose contributions will always be measured against the distractions he brings. If he was on a short leash, it’s only because he deserved to be.
When Smith punched Quinn in the face last season, it undoubtedly had a subtle but definite impact on the rest of the locker room. While I’m sure it’s happened somewhere else, I can’t remember a time where a player on any team physically assaulted one of the team’s marquee players and was around long enough to brag about it. The only thing that probably saved Smith last year was Crennel’s grandfatherly approach to discipline, which is to say that at most Smith got a stern lecture followed by a big bear hug.
With Mangini, it was always going to be a different story. Mangini might claim that the players come with a clean slate, but that’s more public relations hooey than reality. Smith has a history. But more to the point, Smith has a history with Quinn. If Quinn is going to be this team’s starting quarterback, it doesn’t help to have someone like Smith around the rest of the team given both her verbosity and his obvious dislike for Quinn.
Mangini hasn’t done much to tip his hand about which quarterback he prefers, which is why you have to read the tea leaves. This is one tea leaf that I think is worth reading. Mangini may not be locked in on Quinn yet but let’s just say he probably thinks the kid has a bright future.
**
Someone explain to me again why a rules official put Tiger Woods and Padraig Harrington on the clock with three holes to play in last week’s Bridgestone-WGC event at Firestone Country Club. Maybe they were lingering a bit too long, but it’s not like this was a hack foursome backing up the course at Manakiki on a Saturday morning.
For too long, golf has looked for a worthy adversary for Woods and may have one in Harrington. They were engaging in what looked to be an epic battle. And just when the match is reaching its emotional apex, along comes a rules official and tells them to hurry up because, gosh, you don’t want the event to bleed into the Sunday 6 o’clock news where some dimwitted new reader is waiting to breathlessly tell us about either a fire on the east side or a Walk-A-Thon of some sort.
The argument for putting them on the clock is that they should have to live within the same time constraints as every other golfer. On the surface, that makes sense. The reality is that on the Sunday of a PGA tournament, there is no such thing as a time constraints. Three-quarters of the remaining field know they have no chance of winning and play as quickly as they can so they can get the heck out of there and on to the next event. In other words, they’ll play fast, very fast. That leaves essentially a wide open course for the other quarter of the field that has a reasonable shot at a high finish. If in the end that results in an extra 10 minutes, how is that a big deal? Golf was never meant to be a timed event. Besides, just move up the tee times if you’re worried about the finish.
The other argument is that this goofy rule was voted in by the players and so every player should live with it. Again, on the surface that makes sense. But the rule wasn’t so much voted on as dictated. It’s sold to the players as necessary in order to meet the demands of the networks that pay millions to broadcast the events. Yet those same constraints don’t apply to, say, football or baseball where the broadcast fee rights are even higher. Football often does go into overtime and baseball, as George Carlin would say, might go on and on and we don’t know when it will even end. The next time Fox moves a playoff game that’s running long to FX because it’s time for local news will be the first.
Sure, Harrington cracked under that extra pressure and all Woods did was hit an 8-iron 178 yards to within a foot. That means Woods probably wins anyway. But without the pressure to rush his next shot, who’s to say that Harrington doesn’t sink that chip? Harrington is a pretty fair golf in his own right, so he had more of a chance than, say, you or me.
So much of golf’s history revolves around great matches. Woods made history with another victory in Akron but a more lasting impression of that day was lost because of an anal-retentive rules official with a stop watch.
**
The Indians are in Minnesota this weekend, or maybe it’s Kansas City, hard to remember. What isn’t is this week’s question to ponder: Does the summer move slower or faster when the Indians are out of it by June?
Friday, August 14, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
They Don't Keep Anybody
If anyone associated with the Cleveland Indians at the moment is a little irritated with fan reaction to their relatively decent play of late, he should know that the team has only itself to blame.
Indians fans, or at least a healthy majority of them, at this moment are so disillusioned with the leadership and direction of the franchise that nothing short of major, dramatic changes is going to change their indifference.
They’ve heard Indians president and co-owner Paul Dolan candidly admit that the best this team can ever hope for is to be in the playoffs rarely and be competitive occasionally. They’ve seen player after player after player after player bump up against a contract expiration date only to be traded as a result. They’ve seen a general manager spin and wring dry every available cliché about the young, cheap talent he’s acquired, knowing full well that not one of these players will reach his prime in Cleveland unless he’s abjectly mediocre.
The reasons to be cynical are as compelling as they are overwhelming. The reasons to be optimistic are as few as they are underwhelming. So what if the Indians take two of three from the White Sox? They still remain one of the worst teams in the league.
In truth, the fate of the Indians is gut wrenching to the true fan, and by true fan I mean anyone that’s been following the team closely at least since Cory Snyder was a rookie. They don’t want to see their team fail. It’s far more fun when every pitch thrown in September or October has meaning. Give these fans even the sliver of a reason to believe and they’ll excuse the years of mistreatment faster than Red Sox fans are forgiving David Ortiz.
Right now, however, the Indians represent the death of hope. And lest you see this as the misguided thoughts of a bitter writer consider no better source than Indians shortstop, third baseman, designated hitter Jhonny Peralta.
Peralta has had a modest second-half resurgence that in large measure reflects the modest second-half resurgence of the team. There’s probably a connection there worth exploring but for now let’s let that pass. Instead, focus solely on what Peralta told the media. No, not the “I’m not going to change my approach results notwithstanding” stubbornness but his discussion about his contract status.
Peralta is signed through 2010 with a club option that will never get picked up in 2011 unless Peralta continues to undermine his monetary value with his David Delluci-like consistency. Acknowledging that the players can see exactly the same things as fans, Peralta said, as reported by Paul Hoynes in the Plain Dealer, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next year. I don’t know if I’m going to be next or not. I have an option for 2011, but they don’t keep anybody. You never know.”
Though Peralta spent the most critical part of his season locked inside his man-cave in sweet slumber, blissfully ignorant of his responsibilities, at least he was awake long enough to understand full well the Indians’ business model and his place in it. “They don’t keep anybody” can now take its rightful place alongside of “building for a tomorrow that never comes” as the team’s recurring theme/mission statement. By the way, since the Dolans haven’t yet taken up my office for a royalty-free license for those statements, I hereby put the world on notice of my copyright. If the Indians don’t need the money, I do.
All this does is underscore what ultimately has the potential to lead to this franchise’s demise: the lack of an identity. Baseball fans, like those of any sport really, certainly appreciate the game itself. But the reason fans purchase the product associated with it is because they identify with it in a meaningful way. It’s why fans won’t go out of their way to buy tickets to a Chris Perez bobblehead day but might for a Grady Sizemore.
As Shapiro continues to respond to the economic forces that envelop him by tearing down the foundation of what he’s built even before he finishes furnishing it, he strips away from their fans their day-to-day reason to care about the team. Right now fans are about as emotionally invested in this team as someone watching a network TV show that’s about to be cancelled.
It’s certainly nice that the Indians can play better baseball late in a lost season, but nothing about Sunday’s win against the White Sox was particularly meaningful mainly because the front office long ago told them there was nothing particularly meaningful about any win. Ok, let me refine that. It’s meaningful for manager Eric Wedge. He can once again make the case that Shapiro’s already bought that he’s good with younger talent.
More damming though is the fact that the “they don’t keep anybody” approach works as a disincentive for any fan to find meaning in the team. If you were prone to be a Peralta fan (and if you are, let’s discuss off line as I have a phone number to a crisis center to send you), you’re actually far better off rooting for his failures than his successes. If he plays great, he will fulfill Shapiro’s prophecy. If he fails just enough, he’ll be around for years to come, kind of a baseball version of Dick Cheney.
The same holds true for Grady Sizemore. Why bother getting all wrapped up in his career when its success will only hasten his departure? Indeed, what Shapiro really has accomplished, perhaps without intending to, is to make the concept of core players irrelevant to not just the ardent but also the average fans.
Once upon a time a general manager had a goofy notion that good young players should be used as building blocks not trade bait. He had a dream that these building blocks would sustain a mid-market franchise for years to come. And he was right. The Indians of the 1990s were his signature and that general manager’s name was Moe Green. Sorry, I mean, John Hart. Now there’s not even a statute to commemorate his dream.
Shapiro, his protégé, tried to follow that pattern but could never quite replicate it. At this point it’s been all but abandoned in favor of a system whereby the Indians act as the feeder pool for the league’s sharks. Maybe once in awhile that feeder pool will have enough teeth to scare the sharks for a bit, but never for long.
Of course what Shapiro can’t admit is that the previous approach wasn’t nearly as flawed as his own execution of it was. If you put your trust and money in the wrong core it’s going to come back and bite hard, which is really what this season has proven.
It could be, I suppose, that Shapiro has become convinced that the risk-reward approach of the Hart philosophy is too much of a gamble with a franchise so financially fragile. If so, that’s worthy of a healthy debate. Hart wasn’t a genius but only a man with a plan that happened to work. That doesn’t mean another approach can’t. The problem is that when Shapiro deliberately lit the platform the team was standing on, he did so without another, less risky one to jump to that has the similar chance of paying off.
Indians fans, or at least a healthy majority of them, at this moment are so disillusioned with the leadership and direction of the franchise that nothing short of major, dramatic changes is going to change their indifference.
They’ve heard Indians president and co-owner Paul Dolan candidly admit that the best this team can ever hope for is to be in the playoffs rarely and be competitive occasionally. They’ve seen player after player after player after player bump up against a contract expiration date only to be traded as a result. They’ve seen a general manager spin and wring dry every available cliché about the young, cheap talent he’s acquired, knowing full well that not one of these players will reach his prime in Cleveland unless he’s abjectly mediocre.
The reasons to be cynical are as compelling as they are overwhelming. The reasons to be optimistic are as few as they are underwhelming. So what if the Indians take two of three from the White Sox? They still remain one of the worst teams in the league.
In truth, the fate of the Indians is gut wrenching to the true fan, and by true fan I mean anyone that’s been following the team closely at least since Cory Snyder was a rookie. They don’t want to see their team fail. It’s far more fun when every pitch thrown in September or October has meaning. Give these fans even the sliver of a reason to believe and they’ll excuse the years of mistreatment faster than Red Sox fans are forgiving David Ortiz.
Right now, however, the Indians represent the death of hope. And lest you see this as the misguided thoughts of a bitter writer consider no better source than Indians shortstop, third baseman, designated hitter Jhonny Peralta.
Peralta has had a modest second-half resurgence that in large measure reflects the modest second-half resurgence of the team. There’s probably a connection there worth exploring but for now let’s let that pass. Instead, focus solely on what Peralta told the media. No, not the “I’m not going to change my approach results notwithstanding” stubbornness but his discussion about his contract status.
Peralta is signed through 2010 with a club option that will never get picked up in 2011 unless Peralta continues to undermine his monetary value with his David Delluci-like consistency. Acknowledging that the players can see exactly the same things as fans, Peralta said, as reported by Paul Hoynes in the Plain Dealer, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next year. I don’t know if I’m going to be next or not. I have an option for 2011, but they don’t keep anybody. You never know.”
Though Peralta spent the most critical part of his season locked inside his man-cave in sweet slumber, blissfully ignorant of his responsibilities, at least he was awake long enough to understand full well the Indians’ business model and his place in it. “They don’t keep anybody” can now take its rightful place alongside of “building for a tomorrow that never comes” as the team’s recurring theme/mission statement. By the way, since the Dolans haven’t yet taken up my office for a royalty-free license for those statements, I hereby put the world on notice of my copyright. If the Indians don’t need the money, I do.
All this does is underscore what ultimately has the potential to lead to this franchise’s demise: the lack of an identity. Baseball fans, like those of any sport really, certainly appreciate the game itself. But the reason fans purchase the product associated with it is because they identify with it in a meaningful way. It’s why fans won’t go out of their way to buy tickets to a Chris Perez bobblehead day but might for a Grady Sizemore.
As Shapiro continues to respond to the economic forces that envelop him by tearing down the foundation of what he’s built even before he finishes furnishing it, he strips away from their fans their day-to-day reason to care about the team. Right now fans are about as emotionally invested in this team as someone watching a network TV show that’s about to be cancelled.
It’s certainly nice that the Indians can play better baseball late in a lost season, but nothing about Sunday’s win against the White Sox was particularly meaningful mainly because the front office long ago told them there was nothing particularly meaningful about any win. Ok, let me refine that. It’s meaningful for manager Eric Wedge. He can once again make the case that Shapiro’s already bought that he’s good with younger talent.
More damming though is the fact that the “they don’t keep anybody” approach works as a disincentive for any fan to find meaning in the team. If you were prone to be a Peralta fan (and if you are, let’s discuss off line as I have a phone number to a crisis center to send you), you’re actually far better off rooting for his failures than his successes. If he plays great, he will fulfill Shapiro’s prophecy. If he fails just enough, he’ll be around for years to come, kind of a baseball version of Dick Cheney.
The same holds true for Grady Sizemore. Why bother getting all wrapped up in his career when its success will only hasten his departure? Indeed, what Shapiro really has accomplished, perhaps without intending to, is to make the concept of core players irrelevant to not just the ardent but also the average fans.
Once upon a time a general manager had a goofy notion that good young players should be used as building blocks not trade bait. He had a dream that these building blocks would sustain a mid-market franchise for years to come. And he was right. The Indians of the 1990s were his signature and that general manager’s name was Moe Green. Sorry, I mean, John Hart. Now there’s not even a statute to commemorate his dream.
Shapiro, his protégé, tried to follow that pattern but could never quite replicate it. At this point it’s been all but abandoned in favor of a system whereby the Indians act as the feeder pool for the league’s sharks. Maybe once in awhile that feeder pool will have enough teeth to scare the sharks for a bit, but never for long.
Of course what Shapiro can’t admit is that the previous approach wasn’t nearly as flawed as his own execution of it was. If you put your trust and money in the wrong core it’s going to come back and bite hard, which is really what this season has proven.
It could be, I suppose, that Shapiro has become convinced that the risk-reward approach of the Hart philosophy is too much of a gamble with a franchise so financially fragile. If so, that’s worthy of a healthy debate. Hart wasn’t a genius but only a man with a plan that happened to work. That doesn’t mean another approach can’t. The problem is that when Shapiro deliberately lit the platform the team was standing on, he did so without another, less risky one to jump to that has the similar chance of paying off.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Lingering Items--Water Over the Dam Edition
There isn’t much utility or fun in continuing to turn over the same shovel of dirt. But when it comes to the Cleveland Indians sometimes they just beg you to make the effort.
Indians’ co-owner Paul Dolan met with the media the other day to essentially lay out his case for the team’s recent upheaval. While not exactly contradicting general manager Mark Shapiro on the very fine points, he let it be known that without the changes the Indians were on track to lose millions; many, many millions. As it is, even with the recent strip-mining, the team is on track to lose $16 million.
Ok, so Shapiro wasn’t under a specific edict to dump salary. He was just told that the owners were on track to lose multi-millions and weren’t going to be all that pleased with it. And in case Shapiro was being particularly dense, they told him that if he maintained the status quo ante under the misguided notion that the team could compete next year, the chance that there would be any money to play with in the next five or so years under these circumstances were about the same as the team trading for CC Sabathia.
I’m not suggesting that the Dolans should take losing any amount of money, let alone double-digit millions, lightly. I get cranky over far less money. But this is the business they chose and no one promised it would be all rainbows and gum drops.
What’s telling and what portends for things to come is how Dolan said the losses would be covered—through loans and an infusion of family cash. That’s a red flag. While presumably the cash infused from the Dolans is more in the nature of a gift, a loan has to be paid back or at least they used to under the old economy. And if you remember from your Business Administration 101 class, any service on a loan adds to the operating costs of a franchise that already is struggling. The direct impact from a fan’s perspective is two-fold: increased prices to and lowered payroll costs. Presumably most fans would rather embrace the exact opposite scenario.
Dolan was emphatic that his family has no intention on selling the club but then again Art Modell had no intention of selling the Browns. As losses mount, the dynamics change. This, ultimately, will determine Shapiro’s fate with the team. Before the Dolans let the team drive them into personal bankruptcy, they will try everything short of a sale first. If Shapiro can’t deliver a team that can make money, or at least not lose multi-millions, they will find someone different. That’s collateral you can take to a bank.
In that context, Shapiro’s maneuvers are completely understandable, but only in the larger sense. Payroll had to be trimmed. The trick is in trimming the right payroll. Shapiro may have had no choice in dumping Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez, but that’s only because less valuable assets but far bigger drags on the team’s budget, like Travis Hafner and Jake Westbrook, were untradeable.
Defaulting to the most available targets is not at all the same thing as choosing the right targets. For example, the Indians 0f 2010 could still have Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez and still be $10 million ahead if they could have dumped Hafner and Westbrook instead. Of course the Indians wouldn’t have the gaggle of Single A prospects they got in return, but something has to be sacrificed.
The reason this makes a difference is that a team with Lee and Martinez and an extra $10 million of payroll has a better chance of being successful in 2010 than a team without them but with Hafner and Westbrook. If it had success that would translate into higher attendance or at least reverse the loss of attendance and with that the financial losses, if any, to the Dolans are minimized. Suddenly the future doesn’t look so iffy.
But of course Shapiro couldn’t trade a fading Hafner and an injured Westbrook. But by getting caught in the box where such large contracts crippled this team and forced him into making far more dangerous trades of more effective players, Shapiro set the franchise back years if not decades. That may be water over the dam but it’s water that’s leaving the fans soaked for years to come.
**
Dolan couldn’t have made a better case for a salary cap in baseball than this quote: “If every four or five years we can have a shot at the World Series and contend for the playoffs at other times, that’s as good as it gets for a team in this type of market.”
The fact that his assessment is so dead-on accurate is a crushing reality for the fans. One wonders, then, why doesn’t the problem get fixed?
Dolan went on to illustrate how the reality of baseball’s fundamental economic model impacts a team’s entire operations in ways most fans might not even realize. By example he noted that large-market clubs aren’t just getting all the prime free agents, but they are using their money to manipulate the amateur draft as well to ensure the best young talent.
Without delving into too much detail on this, and my colleague Tony Lastoria is a far better resource than me, but the byzantine-like system the major leagues use in the draft is directly responsible for this happening. Basically, large-market teams can assure that the top prospects they draft get signed instead of going to college by throwing more money at them. The world-wide amateur free agent market is like a supermarket where they are the only ones that can get through the doors.
Teams like the Indians, on the other hand, often compromise on draft picks and amateur free agents because signability is a huge factor in the decision-making process. If the Indians know that the player is represented by, for example, Scott Boras, an agent that demands top dollar, they’ll likely take a pass and gravitate toward a lesser skilled but more signable player. Meanwhile, the better prospect eventually drifts to a large market team that will meet his demands.
The concept of small and mid-size markets basically doesn’t exist in either the NBA or the NFL and the common denominator is a salary cap. Out of either foresight or desperation both sports embraced the concept of having all of its partners on a level playing field. Baseball on the other hand doesn’t even see it as a worthy goal.
Likewise, in the NFL teams typically don’t avoid players on the basis that they are un-signable. Occasionally you’ll see a team with a high first round draft pick go in a slightly different direction because it feels it can get the player under contract more quickly, but that is the exception. In the NBA, the concept doesn’t exist. A rookie salary scale, more liberal free agent rules and a salary cap that favors the incumbent team all work to keep the playing field the most level in all of professional sports.
The Indians’ problems are baseball problems and don’t look for any substantive resolution of the former until there are fundamental resolutions to the latter.
**
Moving over to the Browns and their own odyssey toward respectability, receiver Braylon Edwards finally returned to practice and we now know, but not through the team, that he was sitting out because of an ankle injury. And we now know, but not through the team, that Edwards was absolutely brilliant during his first practice. We know it because the local media, without absolutely anything better to do, have taken to literally following training camp on a pass-by-pass basis.
Maybe it’s due to the restrictions the team has placed on the media or the general distrust that head coach Eric Mangini has toward it, but this season’s coverage of training camp by our friends at the Plain Dealer, the News-Herald, the Canton Repository and the Akron Beacon Journal is so mind-numbingly mundane it makes the directions for applying Chap Stick seem positively riveting by comparison.
If case you didn’t know, there is a quarterback competition taking place between Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn. In honor of it, readers of our faithful printed newspapers are given the intimate details of just how many passes were completed in the 7-on-7 drills and to whom. If you think this at all matters, well, that’s where you’d be wrong.
Mangini says something interesting or insightful publicly only by accident. But yet I actually think that when he told the media that it is not so much a day-by-day analysis as much as it is an overall assessment, he was telling the truth. The fact is that if Mangini is so random as to base the outcome of the starting quarterback decision on who went 5-6 on Thursday morning nd who went 4-7, then he is abjectly unqualified to be anything more than the ball boy he used to be.
Maybe it is important how Quinn looked on Tuesday and how Anderson looked on Wednesday morning. Maybe, but I doubt it. Ken Dorsey can look good in a scrimmage. Quarterbacks are made or broken on the actual playing field, which is why this Sunday’s scrimmage, more than anything that’s happened so far, will go a long way toward determining each quarterback’s fate.
**
The Indians have certainly put me in an existential mood. Thus this week’s question to ponder: If the Indians trade Carl Pavano to the Minnesota Twins and no one cares, did the trade really happen?
Indians’ co-owner Paul Dolan met with the media the other day to essentially lay out his case for the team’s recent upheaval. While not exactly contradicting general manager Mark Shapiro on the very fine points, he let it be known that without the changes the Indians were on track to lose millions; many, many millions. As it is, even with the recent strip-mining, the team is on track to lose $16 million.
Ok, so Shapiro wasn’t under a specific edict to dump salary. He was just told that the owners were on track to lose multi-millions and weren’t going to be all that pleased with it. And in case Shapiro was being particularly dense, they told him that if he maintained the status quo ante under the misguided notion that the team could compete next year, the chance that there would be any money to play with in the next five or so years under these circumstances were about the same as the team trading for CC Sabathia.
I’m not suggesting that the Dolans should take losing any amount of money, let alone double-digit millions, lightly. I get cranky over far less money. But this is the business they chose and no one promised it would be all rainbows and gum drops.
What’s telling and what portends for things to come is how Dolan said the losses would be covered—through loans and an infusion of family cash. That’s a red flag. While presumably the cash infused from the Dolans is more in the nature of a gift, a loan has to be paid back or at least they used to under the old economy. And if you remember from your Business Administration 101 class, any service on a loan adds to the operating costs of a franchise that already is struggling. The direct impact from a fan’s perspective is two-fold: increased prices to and lowered payroll costs. Presumably most fans would rather embrace the exact opposite scenario.
Dolan was emphatic that his family has no intention on selling the club but then again Art Modell had no intention of selling the Browns. As losses mount, the dynamics change. This, ultimately, will determine Shapiro’s fate with the team. Before the Dolans let the team drive them into personal bankruptcy, they will try everything short of a sale first. If Shapiro can’t deliver a team that can make money, or at least not lose multi-millions, they will find someone different. That’s collateral you can take to a bank.
In that context, Shapiro’s maneuvers are completely understandable, but only in the larger sense. Payroll had to be trimmed. The trick is in trimming the right payroll. Shapiro may have had no choice in dumping Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez, but that’s only because less valuable assets but far bigger drags on the team’s budget, like Travis Hafner and Jake Westbrook, were untradeable.
Defaulting to the most available targets is not at all the same thing as choosing the right targets. For example, the Indians 0f 2010 could still have Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez and still be $10 million ahead if they could have dumped Hafner and Westbrook instead. Of course the Indians wouldn’t have the gaggle of Single A prospects they got in return, but something has to be sacrificed.
The reason this makes a difference is that a team with Lee and Martinez and an extra $10 million of payroll has a better chance of being successful in 2010 than a team without them but with Hafner and Westbrook. If it had success that would translate into higher attendance or at least reverse the loss of attendance and with that the financial losses, if any, to the Dolans are minimized. Suddenly the future doesn’t look so iffy.
But of course Shapiro couldn’t trade a fading Hafner and an injured Westbrook. But by getting caught in the box where such large contracts crippled this team and forced him into making far more dangerous trades of more effective players, Shapiro set the franchise back years if not decades. That may be water over the dam but it’s water that’s leaving the fans soaked for years to come.
**
Dolan couldn’t have made a better case for a salary cap in baseball than this quote: “If every four or five years we can have a shot at the World Series and contend for the playoffs at other times, that’s as good as it gets for a team in this type of market.”
The fact that his assessment is so dead-on accurate is a crushing reality for the fans. One wonders, then, why doesn’t the problem get fixed?
Dolan went on to illustrate how the reality of baseball’s fundamental economic model impacts a team’s entire operations in ways most fans might not even realize. By example he noted that large-market clubs aren’t just getting all the prime free agents, but they are using their money to manipulate the amateur draft as well to ensure the best young talent.
Without delving into too much detail on this, and my colleague Tony Lastoria is a far better resource than me, but the byzantine-like system the major leagues use in the draft is directly responsible for this happening. Basically, large-market teams can assure that the top prospects they draft get signed instead of going to college by throwing more money at them. The world-wide amateur free agent market is like a supermarket where they are the only ones that can get through the doors.
Teams like the Indians, on the other hand, often compromise on draft picks and amateur free agents because signability is a huge factor in the decision-making process. If the Indians know that the player is represented by, for example, Scott Boras, an agent that demands top dollar, they’ll likely take a pass and gravitate toward a lesser skilled but more signable player. Meanwhile, the better prospect eventually drifts to a large market team that will meet his demands.
The concept of small and mid-size markets basically doesn’t exist in either the NBA or the NFL and the common denominator is a salary cap. Out of either foresight or desperation both sports embraced the concept of having all of its partners on a level playing field. Baseball on the other hand doesn’t even see it as a worthy goal.
Likewise, in the NFL teams typically don’t avoid players on the basis that they are un-signable. Occasionally you’ll see a team with a high first round draft pick go in a slightly different direction because it feels it can get the player under contract more quickly, but that is the exception. In the NBA, the concept doesn’t exist. A rookie salary scale, more liberal free agent rules and a salary cap that favors the incumbent team all work to keep the playing field the most level in all of professional sports.
The Indians’ problems are baseball problems and don’t look for any substantive resolution of the former until there are fundamental resolutions to the latter.
**
Moving over to the Browns and their own odyssey toward respectability, receiver Braylon Edwards finally returned to practice and we now know, but not through the team, that he was sitting out because of an ankle injury. And we now know, but not through the team, that Edwards was absolutely brilliant during his first practice. We know it because the local media, without absolutely anything better to do, have taken to literally following training camp on a pass-by-pass basis.
Maybe it’s due to the restrictions the team has placed on the media or the general distrust that head coach Eric Mangini has toward it, but this season’s coverage of training camp by our friends at the Plain Dealer, the News-Herald, the Canton Repository and the Akron Beacon Journal is so mind-numbingly mundane it makes the directions for applying Chap Stick seem positively riveting by comparison.
If case you didn’t know, there is a quarterback competition taking place between Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn. In honor of it, readers of our faithful printed newspapers are given the intimate details of just how many passes were completed in the 7-on-7 drills and to whom. If you think this at all matters, well, that’s where you’d be wrong.
Mangini says something interesting or insightful publicly only by accident. But yet I actually think that when he told the media that it is not so much a day-by-day analysis as much as it is an overall assessment, he was telling the truth. The fact is that if Mangini is so random as to base the outcome of the starting quarterback decision on who went 5-6 on Thursday morning nd who went 4-7, then he is abjectly unqualified to be anything more than the ball boy he used to be.
Maybe it is important how Quinn looked on Tuesday and how Anderson looked on Wednesday morning. Maybe, but I doubt it. Ken Dorsey can look good in a scrimmage. Quarterbacks are made or broken on the actual playing field, which is why this Sunday’s scrimmage, more than anything that’s happened so far, will go a long way toward determining each quarterback’s fate.
**
The Indians have certainly put me in an existential mood. Thus this week’s question to ponder: If the Indians trade Carl Pavano to the Minnesota Twins and no one cares, did the trade really happen?
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Low-Hanging Fruit
Somewhere around the third or fourth lap Cleveland Browns rookie Alex Mack had to take for missing a snap count or blocking assignment at training camp, it occurred to me how good head coach Eric Mangini has it. In an economy that seems to shed jobs by the dozens on a daily basis, Mangini was on the job market only a few days before being snatched up by owner Randy Lerner to be the latest resuscitator for a franchise that seems to perpetually have had the wind knocked out of it.
Getting another job so quickly was just the first stroke of good fortune for Mangini. Dumb luck or not, he was the beneficiary of a unique confluence of sudden opportunity and Cleveland paranoia, the latter of which suggests that when things go wrong the only answer is to do the exact opposite. It’s not that Romeo Crennel was a poor head coach; the team was done in by his lack of experience as a head coach. Uh huh.
The second and more significant stroke of good fortune is that he gets to take over a situation in which the road to improvement is paved with low expectations and so much low hanging fruit that the only person who probably couldn’t succeed at some level with such advantages was the aforementioned Crennel.
Consider just the circumstance that is getting the most ink from the strained-neck local media, the imposition of actual discipline at camp. Crennel embraced a far different perspective on pre-season preparation than does Mangini. Where Crennel felt it would keep his troops fresh later in the season to limit contact early on, Mangini essentially responds “hogwash.”
At about this point I could make a cheap joke about the inability of Crennel’s supposedly fresh team to score a touchdown in what seemed like 80% of its games last season, but it isn’t a joke that Crennel’s methodology was seriously flawed. Time will tell whether Mangini’s approach is better. We do know though that under Crennel, the Browns were in an endless loop of key player injured, surgery, staph infection. That doesn’t mean that Crennel’s method of easing off on the physical aspects of the game led to injuries or that the two things are even related.. It’s just that they appear to be.
But beyond just the shear number of injuries was the fact that the watermark of Crennel’s teams was their almost complete lack of preparation. Players constantly jumping offsides or getting motion penalties, players seemingly always in the wrong position or utilizing the wrong technique when in position, all were rampant under Crennel. Maybe more reps where players have to hit each other doesn’t get a player any more ready for being hit in games, but given the results of the previous regime a convincing argument can be made to the contrary.
It seems a little Dillon Pantherish to have grown men making hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars running laps for missing a snap count, but maybe it won’t seem so silly if the Browns stop being one of the least disciplined teams in the league and become one of the most. That in and of itself would have been good for a few more victories under Crennel and it likely will be under Mangini.
In other words, just getting the players to all run in the same direction is likely to make Mangini instantly look successful. That’s really low hanging fruit. The better question is, will he be able to build on that? Can Mangini find a way to get at the fruit actually ripening on the tree? That verdict won’t be known for some time but despite the low expectations for this season, there will be clues.
The Brady Quinn/Derek Anderson melodrama will result in a winner and loser but the decision Mangini makes and how he goes about making it will tell us something about his style and whether it will make him successful. Too often so-called training camp competitions turn into exercises in self-fulfillment. A coach already has a belief in which player is better and then rigs the so-called competition so that it’s more about confirming the coach’s initial instinct than it is about giving each player an equal opportunity.
Camp is still young by any measure but it does appear on the surface at least that Mangini is actually having Quinn and Anderson go head to head. The reps appear to be equal and, more importantly, each is getting a chance with different groupings. We’ll get a better view once the preseason games start on whether or not this is a fair fight but at this stage, at least, it’s a positive sign.
Similarly, free agent cornerback Rod Hood told the Plain Dealer’s Mary Kay Cabot on Tuesday that Mangini promised him that he could compete for a starting job and, to this point, Mangini has lived up to his word. That is critical for establishing a coach’s footing. In Denver, new head coach Josh McDaniels is off to a very rocky start not because he’s fighting the media over access but because he’s fighting some key players over credibility. Whatever the business, if the leader doesn’t have credibility, the business will fail.
The other aspect of Mangini’s early tenure that will be a marker for longer term success is the performance of the players he drafted. The Browns’ letterhead may say that George Kokinis is the general manager but at this juncture he’s only slightly more visible than Lerner. These are Mangini’s players.
Where former general manager Phil Savage really hurt this team was not necessarily in his first round drafts or even his free agent singings but in his mid to late round picks. There were simply far too many misses which left gaping holes that were filled by far too many undrafted free agents.
What’s particularly stunning about these missteps is that Savage had such a wide margin for error. The one thing the Browns haven’t had since their return is an overabundance of talent. It shouldn’t have been too hard for any decent draft pick to make this team. But with a hit rate so low, someone who didn’t know better might conclude that the team was simply too talented for a rookie to make. Unfortunately, the opposite was true and yet Savage could never find a way to bring any depth to this team.
A final attribute to be on the hunt for when it comes to Mangini and his prospects for long-term success will be his willingness to apply lessons learned. This is an acquired skill that most people naturally fight. For Mangini, this won’t be confined to adjustments within a game or from game to game. In a larger sense, his ultimate success will come down to his ability to understand why he failed in New York.
Mangini doesn’t reveal much about himself, at least to the media, so it’s hard to know if he’s an introspective sort. Maybe he’s already done a deep dive into his personal psyche over it and not simply rationalize it away as a mistake by Jets’ ownership. He has to own up to his role in it, whatever that might have been. Fans will know whether he does or not. The results will speak for themselves. New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick to this day isn’t exactly a media darling either but after solidly establishing himself as one of the game’s greatest coaches, it’s pretty clear that he learned from his failure in Cleveland.
Mangini doesn’t have to become the next Belichick. Cleveland fans are hardly that demanding. It will suffice if Mangini just understands why he failed in New York and finds a way to ensure that he doesn’t repeat those mistakes. Belichick learned from his Cleveland experience. Will Mangini learn from his time in New York? An affirmative answer to that may very well bring for Lerner the kind of stability he claims to covet for the team he reluctantly inherited.
Getting another job so quickly was just the first stroke of good fortune for Mangini. Dumb luck or not, he was the beneficiary of a unique confluence of sudden opportunity and Cleveland paranoia, the latter of which suggests that when things go wrong the only answer is to do the exact opposite. It’s not that Romeo Crennel was a poor head coach; the team was done in by his lack of experience as a head coach. Uh huh.
The second and more significant stroke of good fortune is that he gets to take over a situation in which the road to improvement is paved with low expectations and so much low hanging fruit that the only person who probably couldn’t succeed at some level with such advantages was the aforementioned Crennel.
Consider just the circumstance that is getting the most ink from the strained-neck local media, the imposition of actual discipline at camp. Crennel embraced a far different perspective on pre-season preparation than does Mangini. Where Crennel felt it would keep his troops fresh later in the season to limit contact early on, Mangini essentially responds “hogwash.”
At about this point I could make a cheap joke about the inability of Crennel’s supposedly fresh team to score a touchdown in what seemed like 80% of its games last season, but it isn’t a joke that Crennel’s methodology was seriously flawed. Time will tell whether Mangini’s approach is better. We do know though that under Crennel, the Browns were in an endless loop of key player injured, surgery, staph infection. That doesn’t mean that Crennel’s method of easing off on the physical aspects of the game led to injuries or that the two things are even related.. It’s just that they appear to be.
But beyond just the shear number of injuries was the fact that the watermark of Crennel’s teams was their almost complete lack of preparation. Players constantly jumping offsides or getting motion penalties, players seemingly always in the wrong position or utilizing the wrong technique when in position, all were rampant under Crennel. Maybe more reps where players have to hit each other doesn’t get a player any more ready for being hit in games, but given the results of the previous regime a convincing argument can be made to the contrary.
It seems a little Dillon Pantherish to have grown men making hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars running laps for missing a snap count, but maybe it won’t seem so silly if the Browns stop being one of the least disciplined teams in the league and become one of the most. That in and of itself would have been good for a few more victories under Crennel and it likely will be under Mangini.
In other words, just getting the players to all run in the same direction is likely to make Mangini instantly look successful. That’s really low hanging fruit. The better question is, will he be able to build on that? Can Mangini find a way to get at the fruit actually ripening on the tree? That verdict won’t be known for some time but despite the low expectations for this season, there will be clues.
The Brady Quinn/Derek Anderson melodrama will result in a winner and loser but the decision Mangini makes and how he goes about making it will tell us something about his style and whether it will make him successful. Too often so-called training camp competitions turn into exercises in self-fulfillment. A coach already has a belief in which player is better and then rigs the so-called competition so that it’s more about confirming the coach’s initial instinct than it is about giving each player an equal opportunity.
Camp is still young by any measure but it does appear on the surface at least that Mangini is actually having Quinn and Anderson go head to head. The reps appear to be equal and, more importantly, each is getting a chance with different groupings. We’ll get a better view once the preseason games start on whether or not this is a fair fight but at this stage, at least, it’s a positive sign.
Similarly, free agent cornerback Rod Hood told the Plain Dealer’s Mary Kay Cabot on Tuesday that Mangini promised him that he could compete for a starting job and, to this point, Mangini has lived up to his word. That is critical for establishing a coach’s footing. In Denver, new head coach Josh McDaniels is off to a very rocky start not because he’s fighting the media over access but because he’s fighting some key players over credibility. Whatever the business, if the leader doesn’t have credibility, the business will fail.
The other aspect of Mangini’s early tenure that will be a marker for longer term success is the performance of the players he drafted. The Browns’ letterhead may say that George Kokinis is the general manager but at this juncture he’s only slightly more visible than Lerner. These are Mangini’s players.
Where former general manager Phil Savage really hurt this team was not necessarily in his first round drafts or even his free agent singings but in his mid to late round picks. There were simply far too many misses which left gaping holes that were filled by far too many undrafted free agents.
What’s particularly stunning about these missteps is that Savage had such a wide margin for error. The one thing the Browns haven’t had since their return is an overabundance of talent. It shouldn’t have been too hard for any decent draft pick to make this team. But with a hit rate so low, someone who didn’t know better might conclude that the team was simply too talented for a rookie to make. Unfortunately, the opposite was true and yet Savage could never find a way to bring any depth to this team.
A final attribute to be on the hunt for when it comes to Mangini and his prospects for long-term success will be his willingness to apply lessons learned. This is an acquired skill that most people naturally fight. For Mangini, this won’t be confined to adjustments within a game or from game to game. In a larger sense, his ultimate success will come down to his ability to understand why he failed in New York.
Mangini doesn’t reveal much about himself, at least to the media, so it’s hard to know if he’s an introspective sort. Maybe he’s already done a deep dive into his personal psyche over it and not simply rationalize it away as a mistake by Jets’ ownership. He has to own up to his role in it, whatever that might have been. Fans will know whether he does or not. The results will speak for themselves. New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick to this day isn’t exactly a media darling either but after solidly establishing himself as one of the game’s greatest coaches, it’s pretty clear that he learned from his failure in Cleveland.
Mangini doesn’t have to become the next Belichick. Cleveland fans are hardly that demanding. It will suffice if Mangini just understands why he failed in New York and finds a way to ensure that he doesn’t repeat those mistakes. Belichick learned from his Cleveland experience. Will Mangini learn from his time in New York? An affirmative answer to that may very well bring for Lerner the kind of stability he claims to covet for the team he reluctantly inherited.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Lingering Items--Tomorrow Never Comes Edition
When I was a kid, I used to buy my baseball cards at a store called Don’s Beverage. Don was a cranky but mostly patient sort with the kids in the neighborhood who’d redeem Coke bottles for 3 cents each in order to buy another pack of cards. Don used to have a sign over the candy section that read “Everything half off, tomorrow.” When you’re a grade schooler it takes you a few days to catch on to the ruse. Tomorrow never came.
That’s pretty much how I feel about the Indians at this point. It’s taken awhile to catch on, of course, but I attribute that more to the sophistication of Indians’ general manager Mark Shapiro and my continuing naiveté that the team was about winning for not realizing it until now, but the Indians aren’t about winning, they’re about staying afloat as if that is a goal to be lauded.
The trades of Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez and Ryan Garko and Rafael Betancourt and Mark DeRosa are only important if you think a professional baseball team should be about winning. When it finally does dawn on you that this is an organization that’s building for a tomorrow that never comes, those trades become far more irrelevant. Aside to the Dolans: as a sign of good faith and in recognition of these economic times, I hereby grant to you an unlimited, free and worldwide license to use the phrase “Building For a Tomorrow That Never Comes” as your new mission statement. Feel free to plaster on anything you want. Look for it next week on a t-shirt at an Indians gift shop near you.
Reading and listening to Shapiro’s explanation of his dumping of anything with a viable pulse made me seem positively prescient the other day when I predicted, nearly word for word, what he’d say, particularly about the Lee trade. Frankly, it’s not that I’m all that great at predictions; Shapiro is just that predictable.
Just as I wrote he would do Shapiro did claim that the value they received now for Lee is better than they could get next year as if there is any way to challenge him on that point. But, again, all that misses the larger point. In the words of Bill Murray’s Tripper Harrison in the semi-classic movie, Meatballs, it just doesn’t matter. Even if the skies parted, monkeys flew, the heavens rained gold coins, cats started playing with dogs and Bill Livingston began writing something interesting, whether or not the Indians trade an All Star or a Cy Young winner just doesn’t matter because all the best players will still end up with the rich teams in the league.
The Indians’ problem is baseball’s problem. If the league owners can’t see how these yearly salary dumps by teams with no real shot at winning are ruining the game for a large portion of their fan base, then they should be the next to go. Without fundamental economic change that gives every team a realistic chance to actually be competitive each and every year, baseball is a rock heading for its own windshield.
This isn’t to let Shapiro off the hook. He’s gone off his own little deep end, so convinced is he in his own abilities that he can’t even acknowledge the crumbling mess around him. He offers his earnest sounding rationales without any sense of irony or context. If he really made the trades because he doesn’t see the Indians as competitive next year either, then whose fault is that? He put this miserable team together and as far as I can tell is the architect for next year’s as well.
You can go up and down the current roster, last year’s roster or whatever projects to next year’s roster and it is literally riddled with either bad decisions made by Shapiro or risky decisions that just didn’t work out. However styled, there is absolutely nothing approaching certainty that any move Shapiro just made or will make will result in anything more than what passes for this team today.
Shapiro took a chance on offering Travis Hafner and Jake Westbrook long-term contracts and those didn’t work out. Their injuries aren’t his fault, certainly, but it underscores the precise point that nothing is nearly as predetermined as Shapiro would like the fans to believe including the ridiculous notion that this team is being built to compete 3-5 years out. Why wasn’t the team being built 3-5 years ago for this season? Because, say it with me, tomorrow never comes.
There is no reason to think that the decisions Shapiro is making now will translate into that mythical competitive team in 3-5 years. Shapiro’s track record isn’t that good. More to the point, though, there are just too many variables for anyone to successfully juggle. Injuries do happen. Players don’t develop in straight lines. Managers can’t manage.
Beyond all that, what’s galling is how Indians fans are constantly being sold a vision of a baseball team that’s like a start-up enterprise, selling its assets and hence its soul to venture capitalists on the if-come. The problem, though, is that the Indians have been around for 100 or so years and long ago should have escaped the clutches of that mentality.
But Shapiro has once again performed his magic act and, it seems the majority of fans are buying it. That doesn’t mean they’re happy with the trades or the state of the team, but as long as they are debating the merits of the latest round of Class A players acquired, Shapiro has won the battle for their hearts and minds. He knows that’s an argument that can’t be resolved but that does work to distract from the truth of the ugliness that’s enveloped this franchise and is working to undermine its very foundation.
Given the state of the Indians, the only other person that may be smiling at this point is Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner. As much of a mess that he’s made of his team, the Browns look positively well run in comparison to the Indians. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a sentence I thought I’d never write.
**
Speaking of the Browns, the fact that they have every one of their draft choices under contract before training camp really starts in earnest is a refreshing change from the previous regime. For reasons large and small, former general manager Phil Savage and cap master/lead negotiator Tripp McCraken never could master that most basic of tasks.
In life there are people that can get things done and there are people that watch others get things done. Under Savage, the Browns and their front office clearly fell in the latter category. It was always one thing or the other. The Browns couldn’t sign this draft pick or that because they were waiting for other draft choices on other teams to sign. Browns fans knew the drill and all it ended up resulting in is a team that was never fully prepared to enter into the season.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some semi-dark clouds rolling into the blue skies over Berea at the moment. Kick returner Josh Cribbs vows to not train but not play unless some serious inroads are made on a contract renegotiation. Kicker Phil Dawson isn’t happy with his contract situation and either are a few others. But at least they are all under contract. That in and of itself is a major upgrade.
**
Speaking of those semi-dark clouds, there also is the little issue of another season of As the Braylon Turns. Faithful reader Al Cook wrote me and asked about the ramifications of the Browns placing receiver Braylon Edwards on the reserved/non-football injury list. The short answer is, not much, but that’s just part of the story.
The non-football injury list isn’t like the injured reserve list. It serves as a parking area from which players can essentially be activated at any time. But because the injury is not related to football, the player doesn’t get paid. Thus, technically, Edwards is in an unpaid status, except for the fact that his contract really hasn’t called for any paychecks at the moment. Players get a stipend during training camp but their pay is pro-rated over the season. Placing Edwards on the non-football injury list was merely a way to tweak him, which at least this administration is willing to do.
Consider last season when Edwards hurt his ankle goofing off with Donte Stallworth after practice. A good case could have been made that the injury wasn’t football related because it wasn’t. Former head coach Romeo Crennel could have used it to smack Edwards back into reality by, too, placing him on the reserved/non-football injury list and would have gotten away with it long enough to make an impression on Edwards. He didn’t. It wouldn’t have made any difference financially but it would have at least told Edwards that the team was tired of his crap and perhaps that would have snapped him back into reality. As it was, Edwards had an Indians-like season instead.
But the rest of the story is that camp has now started and Edwards isn’t participating and no one knows exactly why. Fans sometime scoff at the media’s bitching about Mangini and his near abject refusal to say anything substantive about any aspect of the team’s operations, including what flavor Gatorade is in the cooler, but the mystery surrounding Edwards only underscores why Mangini, and hence Lerner, owe a larger duty to the fans.
Given the untested nature of the receiving corps, Edwards is being counted on, for among other things, leadership. Why exactly is a good question, but one I’ll defer for now. Instead just focus on the fact that Edwards is injured and fans don’t even know when he did it let alone how or what body part is involved. Mangini may see this as giving him a competitive advantage but it is at the expense of a fan base the team needs to bring closer not push away. Given Edwards’ supposedly minor ankle problem last year, these actually are meaningful questions that Mangini should answer but won’t.
This isn’t about making the jobs of Tony Grossi or Marla Ridenour any easier. It’s about rebuilding the basic trust that’s been lost over the years. Sadly, on that score, the Browns are now closer than the Indians. When does Cavs season start?
**
Given all that’s taken place with the Indians lately, this week’s question to ponder is simple: How did it feel the very moment when you realized that Cleveland no longer had a major league baseball franchise?
That’s pretty much how I feel about the Indians at this point. It’s taken awhile to catch on, of course, but I attribute that more to the sophistication of Indians’ general manager Mark Shapiro and my continuing naiveté that the team was about winning for not realizing it until now, but the Indians aren’t about winning, they’re about staying afloat as if that is a goal to be lauded.
The trades of Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez and Ryan Garko and Rafael Betancourt and Mark DeRosa are only important if you think a professional baseball team should be about winning. When it finally does dawn on you that this is an organization that’s building for a tomorrow that never comes, those trades become far more irrelevant. Aside to the Dolans: as a sign of good faith and in recognition of these economic times, I hereby grant to you an unlimited, free and worldwide license to use the phrase “Building For a Tomorrow That Never Comes” as your new mission statement. Feel free to plaster on anything you want. Look for it next week on a t-shirt at an Indians gift shop near you.
Reading and listening to Shapiro’s explanation of his dumping of anything with a viable pulse made me seem positively prescient the other day when I predicted, nearly word for word, what he’d say, particularly about the Lee trade. Frankly, it’s not that I’m all that great at predictions; Shapiro is just that predictable.
Just as I wrote he would do Shapiro did claim that the value they received now for Lee is better than they could get next year as if there is any way to challenge him on that point. But, again, all that misses the larger point. In the words of Bill Murray’s Tripper Harrison in the semi-classic movie, Meatballs, it just doesn’t matter. Even if the skies parted, monkeys flew, the heavens rained gold coins, cats started playing with dogs and Bill Livingston began writing something interesting, whether or not the Indians trade an All Star or a Cy Young winner just doesn’t matter because all the best players will still end up with the rich teams in the league.
The Indians’ problem is baseball’s problem. If the league owners can’t see how these yearly salary dumps by teams with no real shot at winning are ruining the game for a large portion of their fan base, then they should be the next to go. Without fundamental economic change that gives every team a realistic chance to actually be competitive each and every year, baseball is a rock heading for its own windshield.
This isn’t to let Shapiro off the hook. He’s gone off his own little deep end, so convinced is he in his own abilities that he can’t even acknowledge the crumbling mess around him. He offers his earnest sounding rationales without any sense of irony or context. If he really made the trades because he doesn’t see the Indians as competitive next year either, then whose fault is that? He put this miserable team together and as far as I can tell is the architect for next year’s as well.
You can go up and down the current roster, last year’s roster or whatever projects to next year’s roster and it is literally riddled with either bad decisions made by Shapiro or risky decisions that just didn’t work out. However styled, there is absolutely nothing approaching certainty that any move Shapiro just made or will make will result in anything more than what passes for this team today.
Shapiro took a chance on offering Travis Hafner and Jake Westbrook long-term contracts and those didn’t work out. Their injuries aren’t his fault, certainly, but it underscores the precise point that nothing is nearly as predetermined as Shapiro would like the fans to believe including the ridiculous notion that this team is being built to compete 3-5 years out. Why wasn’t the team being built 3-5 years ago for this season? Because, say it with me, tomorrow never comes.
There is no reason to think that the decisions Shapiro is making now will translate into that mythical competitive team in 3-5 years. Shapiro’s track record isn’t that good. More to the point, though, there are just too many variables for anyone to successfully juggle. Injuries do happen. Players don’t develop in straight lines. Managers can’t manage.
Beyond all that, what’s galling is how Indians fans are constantly being sold a vision of a baseball team that’s like a start-up enterprise, selling its assets and hence its soul to venture capitalists on the if-come. The problem, though, is that the Indians have been around for 100 or so years and long ago should have escaped the clutches of that mentality.
But Shapiro has once again performed his magic act and, it seems the majority of fans are buying it. That doesn’t mean they’re happy with the trades or the state of the team, but as long as they are debating the merits of the latest round of Class A players acquired, Shapiro has won the battle for their hearts and minds. He knows that’s an argument that can’t be resolved but that does work to distract from the truth of the ugliness that’s enveloped this franchise and is working to undermine its very foundation.
Given the state of the Indians, the only other person that may be smiling at this point is Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner. As much of a mess that he’s made of his team, the Browns look positively well run in comparison to the Indians. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a sentence I thought I’d never write.
**
Speaking of the Browns, the fact that they have every one of their draft choices under contract before training camp really starts in earnest is a refreshing change from the previous regime. For reasons large and small, former general manager Phil Savage and cap master/lead negotiator Tripp McCraken never could master that most basic of tasks.
In life there are people that can get things done and there are people that watch others get things done. Under Savage, the Browns and their front office clearly fell in the latter category. It was always one thing or the other. The Browns couldn’t sign this draft pick or that because they were waiting for other draft choices on other teams to sign. Browns fans knew the drill and all it ended up resulting in is a team that was never fully prepared to enter into the season.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some semi-dark clouds rolling into the blue skies over Berea at the moment. Kick returner Josh Cribbs vows to not train but not play unless some serious inroads are made on a contract renegotiation. Kicker Phil Dawson isn’t happy with his contract situation and either are a few others. But at least they are all under contract. That in and of itself is a major upgrade.
**
Speaking of those semi-dark clouds, there also is the little issue of another season of As the Braylon Turns. Faithful reader Al Cook wrote me and asked about the ramifications of the Browns placing receiver Braylon Edwards on the reserved/non-football injury list. The short answer is, not much, but that’s just part of the story.
The non-football injury list isn’t like the injured reserve list. It serves as a parking area from which players can essentially be activated at any time. But because the injury is not related to football, the player doesn’t get paid. Thus, technically, Edwards is in an unpaid status, except for the fact that his contract really hasn’t called for any paychecks at the moment. Players get a stipend during training camp but their pay is pro-rated over the season. Placing Edwards on the non-football injury list was merely a way to tweak him, which at least this administration is willing to do.
Consider last season when Edwards hurt his ankle goofing off with Donte Stallworth after practice. A good case could have been made that the injury wasn’t football related because it wasn’t. Former head coach Romeo Crennel could have used it to smack Edwards back into reality by, too, placing him on the reserved/non-football injury list and would have gotten away with it long enough to make an impression on Edwards. He didn’t. It wouldn’t have made any difference financially but it would have at least told Edwards that the team was tired of his crap and perhaps that would have snapped him back into reality. As it was, Edwards had an Indians-like season instead.
But the rest of the story is that camp has now started and Edwards isn’t participating and no one knows exactly why. Fans sometime scoff at the media’s bitching about Mangini and his near abject refusal to say anything substantive about any aspect of the team’s operations, including what flavor Gatorade is in the cooler, but the mystery surrounding Edwards only underscores why Mangini, and hence Lerner, owe a larger duty to the fans.
Given the untested nature of the receiving corps, Edwards is being counted on, for among other things, leadership. Why exactly is a good question, but one I’ll defer for now. Instead just focus on the fact that Edwards is injured and fans don’t even know when he did it let alone how or what body part is involved. Mangini may see this as giving him a competitive advantage but it is at the expense of a fan base the team needs to bring closer not push away. Given Edwards’ supposedly minor ankle problem last year, these actually are meaningful questions that Mangini should answer but won’t.
This isn’t about making the jobs of Tony Grossi or Marla Ridenour any easier. It’s about rebuilding the basic trust that’s been lost over the years. Sadly, on that score, the Browns are now closer than the Indians. When does Cavs season start?
**
Given all that’s taken place with the Indians lately, this week’s question to ponder is simple: How did it feel the very moment when you realized that Cleveland no longer had a major league baseball franchise?
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The Anti Divine Comedy
It was only an inkling but now it’s confirmed. The worst thing that can happen to a major league pitcher wearing a Cleveland Indians uniform is to win the Cy Young award. Just hope that Victor Martinez doesn’t win the batting title.
In ground no other club would ever dare tread, the Indians once again sent a reigning Cy Young award winner, this time Cliff Lee, packing for a parcel of Philadelphia prospects, only two of which are pitchers and only one of which is in the high minor leagues.
Indians general manager Mark Shapiro, apparently wilting under the potential pressure of having to trade a non Cy Young award winner next season decided instead to jump early, way early in dumping Lee on a salivating Phillies organization. In exchange for Lee, the Indians get a Triple A pitcher, a Single A pitcher (apparently the key to the deal, which is laughable if you allow yourself a moment of levity), a catcher and a shortstop. The Single A pitcher, Jason Knapp, is on the disabled list. When healthy, he can apparently throw really, really fast. Let me guess, he’s got swing and miss capability.
So much for Shapiro’s “pitching, pitching, pitching” mantra. It’s now been revised to “pitching, pitching, position player, position player” and that’s without getting into the finer points about whether or not the Indians needed still another catching prospect or even another shortstop prospect.
Shapiro, just because he felt like it, also gave the Phillies Ben Francisco. I wonder if the Phillies even realize it. If they don’t they will when Francisco shows up, bat in hand. The Indians have gone from a team with a bunch of young outfielders to a team with a really young bunch of outfielders.
At this point it really doesn’t matter what Shapiro has to say about any of these prospects. Cleveland fans have been through this drill so many times that they can conduct the press conferences themselves. The prospects are all great, the economy is tough, and the Indians didn’t think they’d be able to sign Lee to an extension. Any questions?
Of course, the Indians never did try to sign Lee to an extension. His agent tried to engage the Indians in those discussions before the start of this season but Shapiro wanted none of it, probably because Lee’s leverage was at its peak given his Cy Young season of 2008. But as Lee continued to pitch well for a truly awful team put together by Shapiro, it became apparent that the Lee’s price wasn’t going in Shapiro’s direction. Time to move on.
Trading Lee now also allows Shapiro to go avoid any serious questions about whether or not trading Lee next year would have brought more value. Shapiro will undoubtedly say that because Lee had another season left on his contract, the Phillies were willing to part with more than they would next season. The great thing for Shapiro is that there’s no way to prove or disprove that theory.
One theory that actually is getting disproven though is that it’s easier to fire the manager than the players. Shapiro isn’t just conducting a fire sale. He’s in full liquidation mode, sacrificing nearly any player with a decent pulse while saving his erstwhile blood brother, manager Eric Wedge from the apparent voice mail telling him to report to Shapiro’s office and bring the playbook.
And speaking of Wedge, if anyone stands to gain by Shapiro’s latest brand of nuttiness, it’s him. Shapiro has this unhealthy belief in Wedge’s ability to manage a young team, unhealthy because, speaking strictly factually, Wedge has done nothing to actually nurture and grow either a young player or a young team. Past being irrelevant, Shapiro will no longer be compelled to fire Wedge come season’s end. What would be the use in that? A young team begs for a patient steady hand and on that score, Shapiro believes Wedge has the hands of a surgeon.
Thus it’s now more likely than ever that Wedge will be guiding whatever faux major league lineup that emerges from spring training next year and suddenly that’s turned into the least of issues. The real point here is that there is no longer any point to this franchise. Right in front of our eyes, Shapiro has turned into John Nash, another brilliant Princeton alumnus who went eventually went paranoid. Nash eventually regained some semblance of footing. If it were up to the fans, Shapiro might never get that chance.
While it’s doubtful that the Dolans are exactly celebrating the fact that their franchise has once again been relegated to a national embarrassment after trading another Cy Young award winner they are probably secretly thrilled that Shapiro has literally taken a meat cleaver to the budget. Wins are nice and all, but when it’s your money on the line there are other priorities. On that level, Shapiro, like Wedge, is probably as safe as he’s ever been.
Don’t be confused. In a world inhabited by the rational, Shapiro would probably be fired for the kind of mess he’s made. In a world where the balance sheet is far more important than the standings, Shapiro is probably in line for a hefty raise. Indeed, Shapiro’s cutting payroll as if he’s got an incentive clause. All any of this means is that the regime is probably solid even if the franchise is not.
There’s no doubt in my mind that, starting with Shapiro but certainly not ending there, a whole bunch of Indians apologists will defend this trade like they have all the others--by focusing on the souvenirs the Indians received in the exchange. But extolling the virtues of this pine tree or that says little about the forest. The Indians are not a better team or franchise today than they were yesterday and yesterday they weren’t so hot to begin with.
The Indians are defying gravity and poetry by going in reverse order of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Having started in relative paradise, they are blasting through purgatory at warp speed on their way to the depths of Hell. This time, though, Dante and Virgil, in the form of Shapiro and Wedge, aren’t nearly as likely to escape.
The Indians long ago stopped giving fans a reason to invest in them for this season and now have jump started that process for next season In turn, less attendance means an even smaller payroll and on and on it will go.
At this point it’s more than fair to ask if there is a realistic path forward. The last time the team was in it this deep they at least had an injection of cash coming from the new stadium that would be opening. It literally changed their fortunes.
There is no such cash cow on the horizon this time. Right now the franchise is encircled by a boa constrictor with each subsequent movement only tightening the grip. Without a few years of serious deficit spending in order to actually rebuild this franchise with bona fide players that can yield a contending team, it will get more and more difficult to breathe. Once a franchise no longer has promise to sell, the end is near. Shapiro may not see bottom but the ticket-buying, television watching, product buying public is starting to see it in high definition.
But hey, look at the bright side. An “anonymous major league source” sounding an awful lot like the Indians’ Chris Antonetti, supposedly told the Plain Dealer’s Paul Hoynes that Knapp, the alleged key to the deal, has “a great pitcher’s body.” So there is that. Of course so did John Rocker.
In ground no other club would ever dare tread, the Indians once again sent a reigning Cy Young award winner, this time Cliff Lee, packing for a parcel of Philadelphia prospects, only two of which are pitchers and only one of which is in the high minor leagues.
Indians general manager Mark Shapiro, apparently wilting under the potential pressure of having to trade a non Cy Young award winner next season decided instead to jump early, way early in dumping Lee on a salivating Phillies organization. In exchange for Lee, the Indians get a Triple A pitcher, a Single A pitcher (apparently the key to the deal, which is laughable if you allow yourself a moment of levity), a catcher and a shortstop. The Single A pitcher, Jason Knapp, is on the disabled list. When healthy, he can apparently throw really, really fast. Let me guess, he’s got swing and miss capability.
So much for Shapiro’s “pitching, pitching, pitching” mantra. It’s now been revised to “pitching, pitching, position player, position player” and that’s without getting into the finer points about whether or not the Indians needed still another catching prospect or even another shortstop prospect.
Shapiro, just because he felt like it, also gave the Phillies Ben Francisco. I wonder if the Phillies even realize it. If they don’t they will when Francisco shows up, bat in hand. The Indians have gone from a team with a bunch of young outfielders to a team with a really young bunch of outfielders.
At this point it really doesn’t matter what Shapiro has to say about any of these prospects. Cleveland fans have been through this drill so many times that they can conduct the press conferences themselves. The prospects are all great, the economy is tough, and the Indians didn’t think they’d be able to sign Lee to an extension. Any questions?
Of course, the Indians never did try to sign Lee to an extension. His agent tried to engage the Indians in those discussions before the start of this season but Shapiro wanted none of it, probably because Lee’s leverage was at its peak given his Cy Young season of 2008. But as Lee continued to pitch well for a truly awful team put together by Shapiro, it became apparent that the Lee’s price wasn’t going in Shapiro’s direction. Time to move on.
Trading Lee now also allows Shapiro to go avoid any serious questions about whether or not trading Lee next year would have brought more value. Shapiro will undoubtedly say that because Lee had another season left on his contract, the Phillies were willing to part with more than they would next season. The great thing for Shapiro is that there’s no way to prove or disprove that theory.
One theory that actually is getting disproven though is that it’s easier to fire the manager than the players. Shapiro isn’t just conducting a fire sale. He’s in full liquidation mode, sacrificing nearly any player with a decent pulse while saving his erstwhile blood brother, manager Eric Wedge from the apparent voice mail telling him to report to Shapiro’s office and bring the playbook.
And speaking of Wedge, if anyone stands to gain by Shapiro’s latest brand of nuttiness, it’s him. Shapiro has this unhealthy belief in Wedge’s ability to manage a young team, unhealthy because, speaking strictly factually, Wedge has done nothing to actually nurture and grow either a young player or a young team. Past being irrelevant, Shapiro will no longer be compelled to fire Wedge come season’s end. What would be the use in that? A young team begs for a patient steady hand and on that score, Shapiro believes Wedge has the hands of a surgeon.
Thus it’s now more likely than ever that Wedge will be guiding whatever faux major league lineup that emerges from spring training next year and suddenly that’s turned into the least of issues. The real point here is that there is no longer any point to this franchise. Right in front of our eyes, Shapiro has turned into John Nash, another brilliant Princeton alumnus who went eventually went paranoid. Nash eventually regained some semblance of footing. If it were up to the fans, Shapiro might never get that chance.
While it’s doubtful that the Dolans are exactly celebrating the fact that their franchise has once again been relegated to a national embarrassment after trading another Cy Young award winner they are probably secretly thrilled that Shapiro has literally taken a meat cleaver to the budget. Wins are nice and all, but when it’s your money on the line there are other priorities. On that level, Shapiro, like Wedge, is probably as safe as he’s ever been.
Don’t be confused. In a world inhabited by the rational, Shapiro would probably be fired for the kind of mess he’s made. In a world where the balance sheet is far more important than the standings, Shapiro is probably in line for a hefty raise. Indeed, Shapiro’s cutting payroll as if he’s got an incentive clause. All any of this means is that the regime is probably solid even if the franchise is not.
There’s no doubt in my mind that, starting with Shapiro but certainly not ending there, a whole bunch of Indians apologists will defend this trade like they have all the others--by focusing on the souvenirs the Indians received in the exchange. But extolling the virtues of this pine tree or that says little about the forest. The Indians are not a better team or franchise today than they were yesterday and yesterday they weren’t so hot to begin with.
The Indians are defying gravity and poetry by going in reverse order of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Having started in relative paradise, they are blasting through purgatory at warp speed on their way to the depths of Hell. This time, though, Dante and Virgil, in the form of Shapiro and Wedge, aren’t nearly as likely to escape.
The Indians long ago stopped giving fans a reason to invest in them for this season and now have jump started that process for next season In turn, less attendance means an even smaller payroll and on and on it will go.
At this point it’s more than fair to ask if there is a realistic path forward. The last time the team was in it this deep they at least had an injection of cash coming from the new stadium that would be opening. It literally changed their fortunes.
There is no such cash cow on the horizon this time. Right now the franchise is encircled by a boa constrictor with each subsequent movement only tightening the grip. Without a few years of serious deficit spending in order to actually rebuild this franchise with bona fide players that can yield a contending team, it will get more and more difficult to breathe. Once a franchise no longer has promise to sell, the end is near. Shapiro may not see bottom but the ticket-buying, television watching, product buying public is starting to see it in high definition.
But hey, look at the bright side. An “anonymous major league source” sounding an awful lot like the Indians’ Chris Antonetti, supposedly told the Plain Dealer’s Paul Hoynes that Knapp, the alleged key to the deal, has “a great pitcher’s body.” So there is that. Of course so did John Rocker.
Monday, July 27, 2009
A Mere Footnote
If you blinked, you missed it.
The Cleveland Indians’ traded relief pitcher Rafael Betancourt to the Colorado Rockies at around the same time general manager Mark Shapiro was telling anyone who’d listen that any trades had to yield “pitching, pitching, pitching” in return.
He got pitching in the form of an unknown commodity buried in the minors via the Mid American Conference. Cue the eye roll. The Indians aren’t about acquiring pitching. If the question is, what did we learn from the Betancourt trade, the answer, stated in the form of a question is “What is the best way to manage a dwindling team budget?”
It’s easy now for Shapiro to say that the Indians were never going to pick up that option anyway so the trade was about getting something for Betancourt rather than let him walk away at the end of the season. Whether it’s true or not or whether it was just Shapiro’s way of rehearsing his speech on Cliff Lee which he’ll either pull out of the drawer later this week or 52 weeks from now is a whole other matter.
In simple economic terms, you can give Shapiro the benefit of the doubt, but just barely. By dumping Betancourt now, the Indians not only saved themselves about $1.5 million off of payroll for the rest of this year, they also “saved” $5 million by not having to pick up his $5 million option for next year. It’s not savings you can bank because Shapiro claims he wasn’t going to pick up the option anyway, but in Indians math it’s still real money.
Frankly, Shapiro’s rationale is just a tad convenient. At $5 million in 2010, Betancourt may not be cheap but it’s not like he would have been wildly overpaid either. That would be Travis Hafner. The average major league salary is around $3.2 million. On the Indians, Betancourt’s salary would be half that of both Jake Westbrook and Kerry Wood and about 42% of Hafner’s salary approximately $12 million salary.
The major case against Betancourt is that he had a career year in 2007 and hasn’t lived up to it since, or in Shapiro-talk, “we don’t see the value proposition in Betancourt tilting toward the Indians in the near term.” But it’s not like Betancourt’s regressed like, say, Jhonny Peralta, who had a career year in 2005 and hasn’t lived up to it since.
Betancourt at least has been a mostly reliable if not quite spectacular reliever for several seasons. He did have 2007, which will put him in the “interesting, we ought to take a chance on him” category for several more seasons. And though he isn’t close to that level right now, he’d easily be considered one of the most viable bullpen arms for next season, particularly when compared to what the Indians received in return.
When a team’s glaring weakness is its bullpen and you trade one of the few mostly reliable arms for a pitcher that’s years away from contributing, then just be straight with the fans. Don’t try to sell them Connor Graham. They can tell the difference between a bald claim of improving your won/loss record and an implied claim of improving your profit/loss margin.
It’s not exactly a revelation that the Indians are a budget first team. It’s not even an indictment. It’s the double-barreled reality of a poor economy and a fundamentally flawed economic structure in baseball. Even with the economic disparities between teams minimized the Betancourt trade might still get made, but the more likely scenario is that a better economic balance between major league teams makes moves like this a far different proposition.
If baseball ever had a commissioner with some wherewithal to actually effect fundamental change on the gaping economic disparities of its member teams, then perhaps teams like Cleveland can being places that players have to leave in order to seek their fame and fortune.
Right now playing for the Indians is like an actor working in summer stock. Think Tom Hanks working for the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland when he was younger. It’s done for the experience, not the money. But you can’t build a career here, in theater or in baseball. The Indians aren’t exactly the minor leagues but at this point to say that they play in the same league as some of the other teams, like the New Yorks and Boston, for example, is only technically true.
That is, perhaps, the fundamental difference between major league baseball and the NFL. In large measure, professional football is run like a game of Monopoly. The banker gives each team the same amount of funny money and success or failure is not just a matter of rolling the dice but a product of the cleverness of your decisions.
The NFL, with its hard salary cap and equitable revenue sharing, puts a premium on the ability to manage the cap. It doesn’t give, say, the Detroit Lions 50% less money than the New York Giants and then tell them to stop whining and go compete. In football, its playing field is actually level.
Baseball, on the other hand, sees no wisdom in such progressive thinking. It runs the league as if some teams have the divine rights of kings and others are perpetually relegated to serf status. From a business standpoint, baseball works about as well as feudalism did.
Still, it’s worth asking whether a salary cap in baseball would make any difference in the trade of Betancort. Probably not, but it certainly would in the case of Lee.
Even with a salary cap, the NFL off-season is like the Hartville flea market. Everyone just goes from one table to the next alternately selling their own crap and buying someone else’s. Football teams dump Betancourt equivalents all the time because their cap value exceeds their on-field contributions, usually for younger and cheaper players in the opposite category. But for teams that need a missing piece or two, a guy like Betancourt may just be the overpriced answer. The Browns signed Willie McGinest.
Still, it mostly works. Baseball does not. With better economic balance n football, it’s far easier to measure the effectiveness of both the front office and the head coach. One can tell, for example, what a dismal failure it was for Phil Savage to sign Donte Stallworth. It’s far harder to tell whether Shapiro’s signing of Mark DeRosa was a mistake.
Another key difference between the leagues is the absence of the late-season salary dump. In baseball, July 31, the trading deadline, becomes as important of a date if not more so than opening day. The yearly ritual of the also-rans dumping assets to offset the on-coming drop in attendance in August and September doesn’t exist in the NFL. Quick, or even not so quick, tell me the last memorable NFL trading deadline deal made? Ok, I’ll make it easier. Tell me the last NFL trading deadline deal you remember. Didn’t think so.
The reason this matters is that football teams can actually build some continuity from year to year. If the Indians turn over their roster by 50% each year, it’s because it has to for economic reasons. When that happens with the Browns it’s only because they made dumb decisions.
Shapiro already runs the team as if it is in a league with a salary cap, but that’s because he has no other choice. Constrained mightily by a budget that seems to shift on a daily basis, this can never take either eye off the bottom line. It may be cynical to say that the team seems focused first on economics and wins and losses second, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
A salary cap wouldn’t necessarily make the Indians a perennial contender, but they’d have a far better chance, mainly because the high-value players they actually developed would likely have remained with them during the prime of their careers. There would have been no need to dump CC Sabathia, for example, any more than there is a need, or at least a perceived need, to dump Lee or Victor Martinez for much the same reason—salary. This isn’t just wishful thinking, it’s how it would have played out absent some overanalyzing by Shapiro, which is always a possibility. And by the way, it would have obviated the need for anyone to ponder the merits of firing Eric Wedge because he wouldn’t have been hired in the first place. With the kind of talent that would have remained, no one in their right mind would have given the keys to a rookie manager.
Betancourt is going to fall into the deep recesses of most fans’ memories the way Jamie Easterly and Victor Cruz have. But when Shapiro takes to the podium to extol the virtues of the three or four bodies that he got for trading Lee, don’t act surprised. You’d have to be comatose not to see that speech coming.
The Cleveland Indians’ traded relief pitcher Rafael Betancourt to the Colorado Rockies at around the same time general manager Mark Shapiro was telling anyone who’d listen that any trades had to yield “pitching, pitching, pitching” in return.
He got pitching in the form of an unknown commodity buried in the minors via the Mid American Conference. Cue the eye roll. The Indians aren’t about acquiring pitching. If the question is, what did we learn from the Betancourt trade, the answer, stated in the form of a question is “What is the best way to manage a dwindling team budget?”
It’s easy now for Shapiro to say that the Indians were never going to pick up that option anyway so the trade was about getting something for Betancourt rather than let him walk away at the end of the season. Whether it’s true or not or whether it was just Shapiro’s way of rehearsing his speech on Cliff Lee which he’ll either pull out of the drawer later this week or 52 weeks from now is a whole other matter.
In simple economic terms, you can give Shapiro the benefit of the doubt, but just barely. By dumping Betancourt now, the Indians not only saved themselves about $1.5 million off of payroll for the rest of this year, they also “saved” $5 million by not having to pick up his $5 million option for next year. It’s not savings you can bank because Shapiro claims he wasn’t going to pick up the option anyway, but in Indians math it’s still real money.
Frankly, Shapiro’s rationale is just a tad convenient. At $5 million in 2010, Betancourt may not be cheap but it’s not like he would have been wildly overpaid either. That would be Travis Hafner. The average major league salary is around $3.2 million. On the Indians, Betancourt’s salary would be half that of both Jake Westbrook and Kerry Wood and about 42% of Hafner’s salary approximately $12 million salary.
The major case against Betancourt is that he had a career year in 2007 and hasn’t lived up to it since, or in Shapiro-talk, “we don’t see the value proposition in Betancourt tilting toward the Indians in the near term.” But it’s not like Betancourt’s regressed like, say, Jhonny Peralta, who had a career year in 2005 and hasn’t lived up to it since.
Betancourt at least has been a mostly reliable if not quite spectacular reliever for several seasons. He did have 2007, which will put him in the “interesting, we ought to take a chance on him” category for several more seasons. And though he isn’t close to that level right now, he’d easily be considered one of the most viable bullpen arms for next season, particularly when compared to what the Indians received in return.
When a team’s glaring weakness is its bullpen and you trade one of the few mostly reliable arms for a pitcher that’s years away from contributing, then just be straight with the fans. Don’t try to sell them Connor Graham. They can tell the difference between a bald claim of improving your won/loss record and an implied claim of improving your profit/loss margin.
It’s not exactly a revelation that the Indians are a budget first team. It’s not even an indictment. It’s the double-barreled reality of a poor economy and a fundamentally flawed economic structure in baseball. Even with the economic disparities between teams minimized the Betancourt trade might still get made, but the more likely scenario is that a better economic balance between major league teams makes moves like this a far different proposition.
If baseball ever had a commissioner with some wherewithal to actually effect fundamental change on the gaping economic disparities of its member teams, then perhaps teams like Cleveland can being places that players have to leave in order to seek their fame and fortune.
Right now playing for the Indians is like an actor working in summer stock. Think Tom Hanks working for the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland when he was younger. It’s done for the experience, not the money. But you can’t build a career here, in theater or in baseball. The Indians aren’t exactly the minor leagues but at this point to say that they play in the same league as some of the other teams, like the New Yorks and Boston, for example, is only technically true.
That is, perhaps, the fundamental difference between major league baseball and the NFL. In large measure, professional football is run like a game of Monopoly. The banker gives each team the same amount of funny money and success or failure is not just a matter of rolling the dice but a product of the cleverness of your decisions.
The NFL, with its hard salary cap and equitable revenue sharing, puts a premium on the ability to manage the cap. It doesn’t give, say, the Detroit Lions 50% less money than the New York Giants and then tell them to stop whining and go compete. In football, its playing field is actually level.
Baseball, on the other hand, sees no wisdom in such progressive thinking. It runs the league as if some teams have the divine rights of kings and others are perpetually relegated to serf status. From a business standpoint, baseball works about as well as feudalism did.
Still, it’s worth asking whether a salary cap in baseball would make any difference in the trade of Betancort. Probably not, but it certainly would in the case of Lee.
Even with a salary cap, the NFL off-season is like the Hartville flea market. Everyone just goes from one table to the next alternately selling their own crap and buying someone else’s. Football teams dump Betancourt equivalents all the time because their cap value exceeds their on-field contributions, usually for younger and cheaper players in the opposite category. But for teams that need a missing piece or two, a guy like Betancourt may just be the overpriced answer. The Browns signed Willie McGinest.
Still, it mostly works. Baseball does not. With better economic balance n football, it’s far easier to measure the effectiveness of both the front office and the head coach. One can tell, for example, what a dismal failure it was for Phil Savage to sign Donte Stallworth. It’s far harder to tell whether Shapiro’s signing of Mark DeRosa was a mistake.
Another key difference between the leagues is the absence of the late-season salary dump. In baseball, July 31, the trading deadline, becomes as important of a date if not more so than opening day. The yearly ritual of the also-rans dumping assets to offset the on-coming drop in attendance in August and September doesn’t exist in the NFL. Quick, or even not so quick, tell me the last memorable NFL trading deadline deal made? Ok, I’ll make it easier. Tell me the last NFL trading deadline deal you remember. Didn’t think so.
The reason this matters is that football teams can actually build some continuity from year to year. If the Indians turn over their roster by 50% each year, it’s because it has to for economic reasons. When that happens with the Browns it’s only because they made dumb decisions.
Shapiro already runs the team as if it is in a league with a salary cap, but that’s because he has no other choice. Constrained mightily by a budget that seems to shift on a daily basis, this can never take either eye off the bottom line. It may be cynical to say that the team seems focused first on economics and wins and losses second, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
A salary cap wouldn’t necessarily make the Indians a perennial contender, but they’d have a far better chance, mainly because the high-value players they actually developed would likely have remained with them during the prime of their careers. There would have been no need to dump CC Sabathia, for example, any more than there is a need, or at least a perceived need, to dump Lee or Victor Martinez for much the same reason—salary. This isn’t just wishful thinking, it’s how it would have played out absent some overanalyzing by Shapiro, which is always a possibility. And by the way, it would have obviated the need for anyone to ponder the merits of firing Eric Wedge because he wouldn’t have been hired in the first place. With the kind of talent that would have remained, no one in their right mind would have given the keys to a rookie manager.
Betancourt is going to fall into the deep recesses of most fans’ memories the way Jamie Easterly and Victor Cruz have. But when Shapiro takes to the podium to extol the virtues of the three or four bodies that he got for trading Lee, don’t act surprised. You’d have to be comatose not to see that speech coming.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Lingering Items--Bumpy Road Edition
As Cleveland Indians’ general manager Eric Wedge continues to twist in the wind, seemingly indefinitely, many fans have turned their attention now to general manager Mark Shapiro. As Clark Griswold would say, “now you’re talking, Eddie.”
The sins of a general manager can sometimes be harder to pin down than those of the manager. And when it comes to Shapiro he can be the most difficult of all to pin down. Through careful calculation, he’s created an aura of being an accessible, regular guy on the cutting edge of the modern method for running a franchise. Yet he never really says much and, when he does, it’s more to confirm something that’s already happened than it is to tell you what might come next. As for all the technological whiz-bang analysis that Shapiro and his cadre of front office MBAs have undertaken, it still hasn’t yielded a consistent winner. But he is an earnest guy, making it easy to give him a pass most of the time.
But as it is with general managers, they are the top day-to-day executives of any franchise (except the Cleveland Browns, apparently) and control most everything that takes place on the field and behind the scenes. Thus they rightly deserve to be the focal point when fan unhappiness shifts from individual losses to institutional bungling.
Shapiro’s track record is whatever you want it to be. You can pick out any discreet period of time over his tenure to prove your point, whatever it might be. The larger picture, though, and the one for which Shapiro must be held most accountable is that the Indians are slipping back ever so gently into their “sleeping giant” status of the early 1980s. It’s a potentially devastating malady where fan interest remains high but attendance does not.
Larry and Paul Dolan know that they own a valuable asset, even if they overpaid to get it. What they are now wrestling with is how to actually keep it from being a financial millstone around their collective necks. They simply cannot countenance owning a mere sleeping giant. Yet the crossroads they face is one in which they stay the course with Shapiro or go in another direction and hope for the best.
It’s not an easy choice, especially when they just know that fans see past and current performance as indicative of the future and thus aren’t likely to embrace a stay the course approach.
That has to scare the bejeezus out of the Dolans. When 2009 rolls into 2010, they will see that their goose of a franchise isn’t going to be laying any golden eggs for a good long time; that is unless something relatively dramatic happens.
That’s where Shapiro re-enters the picture. The question for the fans as proxy for the Dolans is whether or not Shapiro can work some of the black magic that has allowed him to retain his job into a reason why they would even bother to buy tickets for next season and beyond. For too many, Shapiro seems to be out of tricks. The trade of CC Sabathia last season still hasn’t yielded anything tangible and causes many to wonder how Shapiro can make something tangible happen out of the inevitable trade of Cliff Lee, either later this season or next.
If the Dolans are thinking bigger than certainly one thing that can dramatically alter the landscape is to take the risk on the alluring but mystical alternate path. A change of direction is always good for a temporary bump in fan interest and spending. It also takes the immediate heat off the team. Whether it ends up in the same destination is hard to say but it very well could.
There are certain core facts about this franchise that aren’t going to change no matter who is in charge. The economy in this region is deeply troubled and won’t recover any time soon. Even in boom times, Cleveland is a mid-market town with mid-market upside. Whoever sits in the general manager seat next is still going to have to rely on undervalued and underpriced talent, be it young players or flawed veterans, to make it work. To be more successful than Shapiro, they’ll just need to do a better job executing those fundamentals.
This is hardly to suggest that Shapiro should hold on to his job simply because it’s hard to predict whether the next guy will do any better. He is the devil we know and, frankly, the devil we don’t can hardly drag the franchise any further down the hole.
The reality though is that the path of this franchise isn’t going to change. The only thing that can make the journey better is someone more adept at navigation. Shapiro hasn’t been a complete disaster, certainly, but he’s sure finding far more pot holes these days than smooth road and it may very well be time for the Dolans to trust a new driver.
**
Both Sheldon Ocker at the Beacon Journal and Paul Hoynes at the Plain Dealer carried the item on Wednesday that former Indians outfielder David Dellucci is miffed that he was the subject of so much abuse at the hands of Indians fans. Hoynes added, somewhat gratuitously and somewhat pejoratively, that “bloggers” also made sport of Dellucci. Well, at least Hoynes is reading.
Dellucci’s point is that he tried his best and, gosh gee, can’t a guy get a break? He has a point, but only slightly. All a player can do is give it his best effort and if it isn’t good enough then so be it. But Dellucci wasn’t pilloried because of a lack of effort. In fact, it wasn’t even personal.
Dellucci served as a symbol of the Shapiro/Wedge regime, a limping, light hitting, average fielding, good in the clubhouse veteran presence keep your head down and don’t make waves symbol of why this team’s stock is dropping faster than General Motors. It wasn’t even so much that Dellucci was a bad acquisition on a purely statistical level. It’s just that Shapiro threw stupid money at him that ultimately greatly influenced how fans viewed him.
That’s not to blame Dellucci for Shapiro’s irrational exuberance. But on a mid-market team with a mid-market budget, a player making what Dellucci made is going to be saddled with higher expectations. He’s also going to have to play every day, his mediocre performance notwithstanding. At the same time, players further down on the development curve but with potentially higher upsides have to be content with less playing time. Can you say, Franklin Gutierrez?
The fact that Dellucci is miffed with Cleveland fans is typical of the view players get from the dugout. The view from the cheap seats, though, is a whole other matter. Indians fans in particular are tired of dealing with a frustrating boom and bust cycle in which players like Dellucci come in and out of their lives with maddening regularity. They are sold to fans as missing pieces but they turn out to be cheap and ill-fitting copies. The fact is that Dellucci was way overpaid and consequently way oversold to the fans. All he really was and will ever be is a higher priced Jamey Carroll.
**
It may be an age thing, but I’ll probably never get used to how comfortable this generation is with revealing the most intimate details about themselves so publicly. In an article that appeared in ESPN the Magazine this week, Kellen Winslow had no qualms talking about how doctors were draining fluid and all manner of bad goo from his junk sack.
It was well entrenched in the category of way too much information.
Actually, what was interesting about the story is how indifferent Winslow’s teammates were toward him. Winslow was and still is a loud-mouth braggart whose wants still far exceed his accomplishments. He felt, and apparently still feels, that he’s the best tight end in the league and wanted the respect and glory that goes along with that status. That’s probably a generational thing, too.
But the story Winslow related about how he spoke up at a team meeting concerning the problems with staph and none of the players jumped to his defense speaks volumes as does that part of the story where his teammates apparently felt uncomfortable around him because of, among other things, his overly active interest in porn.
He doesn’t see his inability to fit in as anything other than a problem for others but not himself. Introspection is not one of his strong suits. This is where, for once, Braylon Edwards could have been a help. Edwards, as complex a personality as the team has ever had, at least has a modicum of introspection about him. The problem is that, like Winslow, he has an overly active ego relative to his record.
All this is too bad, by the way. Winslow, for all his personality flaws, is everything that players typically like in other players. He works hard. He plays hurt. He has skills. But he’s probably doomed in Tampa. Too many injuries, too much baggage, and just plain too weird.
**
Watching a few of the Indians’ games this week always yields the inevitable dugout view of Wedge and his ever changing battle with facial hair. It also leads to this week’s question to ponder: Why is Carl Willis always sitting so uncomfortably close to Eric Wedge in the dugout?
The sins of a general manager can sometimes be harder to pin down than those of the manager. And when it comes to Shapiro he can be the most difficult of all to pin down. Through careful calculation, he’s created an aura of being an accessible, regular guy on the cutting edge of the modern method for running a franchise. Yet he never really says much and, when he does, it’s more to confirm something that’s already happened than it is to tell you what might come next. As for all the technological whiz-bang analysis that Shapiro and his cadre of front office MBAs have undertaken, it still hasn’t yielded a consistent winner. But he is an earnest guy, making it easy to give him a pass most of the time.
But as it is with general managers, they are the top day-to-day executives of any franchise (except the Cleveland Browns, apparently) and control most everything that takes place on the field and behind the scenes. Thus they rightly deserve to be the focal point when fan unhappiness shifts from individual losses to institutional bungling.
Shapiro’s track record is whatever you want it to be. You can pick out any discreet period of time over his tenure to prove your point, whatever it might be. The larger picture, though, and the one for which Shapiro must be held most accountable is that the Indians are slipping back ever so gently into their “sleeping giant” status of the early 1980s. It’s a potentially devastating malady where fan interest remains high but attendance does not.
Larry and Paul Dolan know that they own a valuable asset, even if they overpaid to get it. What they are now wrestling with is how to actually keep it from being a financial millstone around their collective necks. They simply cannot countenance owning a mere sleeping giant. Yet the crossroads they face is one in which they stay the course with Shapiro or go in another direction and hope for the best.
It’s not an easy choice, especially when they just know that fans see past and current performance as indicative of the future and thus aren’t likely to embrace a stay the course approach.
That has to scare the bejeezus out of the Dolans. When 2009 rolls into 2010, they will see that their goose of a franchise isn’t going to be laying any golden eggs for a good long time; that is unless something relatively dramatic happens.
That’s where Shapiro re-enters the picture. The question for the fans as proxy for the Dolans is whether or not Shapiro can work some of the black magic that has allowed him to retain his job into a reason why they would even bother to buy tickets for next season and beyond. For too many, Shapiro seems to be out of tricks. The trade of CC Sabathia last season still hasn’t yielded anything tangible and causes many to wonder how Shapiro can make something tangible happen out of the inevitable trade of Cliff Lee, either later this season or next.
If the Dolans are thinking bigger than certainly one thing that can dramatically alter the landscape is to take the risk on the alluring but mystical alternate path. A change of direction is always good for a temporary bump in fan interest and spending. It also takes the immediate heat off the team. Whether it ends up in the same destination is hard to say but it very well could.
There are certain core facts about this franchise that aren’t going to change no matter who is in charge. The economy in this region is deeply troubled and won’t recover any time soon. Even in boom times, Cleveland is a mid-market town with mid-market upside. Whoever sits in the general manager seat next is still going to have to rely on undervalued and underpriced talent, be it young players or flawed veterans, to make it work. To be more successful than Shapiro, they’ll just need to do a better job executing those fundamentals.
This is hardly to suggest that Shapiro should hold on to his job simply because it’s hard to predict whether the next guy will do any better. He is the devil we know and, frankly, the devil we don’t can hardly drag the franchise any further down the hole.
The reality though is that the path of this franchise isn’t going to change. The only thing that can make the journey better is someone more adept at navigation. Shapiro hasn’t been a complete disaster, certainly, but he’s sure finding far more pot holes these days than smooth road and it may very well be time for the Dolans to trust a new driver.
**
Both Sheldon Ocker at the Beacon Journal and Paul Hoynes at the Plain Dealer carried the item on Wednesday that former Indians outfielder David Dellucci is miffed that he was the subject of so much abuse at the hands of Indians fans. Hoynes added, somewhat gratuitously and somewhat pejoratively, that “bloggers” also made sport of Dellucci. Well, at least Hoynes is reading.
Dellucci’s point is that he tried his best and, gosh gee, can’t a guy get a break? He has a point, but only slightly. All a player can do is give it his best effort and if it isn’t good enough then so be it. But Dellucci wasn’t pilloried because of a lack of effort. In fact, it wasn’t even personal.
Dellucci served as a symbol of the Shapiro/Wedge regime, a limping, light hitting, average fielding, good in the clubhouse veteran presence keep your head down and don’t make waves symbol of why this team’s stock is dropping faster than General Motors. It wasn’t even so much that Dellucci was a bad acquisition on a purely statistical level. It’s just that Shapiro threw stupid money at him that ultimately greatly influenced how fans viewed him.
That’s not to blame Dellucci for Shapiro’s irrational exuberance. But on a mid-market team with a mid-market budget, a player making what Dellucci made is going to be saddled with higher expectations. He’s also going to have to play every day, his mediocre performance notwithstanding. At the same time, players further down on the development curve but with potentially higher upsides have to be content with less playing time. Can you say, Franklin Gutierrez?
The fact that Dellucci is miffed with Cleveland fans is typical of the view players get from the dugout. The view from the cheap seats, though, is a whole other matter. Indians fans in particular are tired of dealing with a frustrating boom and bust cycle in which players like Dellucci come in and out of their lives with maddening regularity. They are sold to fans as missing pieces but they turn out to be cheap and ill-fitting copies. The fact is that Dellucci was way overpaid and consequently way oversold to the fans. All he really was and will ever be is a higher priced Jamey Carroll.
**
It may be an age thing, but I’ll probably never get used to how comfortable this generation is with revealing the most intimate details about themselves so publicly. In an article that appeared in ESPN the Magazine this week, Kellen Winslow had no qualms talking about how doctors were draining fluid and all manner of bad goo from his junk sack.
It was well entrenched in the category of way too much information.
Actually, what was interesting about the story is how indifferent Winslow’s teammates were toward him. Winslow was and still is a loud-mouth braggart whose wants still far exceed his accomplishments. He felt, and apparently still feels, that he’s the best tight end in the league and wanted the respect and glory that goes along with that status. That’s probably a generational thing, too.
But the story Winslow related about how he spoke up at a team meeting concerning the problems with staph and none of the players jumped to his defense speaks volumes as does that part of the story where his teammates apparently felt uncomfortable around him because of, among other things, his overly active interest in porn.
He doesn’t see his inability to fit in as anything other than a problem for others but not himself. Introspection is not one of his strong suits. This is where, for once, Braylon Edwards could have been a help. Edwards, as complex a personality as the team has ever had, at least has a modicum of introspection about him. The problem is that, like Winslow, he has an overly active ego relative to his record.
All this is too bad, by the way. Winslow, for all his personality flaws, is everything that players typically like in other players. He works hard. He plays hurt. He has skills. But he’s probably doomed in Tampa. Too many injuries, too much baggage, and just plain too weird.
**
Watching a few of the Indians’ games this week always yields the inevitable dugout view of Wedge and his ever changing battle with facial hair. It also leads to this week’s question to ponder: Why is Carl Willis always sitting so uncomfortably close to Eric Wedge in the dugout?
Monday, July 20, 2009
The Same Old Same Old
You don’t necessarily have to be out of the country for a few weeks and basically cut off from the local sports scene to really appreciate the numbing sameness that is the Cleveland Indians, but it helps.
For the last few weeks I’ve been in Italy enjoying the views from Rome, Florence and Venice and enjoying the lack of substantive updates on Project Shapiro V. 2009. Back in the country for mere hours though and it’s quickly apparent that this version is more bug-ridden and faulty than Windows Vista. And all Sheldon Ocker can tell us is that manager Eric Wedge isn’t at fault.
Maybe none of this is Wedge’s fault and maybe none of it ever will be, but it is interesting how a flawed team brings out his flaws as well. But this isn’t about trying once again to bury Wedge. By this point the arguments and counterarguments have been hashed and rehashed. You’re either glass half full or, in the classic words of George W., half glass empty.
The one thing you can’t be, however, is delusional. You can blame injuries, bad luck and bad decision making to explain away a season that looks far more inevitable than anomalous, but what you can’t take away from any of this is that this organization is any closer to figuring any of its problems out than it ever was.
This team is stuck in the mud and the front office seems to be standing slack-jawed at the wreckage as if this outcome never even appeared on the numerous computer runs the interns made of the team back in February. At the moment, this is a team more than 20 games under .500 and heading for 30 and you don’t have to look any further than one Andy Marte to understand why. So paralyzed have they become that they can’t even decide whether to give Marte another chance, despite the impressive season he’s having in Columbus.
It’s not that Marte, personally, would have made a bit of difference to this season’s outcome. He wouldn’t have. It’s what he stands for. Wedge and Shapiro shuffle pitchers in and out of Columbus with all the forethought of someone driving down the freeway at 100 mph while sending a text. But with Marte they wring their hands as if this very well could be the most important decision in the history of professional baseball. It isn’t even the most important decision they’ll make in the next hour.
It’s true enough that Marte has had his opportunities and it’s true enough that he’s squandered them. But that only matters if you view player development in a straight-lined fashion instead of the amazingly jagged line that it really is.
According to a story by Paul Hoynes in Sunday’s Plain Dealer, Marte’s seemingly breakout season in Columbus has drawn the organization’s attention but they remain reluctant to take another chance on him at the moment.
There are probably a number of reasons that Marte is still in Columbus but you get the feeling that when you sort through the organizational doublespeak, it boils down to one thing: Wedge. Marte just doesn’t seem to be Wedge’s kind of player. Either was Brandon Phillips. Now do you understand why the team seems to keep inserting new CDs into the player but the same song keeps playing? Marte would have had to have hit .271 at some point in his career and been “good in the clubhouse” for him to get on the right side of whatever ledger Wedge keeps.
You can almost hear the pain in his voice when he told Hoynes that “[Marte] doesn't seem to be the same guy who was here the last couple of years. We have to see if it translates up here at sometime.” Yes, sometime. What’s the hurry? It’s only late July in a season that was effectively over months ago. Don’t rush.
The issue, though, really isn’t Marte. It’s the organization. Marte is having a good season in AAA and the front office treats is like a mysterious rash on its arm. Beyond just the Wedge factor, which can’t be underestimated or overstated, you had to almost smile at the Lewis Carroll meets Joseph Heller rationale offered by assistant general manager Chris Antonetti, when he explained, presumably straight-faced, that Marte remains in Columbus for the time being because he is out of options and thus he couldn’t automatically be sent to the minors if he flames out again.
Let’s stop and pause on that for a moment. The Indians were so dismayed with Marte that they sent him outright to Columbus earlier this year even though he was out of options. In doing that, they sent the message that they were completely indifferent to whether or not he remained in the organization at all. In fact, the only reason he’s in Columbus is because no other team in the league claimed him, which is saying plenty. Factor in that the reason Marte’s playing time increased only because of an injury to Wes Hodges and you can understand where he sat on the team’s depth chart. If this was the Browns and Marte was a tight end, he’d be behind Martin Rucker.
But like a 12th alternate just lucky to get into the tournament, Marte has made the most of what is surely his absolute final chance and that seems to be the worst news the front office has heard since the Princeton men’s tennis team finished 6th in the Ivy League this past season.
Now that Marte’s playing well, for the first time, the Indians are suddenly managing around the potential of losing him. The question is, why? In the worst case scenario, Marte comes back up to the big leagues and fails, for the fourth time. If that happens, Shapiro can outright him again, just as he did a few months ago. Marte either gets claimed or he doesn’t but either way his career is over in the Indians’ organization anyway. In other words, what downside?
It may very well be that Marte is the second coming of Karl Pagel. Every team has had its share of players over the years that can’t take that final step. But with the kind of year Jhonny Peralta is having you would have thought that Marte would have been in Cleveland the moment he hit his second home run, if only to light about the 83rd fire under Peralta this year.
As I said, Marte isn’t really the issue, it’s the organization. In context, the fact that it is even fretting over him is more a marker for everything that’s wrong than it is a sign that everything is going as planned. Every day Wedge continues to pound the square peg that Peralta has become into the round hole that is the lineup is another day lost to actually trying to build a team for the future.
The Indians right now are a team without much of a plan. They can’t decide if they have enough money to keep Cliff Lee and/or Victor Martinez and they can’t decide if they will have any pitching and hitting if they don’t. They refuse to commit to Asdrubal Cabrera but seem oddly fascinated with the car wreck that’s become Peralta’s career. The next player that Wedge develops will be his first all the while he and the front office continue to pin their hopes on an eventual return to form by players like Travis Hafner and Jake Westbrook.
This team, this organization is far more coulda than shoulda at the moment and the only ones that seem to notice are just about everyone who doesn’t rely on the team for a paycheck.
Yes, it’s late July, the season’s lost but there is one saving grace. The Indians season is like a Spike Lee movie. You can leave for 20 minutes in the middle to get some popcorn and talk to a friend inSa the lobby and when you get back you will not have missed anything and it will make just as much sense as it did when you left.
For the last few weeks I’ve been in Italy enjoying the views from Rome, Florence and Venice and enjoying the lack of substantive updates on Project Shapiro V. 2009. Back in the country for mere hours though and it’s quickly apparent that this version is more bug-ridden and faulty than Windows Vista. And all Sheldon Ocker can tell us is that manager Eric Wedge isn’t at fault.
Maybe none of this is Wedge’s fault and maybe none of it ever will be, but it is interesting how a flawed team brings out his flaws as well. But this isn’t about trying once again to bury Wedge. By this point the arguments and counterarguments have been hashed and rehashed. You’re either glass half full or, in the classic words of George W., half glass empty.
The one thing you can’t be, however, is delusional. You can blame injuries, bad luck and bad decision making to explain away a season that looks far more inevitable than anomalous, but what you can’t take away from any of this is that this organization is any closer to figuring any of its problems out than it ever was.
This team is stuck in the mud and the front office seems to be standing slack-jawed at the wreckage as if this outcome never even appeared on the numerous computer runs the interns made of the team back in February. At the moment, this is a team more than 20 games under .500 and heading for 30 and you don’t have to look any further than one Andy Marte to understand why. So paralyzed have they become that they can’t even decide whether to give Marte another chance, despite the impressive season he’s having in Columbus.
It’s not that Marte, personally, would have made a bit of difference to this season’s outcome. He wouldn’t have. It’s what he stands for. Wedge and Shapiro shuffle pitchers in and out of Columbus with all the forethought of someone driving down the freeway at 100 mph while sending a text. But with Marte they wring their hands as if this very well could be the most important decision in the history of professional baseball. It isn’t even the most important decision they’ll make in the next hour.
It’s true enough that Marte has had his opportunities and it’s true enough that he’s squandered them. But that only matters if you view player development in a straight-lined fashion instead of the amazingly jagged line that it really is.
According to a story by Paul Hoynes in Sunday’s Plain Dealer, Marte’s seemingly breakout season in Columbus has drawn the organization’s attention but they remain reluctant to take another chance on him at the moment.
There are probably a number of reasons that Marte is still in Columbus but you get the feeling that when you sort through the organizational doublespeak, it boils down to one thing: Wedge. Marte just doesn’t seem to be Wedge’s kind of player. Either was Brandon Phillips. Now do you understand why the team seems to keep inserting new CDs into the player but the same song keeps playing? Marte would have had to have hit .271 at some point in his career and been “good in the clubhouse” for him to get on the right side of whatever ledger Wedge keeps.
You can almost hear the pain in his voice when he told Hoynes that “[Marte] doesn't seem to be the same guy who was here the last couple of years. We have to see if it translates up here at sometime.” Yes, sometime. What’s the hurry? It’s only late July in a season that was effectively over months ago. Don’t rush.
The issue, though, really isn’t Marte. It’s the organization. Marte is having a good season in AAA and the front office treats is like a mysterious rash on its arm. Beyond just the Wedge factor, which can’t be underestimated or overstated, you had to almost smile at the Lewis Carroll meets Joseph Heller rationale offered by assistant general manager Chris Antonetti, when he explained, presumably straight-faced, that Marte remains in Columbus for the time being because he is out of options and thus he couldn’t automatically be sent to the minors if he flames out again.
Let’s stop and pause on that for a moment. The Indians were so dismayed with Marte that they sent him outright to Columbus earlier this year even though he was out of options. In doing that, they sent the message that they were completely indifferent to whether or not he remained in the organization at all. In fact, the only reason he’s in Columbus is because no other team in the league claimed him, which is saying plenty. Factor in that the reason Marte’s playing time increased only because of an injury to Wes Hodges and you can understand where he sat on the team’s depth chart. If this was the Browns and Marte was a tight end, he’d be behind Martin Rucker.
But like a 12th alternate just lucky to get into the tournament, Marte has made the most of what is surely his absolute final chance and that seems to be the worst news the front office has heard since the Princeton men’s tennis team finished 6th in the Ivy League this past season.
Now that Marte’s playing well, for the first time, the Indians are suddenly managing around the potential of losing him. The question is, why? In the worst case scenario, Marte comes back up to the big leagues and fails, for the fourth time. If that happens, Shapiro can outright him again, just as he did a few months ago. Marte either gets claimed or he doesn’t but either way his career is over in the Indians’ organization anyway. In other words, what downside?
It may very well be that Marte is the second coming of Karl Pagel. Every team has had its share of players over the years that can’t take that final step. But with the kind of year Jhonny Peralta is having you would have thought that Marte would have been in Cleveland the moment he hit his second home run, if only to light about the 83rd fire under Peralta this year.
As I said, Marte isn’t really the issue, it’s the organization. In context, the fact that it is even fretting over him is more a marker for everything that’s wrong than it is a sign that everything is going as planned. Every day Wedge continues to pound the square peg that Peralta has become into the round hole that is the lineup is another day lost to actually trying to build a team for the future.
The Indians right now are a team without much of a plan. They can’t decide if they have enough money to keep Cliff Lee and/or Victor Martinez and they can’t decide if they will have any pitching and hitting if they don’t. They refuse to commit to Asdrubal Cabrera but seem oddly fascinated with the car wreck that’s become Peralta’s career. The next player that Wedge develops will be his first all the while he and the front office continue to pin their hopes on an eventual return to form by players like Travis Hafner and Jake Westbrook.
This team, this organization is far more coulda than shoulda at the moment and the only ones that seem to notice are just about everyone who doesn’t rely on the team for a paycheck.
Yes, it’s late July, the season’s lost but there is one saving grace. The Indians season is like a Spike Lee movie. You can leave for 20 minutes in the middle to get some popcorn and talk to a friend inSa the lobby and when you get back you will not have missed anything and it will make just as much sense as it did when you left.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Welcome to the Dark Side, Wolverines
[Editor's Note: This column originally appeared on December 20, 2007. I'd call it a best of, or a classic, but it's really more like foreshadowing. What it is, actually, is a way for the author to take a much deserved vacation. We'll see you in a few weeks. For now, either enjoy these "best ofs" or not. Your choice. ]
There is a Chinese proverb that says in desperation, a dog will leap over a wall. Over the many decades of its existence, the University of Michigan has attempted to build a certain wall of elitism around its school, effectively telling everyone in the world that it is a different and better place, academically and otherwise, than say the Ohio States of the world.
Well, that wall not only just got jumped it got torn down and all it took was Michigan selling its soul with the hiring of a coach who couldn’t close the deal in a game he needed to win in order to gain a berth in the National Championship game on the line. Rich Rodriguez meet Lloyd Carr.
It’s hard to know, of course, how the Michigan’s hiring of the former West Virginia Moutaineers coach ultimately will play out, though its fun to speculate, given Rodriguez’s continued inability to actually win really big games. What isn’t so hard to know, of course, is that Michigan fans better get used to two things: their school is no longer an above-it-all institution of higher learning and their football program is now being led by a coach with one eye always firmly trained on the next opportunity of a lifetime.
Former Louisville and Atlanta Falcons coach Bobby Petrino has been getting a tremendous amount of abuse from conveniently high-minded types like former players and ESPN talking heads for supposedly running out on a hapless Atlanta Falcons team and franchise but Rodriguez’s similar move in West Virginia has been met with mostly a shrug. Hard to figure, particularly as the facts continue to trickle out about Rodriguez.
Make no mistake about it, Rodriguez is running out on his team in much the same way Petrino ran out on Atlanta. Keep in mind first that the ink on the contract Rodriguez had signed just this past August with West Virginia is barely dry. Second, West Virginia’s season isn’t over. They have a little matter of a Fiesta Bowl game on January 2nd against Oklahoma before the season is over. Arguably, that game is far more meaningful to West Virginia and its program than the three remaining games that were on the Atlanta Falcons schedule when Petrino abruptly quit.
Maybe Petrino should have stuck around the hopelessness that is Atlanta these days, but no one has yet come up with a plausible reason why Rodriguez shouldn’t be similarly criticized or chastised. If Michigan truly wanted Rodriguez, which is somewhat questionable since he was, after all, their third choice, why couldn’t they wait until after the Fiesta Bowl?
Actually, there is an answer to that question. It’s tied up in the engine that really drives the college football machine these days: recruiting. Rodriguez met with Michigan representatives last Friday in Toledo. By Saturday morning, according to published reports, Rodriguez had made his decision. How do we know that? Well, it appears that one of the first persons told about the decision was not his team, maybe not even his wife. It was Pittsburgh Jeanette high school player, Terrelle Pryor, who just happens to be one of the most highly sought recruits in the nation.
According to a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Rodriguez called Pryor Saturday morning, just hours actually after the Toledo meeting, to tell Pryor he was headed to Michigan. Pryor’s immediate reaction was to take West Virginia off his list of schools under consideration and to add Michigan to it instead.
Pryor is so highly sought, including by Ohio State, because he runs the spread offense, which just happens to be Rodriguez’s specialty and is the current rage in offensive schemes. In fact, while Ohio State is one of Pryor’s top choices, along with Oregon, Penn State and Florida, Pryor has openly mused that Ohio State’s offensive philosophy may not be the right fit for him.
But now that Rodriguez has taken his act to Michigan, Pryor now has three Big Ten schools on his list. Given how quickly Rodriguez called Pryor with the news, it is fair to ask (though no one seemingly has) what role the potential to land Pryor in Michigan played in Michigan’s decision to offer Rodriguez the job. In fact, if Pryor does end up at Michigan, those questions shouldn’t just be asked on the internet, the NCAA should actually investigate.
It’s doubtful that anyone officially associated with Michigan would actually admit that the chance to lure Pryor to the Wolverines in order to resurrect a program in sore need of resurrection played any role whatsoever. But if anyone officially associated with Michigan denies that Pryor’s name ever came up, then the last piece of Michigan’s so-called mystique—credibility—will have been forever compromised. Welcome, Wolverines, to the dark side.
Another aspect about Rodriguez’s hiring, which not only reflects poorly on Michigan but also tells you a great deal about Rodriguez’s ethics, is the little matter of the pesky $4 million buyout in that flimsy contract he signed last August. According to a story in the Charleston Daily Mail, it sure seems like Rodriguez is trying to avoid paying the penalty he voluntarily accepted without so much as a gun to his head just eight months ago if he ever quit and went to another school.
No one actually expected Rodriguez to pay the penalty personally. These things are usually handled by a combination of the school and its boosters that lured him away. But $4 million is actually one of the bigger penalty clauses that you’ll see in a contract and neither the University of Michigan nor its boosters seem all that keen on paying an extra $4 million just to buy their third choice.
Attempting to escape the obligation, Rodriguez has done a couple of things, on the advice undoubtedly of his attorneys. First, he’s actually intimated that he’s not leaving because of the great opportunity that Michigan supposedly presents but more so because West Virginia wasn’t meeting its contractual commitments to him regarding the completion of an academic center and an upgrade to the locker room. In this battle, he’s enlisted some alums to spread the word while remaining oh so distant from it personally. Coward.
Apparently, the Mountaineers academic center was completed, just a little later than planned. The locker room upgrade is supposedly on schedule. If this all seems more than a little trivial, just remember the two great adages of most major college coaches these days: Greed know no bounds and no amount of money is too small to quibble over when it’s mine. Remember, too, that all this is really just an attempt to insert leverage into a discussion on how to reduce the $4 million to, perhaps a more manageable number. In that regard, it’s also instructive to remember that this is the same tactic that Michigan and John Beilein used just last year when Beilein, too, bolted the Mountaineers for the sunny shores of Ann Arbor and sought to reduce his $2.5 million buyout penalty. It worked. He paid only $1.5 million. Cheapskate.
Second, the effective date of Rodriguez’s resignation letter is January 3rd. The point here is to try and encourage West Virginia to actually fire Rodriguez before that date, which, too, would avoid Rodriguez having to pay the penalty.
If all this seems just a little underhanded or a little sordid, remember that Michigan could make this all go away by simply paying the penalty in the first place. Of course, they didn’t do that in the case of Beilein when the stakes were less, so why would anyone expect anything different here? You may rightly surmise that this is the least that this supposedly stand-up institution could do, but you’d be wrong. Doing the right thing always has its price and, in this case, we now know that at Michigan, it’s less than $4 million.
Eventually, you do reap what you sow and all this will someday come back to revisit Rodriguez and Michigan, and probably at the least opportune time. In the short-term, though, Michigan and its fans can go off and celebrate this hiring and all that it will supposedly bring to the program. But as they’re drinking themselves giddy, no amount of alcohol can hide the fact that as of now, the only differences between themselves and Arkansas are geography and conference affiliation. And when their heads eventually clear, maybe then they’ll awake to the reality of the permanent damage they’ve done to the school and its reputation.
There is a Chinese proverb that says in desperation, a dog will leap over a wall. Over the many decades of its existence, the University of Michigan has attempted to build a certain wall of elitism around its school, effectively telling everyone in the world that it is a different and better place, academically and otherwise, than say the Ohio States of the world.
Well, that wall not only just got jumped it got torn down and all it took was Michigan selling its soul with the hiring of a coach who couldn’t close the deal in a game he needed to win in order to gain a berth in the National Championship game on the line. Rich Rodriguez meet Lloyd Carr.
It’s hard to know, of course, how the Michigan’s hiring of the former West Virginia Moutaineers coach ultimately will play out, though its fun to speculate, given Rodriguez’s continued inability to actually win really big games. What isn’t so hard to know, of course, is that Michigan fans better get used to two things: their school is no longer an above-it-all institution of higher learning and their football program is now being led by a coach with one eye always firmly trained on the next opportunity of a lifetime.
Former Louisville and Atlanta Falcons coach Bobby Petrino has been getting a tremendous amount of abuse from conveniently high-minded types like former players and ESPN talking heads for supposedly running out on a hapless Atlanta Falcons team and franchise but Rodriguez’s similar move in West Virginia has been met with mostly a shrug. Hard to figure, particularly as the facts continue to trickle out about Rodriguez.
Make no mistake about it, Rodriguez is running out on his team in much the same way Petrino ran out on Atlanta. Keep in mind first that the ink on the contract Rodriguez had signed just this past August with West Virginia is barely dry. Second, West Virginia’s season isn’t over. They have a little matter of a Fiesta Bowl game on January 2nd against Oklahoma before the season is over. Arguably, that game is far more meaningful to West Virginia and its program than the three remaining games that were on the Atlanta Falcons schedule when Petrino abruptly quit.
Maybe Petrino should have stuck around the hopelessness that is Atlanta these days, but no one has yet come up with a plausible reason why Rodriguez shouldn’t be similarly criticized or chastised. If Michigan truly wanted Rodriguez, which is somewhat questionable since he was, after all, their third choice, why couldn’t they wait until after the Fiesta Bowl?
Actually, there is an answer to that question. It’s tied up in the engine that really drives the college football machine these days: recruiting. Rodriguez met with Michigan representatives last Friday in Toledo. By Saturday morning, according to published reports, Rodriguez had made his decision. How do we know that? Well, it appears that one of the first persons told about the decision was not his team, maybe not even his wife. It was Pittsburgh Jeanette high school player, Terrelle Pryor, who just happens to be one of the most highly sought recruits in the nation.
According to a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Rodriguez called Pryor Saturday morning, just hours actually after the Toledo meeting, to tell Pryor he was headed to Michigan. Pryor’s immediate reaction was to take West Virginia off his list of schools under consideration and to add Michigan to it instead.
Pryor is so highly sought, including by Ohio State, because he runs the spread offense, which just happens to be Rodriguez’s specialty and is the current rage in offensive schemes. In fact, while Ohio State is one of Pryor’s top choices, along with Oregon, Penn State and Florida, Pryor has openly mused that Ohio State’s offensive philosophy may not be the right fit for him.
But now that Rodriguez has taken his act to Michigan, Pryor now has three Big Ten schools on his list. Given how quickly Rodriguez called Pryor with the news, it is fair to ask (though no one seemingly has) what role the potential to land Pryor in Michigan played in Michigan’s decision to offer Rodriguez the job. In fact, if Pryor does end up at Michigan, those questions shouldn’t just be asked on the internet, the NCAA should actually investigate.
It’s doubtful that anyone officially associated with Michigan would actually admit that the chance to lure Pryor to the Wolverines in order to resurrect a program in sore need of resurrection played any role whatsoever. But if anyone officially associated with Michigan denies that Pryor’s name ever came up, then the last piece of Michigan’s so-called mystique—credibility—will have been forever compromised. Welcome, Wolverines, to the dark side.
Another aspect about Rodriguez’s hiring, which not only reflects poorly on Michigan but also tells you a great deal about Rodriguez’s ethics, is the little matter of the pesky $4 million buyout in that flimsy contract he signed last August. According to a story in the Charleston Daily Mail, it sure seems like Rodriguez is trying to avoid paying the penalty he voluntarily accepted without so much as a gun to his head just eight months ago if he ever quit and went to another school.
No one actually expected Rodriguez to pay the penalty personally. These things are usually handled by a combination of the school and its boosters that lured him away. But $4 million is actually one of the bigger penalty clauses that you’ll see in a contract and neither the University of Michigan nor its boosters seem all that keen on paying an extra $4 million just to buy their third choice.
Attempting to escape the obligation, Rodriguez has done a couple of things, on the advice undoubtedly of his attorneys. First, he’s actually intimated that he’s not leaving because of the great opportunity that Michigan supposedly presents but more so because West Virginia wasn’t meeting its contractual commitments to him regarding the completion of an academic center and an upgrade to the locker room. In this battle, he’s enlisted some alums to spread the word while remaining oh so distant from it personally. Coward.
Apparently, the Mountaineers academic center was completed, just a little later than planned. The locker room upgrade is supposedly on schedule. If this all seems more than a little trivial, just remember the two great adages of most major college coaches these days: Greed know no bounds and no amount of money is too small to quibble over when it’s mine. Remember, too, that all this is really just an attempt to insert leverage into a discussion on how to reduce the $4 million to, perhaps a more manageable number. In that regard, it’s also instructive to remember that this is the same tactic that Michigan and John Beilein used just last year when Beilein, too, bolted the Mountaineers for the sunny shores of Ann Arbor and sought to reduce his $2.5 million buyout penalty. It worked. He paid only $1.5 million. Cheapskate.
Second, the effective date of Rodriguez’s resignation letter is January 3rd. The point here is to try and encourage West Virginia to actually fire Rodriguez before that date, which, too, would avoid Rodriguez having to pay the penalty.
If all this seems just a little underhanded or a little sordid, remember that Michigan could make this all go away by simply paying the penalty in the first place. Of course, they didn’t do that in the case of Beilein when the stakes were less, so why would anyone expect anything different here? You may rightly surmise that this is the least that this supposedly stand-up institution could do, but you’d be wrong. Doing the right thing always has its price and, in this case, we now know that at Michigan, it’s less than $4 million.
Eventually, you do reap what you sow and all this will someday come back to revisit Rodriguez and Michigan, and probably at the least opportune time. In the short-term, though, Michigan and its fans can go off and celebrate this hiring and all that it will supposedly bring to the program. But as they’re drinking themselves giddy, no amount of alcohol can hide the fact that as of now, the only differences between themselves and Arkansas are geography and conference affiliation. And when their heads eventually clear, maybe then they’ll awake to the reality of the permanent damage they’ve done to the school and its reputation.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Follow the Money
[Editor's Note: This column originally appeared on February 28, 2008. I'd call it a best of, or a classic, but it's really more like foreshadowing. What it is, actually, is a way for the author to take a much deserved vacation. We'll see you in a few weeks. For now, either enjoy these "best ofs" or not. Your choice. ]
On the surface, the two stories wouldn’t seem to have much in common. Chicago Cubs owner Sam Zell said earlier this week that he would definitely consider selling the naming rights to Wrigley Field. At roughly the same time, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was heard saying, again, that he believes NFL owners will vote to opt out of the current labor agreement.
Two different sports, two completely unrelated issues. Hardly. Like everything else in sports these days, the two stories share a common parent: money. In particular, the root is the ever spiraling cost of owning and running a professional sports franchise and what to do about it.
There was a time not all that long ago when old white men bought sports teams for the pure ego and hobby of it. That era was characterized mostly by the alarming lack of business acumen these owners brought to their hobby. Whatever rigor they applied to their “real” businesses, the ones that made them all the dough, was thrown out the window when they dabbled in sports.
But this didn’t necessarily cause them any great concern because the value of their teams continued to climb ever higher, seemingly defying all the laws of economics. Owning a sports team became the ultimate boom enterprise. But the downside, at least from a fan’s perspective, is that the economic health of their sports eventually grew worse. Most owners, more interested in stroking their egos than making good business decisions with their teams, wouldn’t hesitate to sign the next great superstar to an even more outrageous contract then the last great superstar. Ticket prices rose.
But eventually a different breed of owner started making their way into pro sports. Buying at ever increasing prices and taking on the kind of crushing debt that made the old white guys shake their heads, this breed grew up on budgets and business plans and didn’t see any reason not to translate that into their sports properties. Indeed, it was a necessity. This breed has no less of a desire to win than their forbearers; it’s just that given what they paid for their team, they aren’t as comfortable dipping into their personal fortunes any further in order to meet their debt payments, let alone such trivial matters as player acquisition expenses.
Zell and Jones are two such owners. Zell is a somewhat reluctant owner of the Cubs, having acquired them when he purchased the Tribune Co., the Cubs’ previous owner, last April for more than $8 billion. Zell’s interest seemed, at least at the time, much more focused on the media properties under the Tribune banner and not, necessarily the Cubs.
Most expect Zell to sell the Cubs sooner rather than later if only to retire some of the massive debt he took on to buy the Tribune Co. in the first place. But Zell is letting it be known now that he will sell the Cubs when he’s good and ready and, by the way, he plans to maximize his recovery by selling the Cubs and Wrigley Field separately.
There is good reason for Zell to wait and to sell separately. According to Forbes, the value of the Cubs franchise has been increasing at an average annual rate of 14% and increased a whopping 32% just between 2005 and 2006, not atypical figures whatsoever in either baseball or football. Needing money is one thing, but given these returns it compels Zell to wait a little longer to sell. In the meantime, why not create a tidy little revenue stream by selling the naming rights to one of the most famous stadiums in the world? For an owner more interested in money than history, it makes perfect sense.
For the baseball purist out there, Zell’s plans may be sacrilege but don’t blame Zell. Baseball’s ownership fraternity has never been all that keen on sharing revenue among themselves and thus it’s not a surprise that left to their own devices things like this would happen. With baseball having created an economic mess of itself for the last several years with no appreciable end in sight, now is hardly the time to begrudge even Sam Zell from making a little more money on the backs of fans. There are much bigger issues to solve in that sport first.
At first blush, it seems that’s what Jones and at least 23 other of his fellow owners are trying to do by opting out of the labor contract early, solving the big problems. Under its terms, the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement is supposed to expire after the 2012 season. But either the owners or the union can opt out of the final two years by giving notice by November 8th of this year. If that occurs, 2010 becomes the final year of the contract and it would be sans a salary cap.
But lest anyone think that this tactic has anything to do with eradicating the sport of a salary cap, think again. Though the owners once fought the concept, the presence of a salary cap does, from their perspective, achieve the desired result by acting as a sort of lifeline or net to those among them who would otherwise try to scale a mountain they have no business climbing in the first place.
What Jones and his brethren really want is a re-working of the cap. It’s no secret that the owners feel that the current collective bargaining agreement, which was actually an extension of the previous contract, was rammed down their throats by then commissioner Paul Tagliabue after several months of hard bargaining with the union. In fact, it’s not a coincidence that Tagliabue’s retirement announcement came just days after the contract was signed. He knew he had lost the support of many of the owners.
It’s not hard to see why. Putting aside the contract’s complexity just know that in 2010, assuming the contract were to stay in place, the players share of projected total revenues (itself an incredibly complex calculation) rises to 58%. That’s a pretty long arm into the owners’ rather deep pockets. Keep in mind, too, that the definition of total revenues was further expanded so that virtually any income that the owners generate gets included in the calculation.
Ever since Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989, he’s been trying to find ways to increase his own bottom line. When he tried striking his own marketing deals built off the Cowboys brand, he got cut off at the pass. Since then he’s been working from inside with an ever-changing fraternity that used to see him as a no-nothing maverick. Now he has the ears of a majority of owners who see the players getting an ever bigger piece of what they consider to be their pie. And the bigger the piece that goes to the players, the less that goes to the owners, many of whom are juggling huge debt.
None of this makes Jones or any of the other owners bad guys, but it does set football up for the kind of labor disharmony that is at the root of some of baseball’s biggest problems, including the lack of a legitimate, wide-ranging drug testing program. Upshaw has vowed that if the cap comes off, it will never return, a big promise that he probably can’t keep. Football owners aren’t quite the patsies that permeate baseball’s ownership ranks.
Whether Zell ultimately sells the naming rights to Wrigley Field and whether there is a period of labor unrest in football ultimately are just the visible and transient outcomes of a larger unspoken issue. But all you need to remember when trying to connect the seemingly unrelated dots in such matters is what the “Deep Throat” character kept telling Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward character in All the President’s Men: follow the money.
On the surface, the two stories wouldn’t seem to have much in common. Chicago Cubs owner Sam Zell said earlier this week that he would definitely consider selling the naming rights to Wrigley Field. At roughly the same time, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was heard saying, again, that he believes NFL owners will vote to opt out of the current labor agreement.
Two different sports, two completely unrelated issues. Hardly. Like everything else in sports these days, the two stories share a common parent: money. In particular, the root is the ever spiraling cost of owning and running a professional sports franchise and what to do about it.
There was a time not all that long ago when old white men bought sports teams for the pure ego and hobby of it. That era was characterized mostly by the alarming lack of business acumen these owners brought to their hobby. Whatever rigor they applied to their “real” businesses, the ones that made them all the dough, was thrown out the window when they dabbled in sports.
But this didn’t necessarily cause them any great concern because the value of their teams continued to climb ever higher, seemingly defying all the laws of economics. Owning a sports team became the ultimate boom enterprise. But the downside, at least from a fan’s perspective, is that the economic health of their sports eventually grew worse. Most owners, more interested in stroking their egos than making good business decisions with their teams, wouldn’t hesitate to sign the next great superstar to an even more outrageous contract then the last great superstar. Ticket prices rose.
But eventually a different breed of owner started making their way into pro sports. Buying at ever increasing prices and taking on the kind of crushing debt that made the old white guys shake their heads, this breed grew up on budgets and business plans and didn’t see any reason not to translate that into their sports properties. Indeed, it was a necessity. This breed has no less of a desire to win than their forbearers; it’s just that given what they paid for their team, they aren’t as comfortable dipping into their personal fortunes any further in order to meet their debt payments, let alone such trivial matters as player acquisition expenses.
Zell and Jones are two such owners. Zell is a somewhat reluctant owner of the Cubs, having acquired them when he purchased the Tribune Co., the Cubs’ previous owner, last April for more than $8 billion. Zell’s interest seemed, at least at the time, much more focused on the media properties under the Tribune banner and not, necessarily the Cubs.
Most expect Zell to sell the Cubs sooner rather than later if only to retire some of the massive debt he took on to buy the Tribune Co. in the first place. But Zell is letting it be known now that he will sell the Cubs when he’s good and ready and, by the way, he plans to maximize his recovery by selling the Cubs and Wrigley Field separately.
There is good reason for Zell to wait and to sell separately. According to Forbes, the value of the Cubs franchise has been increasing at an average annual rate of 14% and increased a whopping 32% just between 2005 and 2006, not atypical figures whatsoever in either baseball or football. Needing money is one thing, but given these returns it compels Zell to wait a little longer to sell. In the meantime, why not create a tidy little revenue stream by selling the naming rights to one of the most famous stadiums in the world? For an owner more interested in money than history, it makes perfect sense.
For the baseball purist out there, Zell’s plans may be sacrilege but don’t blame Zell. Baseball’s ownership fraternity has never been all that keen on sharing revenue among themselves and thus it’s not a surprise that left to their own devices things like this would happen. With baseball having created an economic mess of itself for the last several years with no appreciable end in sight, now is hardly the time to begrudge even Sam Zell from making a little more money on the backs of fans. There are much bigger issues to solve in that sport first.
At first blush, it seems that’s what Jones and at least 23 other of his fellow owners are trying to do by opting out of the labor contract early, solving the big problems. Under its terms, the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement is supposed to expire after the 2012 season. But either the owners or the union can opt out of the final two years by giving notice by November 8th of this year. If that occurs, 2010 becomes the final year of the contract and it would be sans a salary cap.
But lest anyone think that this tactic has anything to do with eradicating the sport of a salary cap, think again. Though the owners once fought the concept, the presence of a salary cap does, from their perspective, achieve the desired result by acting as a sort of lifeline or net to those among them who would otherwise try to scale a mountain they have no business climbing in the first place.
What Jones and his brethren really want is a re-working of the cap. It’s no secret that the owners feel that the current collective bargaining agreement, which was actually an extension of the previous contract, was rammed down their throats by then commissioner Paul Tagliabue after several months of hard bargaining with the union. In fact, it’s not a coincidence that Tagliabue’s retirement announcement came just days after the contract was signed. He knew he had lost the support of many of the owners.
It’s not hard to see why. Putting aside the contract’s complexity just know that in 2010, assuming the contract were to stay in place, the players share of projected total revenues (itself an incredibly complex calculation) rises to 58%. That’s a pretty long arm into the owners’ rather deep pockets. Keep in mind, too, that the definition of total revenues was further expanded so that virtually any income that the owners generate gets included in the calculation.
Ever since Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989, he’s been trying to find ways to increase his own bottom line. When he tried striking his own marketing deals built off the Cowboys brand, he got cut off at the pass. Since then he’s been working from inside with an ever-changing fraternity that used to see him as a no-nothing maverick. Now he has the ears of a majority of owners who see the players getting an ever bigger piece of what they consider to be their pie. And the bigger the piece that goes to the players, the less that goes to the owners, many of whom are juggling huge debt.
None of this makes Jones or any of the other owners bad guys, but it does set football up for the kind of labor disharmony that is at the root of some of baseball’s biggest problems, including the lack of a legitimate, wide-ranging drug testing program. Upshaw has vowed that if the cap comes off, it will never return, a big promise that he probably can’t keep. Football owners aren’t quite the patsies that permeate baseball’s ownership ranks.
Whether Zell ultimately sells the naming rights to Wrigley Field and whether there is a period of labor unrest in football ultimately are just the visible and transient outcomes of a larger unspoken issue. But all you need to remember when trying to connect the seemingly unrelated dots in such matters is what the “Deep Throat” character kept telling Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward character in All the President’s Men: follow the money.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Another Lost Weekend---Almost
[Editor's Note: This column originally appeared on April 6, 2008. I'd call it a best of, or a classic, but it's really more like foreshadowing. What it is, actually, is a way for the author to take a much deserved vacation. We'll see you in a few weeks. For now, either enjoy these "best ofs" or not. Your choice. ]
Well, at least they avoided the sweep. But no one outside of Cleveland Indians announcer Matt Underwood actually believes, as Underwood said after the final out Sunday, that all is once again well with the Indians. Rather, had the Indians found a way to once again lose to the Oakland As, more than a few flat screens around northeast Ohio would have been in need of the Best Buy Geek Squad.
Until the Tribe found a way to squeak out Sunday’s 2-1 win, the highlight was the fact that only two of the three games found their way on local television. Sitting through two of them was more than enough to bring back a whole host of last season memories of what this team looks like when it doesn’t hit. It isn’t pretty in the same way that a head-on car crash isn’t pretty.
If there was a bright spot, and geez that would be hard to find, it had to be Cliff Lee, who pitched twice as well as the rest of the team played. For most of the game, it looked like it was Lee’s turn in the “hard luck loser” box pitching for a team that was treating Oakland’s Joe Blanton like he was Josh Beckett.
Sticking with the Cliff Lee theme for a minute, in a weekend that was discouraging on several levels Lee looked nothing like the pretender who was up there last year nibbling at the corners, treating every hitter as if he was David Ortiz and otherwise getting his brains beat in every five days until he took up permanent residence in Buffalo. In his first start of this season, Lee looked mostly confident and mostly willing to challenge the awfully young As lineup. If that seems like faint praise, it’s really not considering that the rest of the Indians lineup was much less willing to take on that challenge for most of the three game series.
A microcosm of the weekend’s offensive futility was the 7th inning of Sunday’s game. After Jason Michaels grounded out, Andy Marte and Kelly Shoppach singled. The As then walked Grady Sizemore, the only Indians player putting together decent at bats these days. Asdrubal Cabrera was up next and hit a perfect double play ball to As first baseman Daric Barton. Barton bobbled it long enough to keep the Indians out of the double play, although Barton was able to get Cabrera at first. The Indians, however, tied the game at 1-1. Give Cabrera the gift RBI.
With first base open, the As decided to intentionally walk Travis Hafner, which made some sense historically but not if you have access to the hitting charts of Hafner’s last 140 or so games, bringing up Ryan Garko, who traditionally hits Blanton well. After falling behind in the count, Garko walked on a 3-2 pitch to bring home the Indians second run. That brought on Santiago Casilla who proceeded to strike out Jhonny Peralta.
If you’re on optimist, you’d say at least the Indians took the lead. If you’re a realist, you know that this was the Indians best opportunity to break out of the offensive slump that’s gripped them over the last four games. Instead, they ended up with two runs as the result of an error (though it won’t appear in the box score as such) and a walk. The Indians didn’t come any closer to scoring the rest of the game and were left to protect what was a tenuous lead at best.
But the reason the Indians avoided the sweep is the reason they have a chance to be special—good pitching. When Lee was done after 6 2/3 innings, the pitching triumvirate that was so strong last season, Rafael Perez, Rafael Bentancort and Joe Borowski kept the As off the board. In truth, they were hardly challenged.
Indians Manager Eric Wedge, never one to register much of a pulse publicly, nonetheless hit the nail on the head, the best hit of the weekend actually, when he said that that the main problem with the offense is the lack of quality at bats. In each of Friday’s and Saturday’s losses, the Indians struck out 10 times. Not every strike out occurred while the Indians batter had his bat on his shoulder, it only seemed like it. And it wasn’t as if they were facing the Red Sox. Justin Duchscherer, which is at least as hard to spell as it is to say, baffled the Indians on Friday and teammate Dana Eveland, another pitcher unknown outside of the most hardcore of fantasy league players, did likewise on Saturday.
On Sunday, all Blanton did was what he normally does, give up hits. The only problem is that other than the aforementioned 7th inning, the Indians couldn’t string them together. In fact, as a measure of the lost weekend that the Tribe offense had, only twice in three games did it have two consecutive hits in an inning, the 7th on Sunday and the 6th inning on Friday. In fact, Friday’s 6th inning was a whole lot like Sunday’s 7th. Shoppach led off the inning with a single. Sizemore followed with another. Cabrera walked to load the bases, bringing up Peralta who hit into a double play, brining home a run. Hafner was up next and struck out looking, naturally.
The obvious counterpoint to all of this is that the season’s just six games old. There always are going to be stretches where it seems like every opposing pitcher is throwing softballs and stretches where it seems like they’re throwing BBs. The sheer length of the season is often underappreciated leading to drive-by analysis that lacks context. But on the other hand this is a team that is largely a carryover from last season and its weekend offensive struggles seem much more like a continuation of a pattern firmly established than a typical seasonal blip. If Tribe General Manager Mark Shapiro were more like Browns General Manager Phil Savage, he already would have seen enough, either David Dellucci or Jason Michaels or both would be on their way to Seattle and Ben Francisco would be on his way from Buffalo.
But the one thing that you can’t ever look like you’re doing in baseball is panicking. And that’s exactly what it would look like if Shapiro were to acknowledge what everyone can see is true—that without more offensive production from their outfield, the Indians are going to have a lot of hard luck losing pitchers this season.
It’s true that the Indians best hitter, Victor Martinez, sat out his fourth straight game, but his presence isn’t going to solve everything or even most things. Offensively, this is a flawed Indians line-up and will remain so as long as guys like Michaels, Dellucci and Andy Marte get significant playing time. Throw in the disturbing tendencies of Peralta to take weeks off at a time, Casey Blake being Casey Blake, and Hafner still unable to return to the form he had before he got married and you can see why the Indians scored six runs all weekend against a very average Oakland team.
But baseball, like golf, always offers a chance for immediate redemption. For the Indians, they’ll have to find it in Anaheim against a team far better than the one they faced this weekend. And if all goes as it usually does in baseball, then the Indians will end up averaging 10 runs a game against the Angels. But if things don’t turn around then, don’t look for it for awhile for after the Indians board that charter plane following Wednesday’s afternoon getaway game, they’re headed back to Cleveland to face, again, that dynamic one-two punch of Eveland and Duchscherer and the mighty,
Well, at least they avoided the sweep. But no one outside of Cleveland Indians announcer Matt Underwood actually believes, as Underwood said after the final out Sunday, that all is once again well with the Indians. Rather, had the Indians found a way to once again lose to the Oakland As, more than a few flat screens around northeast Ohio would have been in need of the Best Buy Geek Squad.
Until the Tribe found a way to squeak out Sunday’s 2-1 win, the highlight was the fact that only two of the three games found their way on local television. Sitting through two of them was more than enough to bring back a whole host of last season memories of what this team looks like when it doesn’t hit. It isn’t pretty in the same way that a head-on car crash isn’t pretty.
If there was a bright spot, and geez that would be hard to find, it had to be Cliff Lee, who pitched twice as well as the rest of the team played. For most of the game, it looked like it was Lee’s turn in the “hard luck loser” box pitching for a team that was treating Oakland’s Joe Blanton like he was Josh Beckett.
Sticking with the Cliff Lee theme for a minute, in a weekend that was discouraging on several levels Lee looked nothing like the pretender who was up there last year nibbling at the corners, treating every hitter as if he was David Ortiz and otherwise getting his brains beat in every five days until he took up permanent residence in Buffalo. In his first start of this season, Lee looked mostly confident and mostly willing to challenge the awfully young As lineup. If that seems like faint praise, it’s really not considering that the rest of the Indians lineup was much less willing to take on that challenge for most of the three game series.
A microcosm of the weekend’s offensive futility was the 7th inning of Sunday’s game. After Jason Michaels grounded out, Andy Marte and Kelly Shoppach singled. The As then walked Grady Sizemore, the only Indians player putting together decent at bats these days. Asdrubal Cabrera was up next and hit a perfect double play ball to As first baseman Daric Barton. Barton bobbled it long enough to keep the Indians out of the double play, although Barton was able to get Cabrera at first. The Indians, however, tied the game at 1-1. Give Cabrera the gift RBI.
With first base open, the As decided to intentionally walk Travis Hafner, which made some sense historically but not if you have access to the hitting charts of Hafner’s last 140 or so games, bringing up Ryan Garko, who traditionally hits Blanton well. After falling behind in the count, Garko walked on a 3-2 pitch to bring home the Indians second run. That brought on Santiago Casilla who proceeded to strike out Jhonny Peralta.
If you’re on optimist, you’d say at least the Indians took the lead. If you’re a realist, you know that this was the Indians best opportunity to break out of the offensive slump that’s gripped them over the last four games. Instead, they ended up with two runs as the result of an error (though it won’t appear in the box score as such) and a walk. The Indians didn’t come any closer to scoring the rest of the game and were left to protect what was a tenuous lead at best.
But the reason the Indians avoided the sweep is the reason they have a chance to be special—good pitching. When Lee was done after 6 2/3 innings, the pitching triumvirate that was so strong last season, Rafael Perez, Rafael Bentancort and Joe Borowski kept the As off the board. In truth, they were hardly challenged.
Indians Manager Eric Wedge, never one to register much of a pulse publicly, nonetheless hit the nail on the head, the best hit of the weekend actually, when he said that that the main problem with the offense is the lack of quality at bats. In each of Friday’s and Saturday’s losses, the Indians struck out 10 times. Not every strike out occurred while the Indians batter had his bat on his shoulder, it only seemed like it. And it wasn’t as if they were facing the Red Sox. Justin Duchscherer, which is at least as hard to spell as it is to say, baffled the Indians on Friday and teammate Dana Eveland, another pitcher unknown outside of the most hardcore of fantasy league players, did likewise on Saturday.
On Sunday, all Blanton did was what he normally does, give up hits. The only problem is that other than the aforementioned 7th inning, the Indians couldn’t string them together. In fact, as a measure of the lost weekend that the Tribe offense had, only twice in three games did it have two consecutive hits in an inning, the 7th on Sunday and the 6th inning on Friday. In fact, Friday’s 6th inning was a whole lot like Sunday’s 7th. Shoppach led off the inning with a single. Sizemore followed with another. Cabrera walked to load the bases, bringing up Peralta who hit into a double play, brining home a run. Hafner was up next and struck out looking, naturally.
The obvious counterpoint to all of this is that the season’s just six games old. There always are going to be stretches where it seems like every opposing pitcher is throwing softballs and stretches where it seems like they’re throwing BBs. The sheer length of the season is often underappreciated leading to drive-by analysis that lacks context. But on the other hand this is a team that is largely a carryover from last season and its weekend offensive struggles seem much more like a continuation of a pattern firmly established than a typical seasonal blip. If Tribe General Manager Mark Shapiro were more like Browns General Manager Phil Savage, he already would have seen enough, either David Dellucci or Jason Michaels or both would be on their way to Seattle and Ben Francisco would be on his way from Buffalo.
But the one thing that you can’t ever look like you’re doing in baseball is panicking. And that’s exactly what it would look like if Shapiro were to acknowledge what everyone can see is true—that without more offensive production from their outfield, the Indians are going to have a lot of hard luck losing pitchers this season.
It’s true that the Indians best hitter, Victor Martinez, sat out his fourth straight game, but his presence isn’t going to solve everything or even most things. Offensively, this is a flawed Indians line-up and will remain so as long as guys like Michaels, Dellucci and Andy Marte get significant playing time. Throw in the disturbing tendencies of Peralta to take weeks off at a time, Casey Blake being Casey Blake, and Hafner still unable to return to the form he had before he got married and you can see why the Indians scored six runs all weekend against a very average Oakland team.
But baseball, like golf, always offers a chance for immediate redemption. For the Indians, they’ll have to find it in Anaheim against a team far better than the one they faced this weekend. And if all goes as it usually does in baseball, then the Indians will end up averaging 10 runs a game against the Angels. But if things don’t turn around then, don’t look for it for awhile for after the Indians board that charter plane following Wednesday’s afternoon getaway game, they’re headed back to Cleveland to face, again, that dynamic one-two punch of Eveland and Duchscherer and the mighty,
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