When You Say Nothing at All

When You Say Nothing at All

By Gary Benz


Though the Indians’ season has been effectively over for more than a few months now, there are still games to play and things to do. There are also fans to please, professional sports being part of the entertainment industry and all. The problem is that the Indians don’t appear to be doing much pleasing of late, the lousy record being only one factor.

If attendance figures are a barometer, then one truism is that the Indians will be further mired in its “mid-market” mentality for the foreseeable future. Last season, the team averaged 28,448 fans per game. That was with a rather odd and cold start to the season and a thrilling and hot finish. It also was only good enough to put the Indians 21st among all major league clubs. This season, the Indians average attendance is down by about 1,200 fans per game. With no hope for a spectacular turnaround, expect it to plunge further. The Indians still are 21st in the league and probably will stay right about there. Attendance being critical to revenues, the Indians’ balance sheet is like the broader economy—gloomy, no quick fix on the horizon.

For the Nate Beckstroms of the world, this is not good news. Beckstrom is a fan from Salt Lake City who took the time to write a rather impassioned email to me about his favorite team. He’s frustrated with the current and projected future state of the Indians. He isn’t alone. What got Nate all excited at the moment was the trade of Casey Blake. With due respect, Nate, that’s about the only thing that has made sense with this team since last season ended. Everything else, your point is well taken.

What Nate wants most of all is for someone to explain to him exactly what the Indians’ game plan really is. He sees a team that was on the verge of making it to the World Series suddenly morph into a team undergoing another rebuilding. Mostly, though he wants Indians’ general manager Mark Shapiro to offer an explanation that makes sense.

That’s a tall order. Shapiro, for all his accessibility and sincerity, makes himself so because of the one skill he has mastered above all others: the ability to say nothing when he’s otherwise making perfect sense. Shapiro can carefully and succinctly explain why anyone would want to acquire Matt LaPorta, Zach Jackson and Rob Bryson and you’re ready to buy into the rationale behind the C.C. Sabathia trade. But as you walk away, you realize that at that very same moment, Shapiro was essentially picking your pocket with his free hand, failing to offer any real insight into how this trade fits into any short, mid or long-term plans of the Indians. It’s a pattern.

In February, for example, Shapiro said this about Sabathia: “I can’t present you with a scenario where it's acceptable to us or to our relationship with our fans that involves trading C.C. or examining trading him.” Reasonable, but what did it really mean? Almost anything you want it to mean.

Then there was this right after the Sabathia trade: “We all headed into this season with what we feel are well-founded expectations for a championship-contending season. Four core players on the DL -- tough for almost any franchise to overcome -- as well as disappointing performances from many components of our team, most noticeably in the bullpen, leave us at the juncture we're at. There wasn't much doubt or question in our mind that it was nearly impossible for us to become a contending club this year.” Obvious, but so what? So nothing, that’s the point.
Then there was that whole rather ugly episode where Shapiro essentially misled everyone about the status of catcher Victor Martinez. Just prior to the June 11 game that Martinez exited early with the previously undisclosed elbow injury, Shapiro explained the reluctance to take him out of the lineup previously this way: “I feel like we don't have a combination of players who are going to give us a lot more than Victor's giving us, particularly in light of what he brings to our team.” At that time, Martinez’s average had dropped to .278 and he was hitting .208 in the last 21 games. Given this, what was Shapiro really trying to say, that Kelly Shoppach, for example, was incapable of hitting .208 with no home runs? Probably not, but maybe.
Even now, fans like Nate are left to speculate exactly what the rest of this season really holds for the Indians. Was the Casey Blake trade really about the players received or opening up a legitimate opportunity for Andy Marte? It’s this kind of puzzle that causes the Nates of the world to wonder whether the Indians are just becoming a farm club for the rest of major league baseball.
At this juncture most fans are well beyond having Shapiro own up to his dreadful offseason miscalculations. He screwed up, fans get that. No one is looking for his head on a stick, they’re just looking for answers. They won’t be coming anytime soon.
Here’s a theory, and until Shapiro comes up and publicly puts a stake in the ground about what he’s trying to accomplish and then sticks to it, there’s no reason to believe it’s not true: the Indians don’t really know what they’re going to do, for the rest of this season, for next year or for the foreseeable future for that matter. The team is about collecting pieces and parts that might be useful but no one, from the Dolans to Shapiro, have any idea just how.

Again, until Shapiro actually proves otherwise, there’s no reason but for Nate to believe that the Indians under Shapiro will forever remain in a state of rebuilding. It’s what Shapiro does best. He’s shown some affinity for judging young talent and in understanding the concepts of what it takes for a team to be successful. He’s had success in gathering all or at least most of the right pieces. Where he fails miserably is in delivering a final product. In other words, he can’t close, which, by no small coincidence, is one of the key problems plaguing his team this year.

Rewarding Faith

It’s such a fine line between delusion and genius that it’s often hard to tell which is which. Leave it to Cleveland sports fans to blur the line even further.

Generations of disappointments notwithstanding, fans arrived at Cleveland Browns training camp on Wednesday unabashedly chanting “Super Bowl.” One would have thought that given how quickly the Indians dashed fans hopes for a big year that these same fans would approach the upcoming Browns season a tad more cautiously. If anything, they are being even more reckless with their hearts. That’s not all bad.

There is an inherent need we all have to believe in something, anything. When it comes to sports, we want to believe in the teams we follow. We want to believe that our favorite players are capable of greatness even as they disappoint us again and again. We want to believe that good will prevail over evil and in the power of redemption. We believe all of this because there is nothing more satisfying than faith rewarded.

The implied question of the entire Browns 2008 season is just that: will faith be rewarded? Fans in Cleveland have stuck behind this franchise when all sense of logic and reason would dictate otherwise. For years, they believed that Art Modell, so sincere until he wasn’t, would find the right formula. When he packed the team’s bags permanently for Baltimore, whatever faith was temporarily shelved was instantly and permanently revived when the NFL did the right thing and gave the city a new franchise a few years later.

A sight that is forever permanently etched in the collective conscience is that of the Browns re-emerging against the Pittsburgh Steelers on a Sunday night in 1999. It’s a buzz that still lingers. Even after the Browns had their collective heads handed to them that evening in a 43-0 blowout that wasn’t as close as the final score, the buzz remained. In reality, the excitement of this season is really just a higher decibel level on a sound that’s been there all along.

The point I think is that even if the Browns fall flat on their face again this season, Cleveland won’t suddenly turn into Atlanta, as lousy a sports town as their exists in America. While the Falcons, for example, scramble to rebuild a modest fan base turned off by a franchise that banked heavily and lost on Michael Vick, it’s hard to imagine a similar scenario in Cleveland. The worst thing that ever happens with Cleveland fans, no matter how they’re kicked about, is that they occasionally turn even more bitter and cynical. But they hang in nonetheless.

If faith is going to get rewarded this season, much of it will depend on players staying healthy. Granted, it’s a pretty obvious observation that tends to be true of most teams, but ask yourself when was the last time that’s all the Browns’ season hinged on.

The extended exhibition season being played out at Progressive Field actually provides a rather fine contrast between those expectations that are justified and those that aren’t. It seems so clear now that the Indians couldn’t stand pat and simply hope to get better that you wonder how Indians’ general manager Mark Shapiro could have missed that one. Pinning a team’s fortunes largely on a steady line of progress by young, unproven players, a closer twice defying the laws of reason and probability, and a remarkable comeback by a designated hitter that can’t hit seems silly in retrospect. And that’s not to even get into the near systemic aversion to actually bringing in players with a proven track record that contributes to the state of things.

In contrast, the expectations of the Browns’ upcoming season seem much more rationally based. The strength of the team is the offensive line and it is a unit that relies mostly on veterans with a proven track record. Left tackle Joe Thomas is only in his second year, but he’s already a far more advanced sophomore than, say, Asdrubal Cabrera was entering into his second (but first full) season with the Indians. Derek Anderson, as quarterback, had a breakout season. Though a veteran by this point, he is perhaps the one player upon which you can tag with hope, as in the team hopes Anderson can progress even further in his second full year as a starter.

The defensive line, the team’s glaring weakness a year ago, has been rebuilt in much the same way Savage rebuilt the offensive line the last few years, with veterans. That doesn’t mean it will play as well as the offensive line, but then again it doesn’t have to in order for dramatic improvement to be shown. The receiving corps, including tight end Kellen Winslow, Jr., is, again, a veteran unit with some measure of accomplishment. Jamal Lewis at running back is still a highly-skilled.

On special teams, the Browns again are relying on veterans in every key position. And these aren’t veterans like David Dellucci of the Indians is a veteran. They are veterans who have actually have a level of accomplishment stretching beyond a half season.

The one thing you do notice as you wind your way through this team, though, is that it lacks depth, meaning that its health will determine its fate as the year goes on, even more so than the schedule. The offensive line, again, has about the greatest depth on this team, the defensive backfield the least. The rest of the units are somewhere in between. The questions regarding head coach Romeo Crennel, may remain but they are severely muted once he turned the offense over to someone actually competent to run it. In short, there are concerns and counter arguments, but they rely far less on speculation for resolution than did those with the Indians.

It’s entirely possible that the Browns will crumble under the white hot spot light of a schedule that places them front and center several times this season. But the veteran make-up of this team does provide a decent level of comfort that a total meltdown is unlikely. Faith may not get rewarded this season. Inded it may never be rewarded to the fans of this town, all of whom deserve more than a little something for their efforts. But at least in the short term, the harmless chanting of “Super Bowl” each time the team takes the practice field in Berea these days seems a little less loony than it did just a few years ago.

The Training Camp Ritual

The official opening of the Cleveland Browns training camp on Wednesday also operates as the unofficial close of the Cleveland Indians 2008 season.

With the Indians attendance in the tank, neither owners Larry and Paul Dolan nor those responsible for putting the “Progressive” name on the former Jacobs Field are likely to be all that happy about it. But the daily overload of Browns coverage in this town provides enough of a distraction from the wreckage of an Indians season that initially held such promise that it all but assures that the Indians will be mostly a footnote for about the next six months to most fans.

Already there have been a couple of dozen of the same story about the upcoming Browns season from the usual media outlets. You’ve read them. It’s a civic obligation. They have such come-on headlines as “The 10 Questions Heading into Training Camp” or “Everything You Need to Know about the 2008 Browns” or “The Five Key Battles to Watch in Training Camp.” If there were indeed only 10 questions, five key battles and someone did know everything, we could bank the season and start the debate early on the 2009 Indians.

But these are the Browns, a puzzling franchise on its best days. All you really need to know right now is that the team made dramatic moves in the offseason that will take most of the season to evaluate, has temporarily staved off a potential quarterback controversy by anointing Derek Anderson the starter and managed to find a way to muzzle sports agent and self-promoter extraordinaire Drew Rosenhaus long enough so that Kellen Winslow, Jr.’s contract situation won’t be a distraction, at least early on.

Thus do the Browns find themselves heading into the season riding the wave of trendy expectations with a whole bunch of naysayers waiting in the wings to say “I told you so.” That can wait for another day, like when the first high ankle sprain is suffered. Questions may abound, just as they do with any team this time of year. But if you are harboring the naïve, almost quaint notion that the purpose of training camp is to resolve such matters, think again. Most of what will get resolved are questions that no one yet has thought to ask.

The problem, of course, is figuring out just how to glean insight from the daily grind of a mind-grippingly dull training camp. Feel free to attend if you’d like, but don’t say you weren’t warned. If you’re going to go, take sunscreen. It will be hot, real hot.

Camp is important for the players, but for the fans there is little information to be gained from watching players stretch. The lure of training camp for fans really seems to be the ability to channel Phil Savage as you watch players going from one drill to the next.

You, too, can then cross your arms, adjust your sunglasses and experience the whistles blowing as the players go from drill to drill. You, too, can watch the kickers standing around mostly quizzing each other on movie trivia as they “rest” between kicks. You’ll get to see passes thrown and passes dropped. Some will also be caught. Many will get intercepted. Predictably, you’ll conclude that “Quinn threw several tight spirals” or “Anderson under threw his receivers all day.” If you’re lucky a few fights will break out. None of it will mean a thing.

In fact, this year’s version of training camp could very well be the most boring in recent memory. There’s a decided lack of controversy. There aren’t any hold outs. Most of the key positions are settled and those that are not have little chance of being settled in 7-on-7 drills.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t significant work to do, there is. It’s just that most of it actually takes place away from the fans anyway, inside the meeting halls and conference rooms of the Browns’ practice facility. It’s there that film is broken down, technique studied and players lectured to for hours on end about the various finer points of the game.

So much about pro football has changed over the years that it’s not a surprise that training camp has taken on such a vastly different character when compared to the “old days,” by which I mean when the Browns used to hold training camp at Hiram College. Back then, the overriding emphasis was on getting players back in shape. Many actually had off-season jobs because they needed the money. If they stayed in shape, and many of them did certainly, it wasn’t under the laser-like glare of team officials. The players needed training camp for physical conditioning as much as anything else.

These days, a player that reports for training camp in anything other than optimal shape is a major story and it should be. Football is considered their full time job and players are paid to work out in the off-season. If a player does anything else in the offseason, maybe he heads back to school to complete his degree. But his first priority is to keep himself in shape and focused and if it’s not, then he finds himself looking for work elsewhere. Just ask Jason Taylor.

That’s why so much of training camp is now devoted to the mental side of the game. Physically, the players are ready on Day 1 and whatever fine tuning is needed for established veterans comes during the otherwise meaningless pre-season games. Mentally is where coaches believe this game seems to be won more often than not.

What you’re left with really is the misnomer that training camp really has become. You see it in the schedule established and in the approach to the fans. There are now official autograph tents and plenty of buying opportunities—refreshments and team merchandise of course. But it seems that outside of making a few bucks, the only reason teams invite fans any more is tradition. Given the paranoia that grips most NFL teams, you get the sense they’d rather face a congressional inquiry on steroids then open up a meaningless practice in August.

Still, as rituals go, attending training camp is a mostly harmless exercise. And as a last bit of advice, treat it like you would the regular season. Go in with expectations lowered. That way you can’t be disappointed. Oh, yeah. Take sunscreen.

When to Say When

The melancholy drama playing out in Green Bay between Brett Favre and Packers management is a painful reminder that at its core, professional sports is far more about the business than the game. One doesn’t survive without the other, but never forget, as Favre certainly won’t now, that when business imperatives crash head on with personal issues, the business will win every time.

Each day may bring a new wrinkle or two in the on-going Favre saga, but its essential elements are as old as the business, indeed any business: an aging, once productive player who still feels he can contribute vs. a business that must constantly replenish its talent to survive in the long-term.

You can compile a list where this same scenario has played out in any city. Because it’s Favre and because he’s a quarterback, football fans can quickly tick off Joe Montana’s two-year run of sorts with the Kansas City Chiefs, the year Johnny Unitas spent in San Diego and even Joe Namath’s lost year with the Los Angeles Rams as the most obvious examples.

There have been plenty of examples right here in Cleveland. Bill Belichick’s mid-season banishment of Bernie Kosar comes immediately to mind, although fans on both sides of that debate are still arguing whether it was truly a case of diminished skills or the clash of two head-strong personalities. It’s far from the only example. On the other side of it, the Browns seem intent on wringing out whatever might be left in Willie McGinest’s reservoir. In baseball, the Indians tried the same thing with both Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro, two distinguished pitchers who desperately tried to hang on longer than was probably advisable. Arguably, even the Indians’ refusal to resign Omar Vizquel falls into this category.

As much as every situation is different, each also is very much the same: a high profile, Hall of Fame-type player unable to know when to say when and a front office wrestling with a potential public relations disaster. The Baltimore Colts could no more relish the though of turning their back on Johnny U as could the Packers turning away Favre. Each also involves a heavy dose of emotion emanating from every corner.

And, as usual, fans are caught in the middle. Almost universally, they’ll support the player. Fans are far more interested in watching their favorites long past their primes than in retiring too soon. Jim Brown and Barry Sanders may set the standard for retiring on top, but they are as much criticized by parochial interests for retiring too soon.

Packer fans are predictably distraught. The thought of Favre not playing again is as distasteful to them as the thought that he could end up with one of their rivals. That’s why you hear the argument that the Packers are making a colossal mistake in seemingly not allowing Favre to return because by any measure, Favre is a better quarterback than Aaron Rogers. It’s an emotional argument, but it’s also incomplete because Rogers really hasn’t had any opportunity to establish himself and Favre is a Hall of Famer. It’s also an argument that looks back without any appreciation of what is to come.

The better question, but not necessarily the best question, is one that asks which quarterback gives the team the best chance to win the next game on the schedule. Even then, this doesn’t entirely resolve the matter because so much depends on the time frame. In other words, Favre may give the Packers the best chance to win the first game of the season, but is that true for the eighth game of the season? What about the 12th?

Favre may have proven to be the football equivalent of Bruce Willis’ character in “Unbreakable” thus far, but sooner or later the statistics will catch up with him. He will get hurt. If the Packers miss the opportunity in the interim to develop Rogers, a quarterback in whom they also have much invested their chance of winning later drops measurably.

That’s really the right question, isn’t it? What’s best overall for the franchise? Even fans complaining about the perceived unfair treatment of a multi-millionaire would concede that their loyalties ultimately run to the franchise first, the players second. If Favre ends up with the Minnesota Vikings, some fans may buy a purple Favre jersey out of spite, but I can pretty much guarantee you that in two years the Goodwill bins in and around Milwaukee would be filled with those same jerseys.

Unfortunately, defining “overall” is a nearly impossible task, one that makes you appreciate how difficult the job of general manager really can be at times. It’s like the economy; everyone has an opinion on it. Making it even more difficult is the fact that with Favre, just as in most cases like it, the professionals can’t even agree. Certainly if the Packers ultimately release Favre, someone will pick him up, which is at least some validation that Favre can still play in the league. Just as Kosar played some meaningful games for the Cowboys immediately after Belichick booted him from Cleveland, Favre will certainly do something heroic for another team.

That seems to be the real fear of Packers management and it shouldn’t be. Favre may contribute for awhile with another team, but it won’t be for too long. Packers management should take great comfort in the lessons of Montana, Namath and Unitas. Even Belichick wasn’t too far off base when it came to Kosar. Each of these situations should provide as much proof as Packers management really needs that their long-term assessment on Favre isn’t wrong. There may be some gas left in Favre’s tank, but that tank is hardly full.

The Favre case really is a pretty easy one from a distance. Packers management may be exhausted by the yearly ritual of his indecision and are using it against him now to extract a bit of revenge but they should just let it go. If Favre’s a distraction it’s because Packers management has let it become a distraction. What they know in their hearts should guide their actions: Far worse than letting Favre go too soon is hanging on to him too long.

Another Slice of Irony

The line between love and hate is paper thin, as is the line between hope and despair. If you’re a Cleveland sports fan, though, not to worry. Razor thin or as wide as a bus, it’s a line you can walk with one eye closed, playing a banjo in one hand and balancing your checkbook with the other.

To the doubters, meaning those outside Cleveland without any sense of history or perspective, all you needed to do was listen to the reaction of hardcore Indians’ fans following their team’s improbable four-game sweep of the Tampa Bay Rays this past weekend to understand the inherent contradictions of an Indians fan.

More than a few see great hope in a team even as they secretly admit it was against a team that may be more media-created pretender than legitimate contender. This detail aside, many of these were the same fans alternately bemoaning the trade of CC Sabathia and then putting their best smiley face on it last week. If this all sounds rather oxymoronic, that’s because it is. The only thing Cleveland fans, so conditioned to also-ran status, hate worse than a losing team is a winning team. That’s life through this looking glass and the Tampa Bay series is an object lesson.

It really is rather difficult to figure out just what the Indians rather modest four-game winning streak means, particularly, and naturally, coming as it does on the heels of a 10-game losing streak. The glass half-full (or as George W. would say, the half-glass full) types see this as a portent of things to come, a confirmation of sorts of the inexplicable faith general manager Mark Shapiro had in this crew going into the season. The half-empty folks see it as an aberration. The truth doesn’t lie necessarily in the middle somewhere, but it’s out there nonetheless.

The weekend did show a few things worth noting, especially for those in the “remain calm” camp. First, shortstop Jhonny Peralta’s off-season laser eye surgery seems to finally be kicking in. Or maybe he’s drinking more Mountain Dew or getting more sleep. Undoubtedly, though, he’s more or less slowly but definitively seizing control of the clean-up spot in the Indians’ batting order, making it less of the black hole it’s been for over a year.

Second, Ben Francisco can hit. In his last 10 games, he’s batting .333 with two home runs and seven RBI in 39 at bats. Of course, it was clear in spring training that Francisco could hit. But the team and the town living as it does in a sort of Bizarro World where down is up and right is left, the Indians deep thinkers needed to make really, really certain that the Jason Michaels/David Dellucci platoon wouldn’t work. Here’s hoping they’re satisfied.

Third, when catcher Victor Martinez returns, nearly half the lineup can actually hit, assuming center fielder Grady Sizemore doesn’t misplace his stroke during the All Star Game’s Home Run Derby. While that won’t fully limit the maddening number of times the team scores two or less runs a game, it should make a serious dent in it.

Fourth, the combination of good starting pitching and scoring runs can cover up a healthy number of sins in the bullpen. Even with those sins, it’s not as if this year’s model is the reincarnation of the Bullpen From Hell, 2003 edition. There is no reason to give up on Rafael Betancourt, for example, even if he looks like he is battling demons on the mound. In actuality, Betancourt looks more like a guy struggling to understand his role than a pitcher struggling generally. Massahide Kobayashi has shown enough promise to keep marching him out there to close out games, at least until Shapiro invests in a legitimate closer. Rafael Perez, Tom Mastny and Jensen Lewis are still decent prospects, if nothing else. We’ve seen far worse.

For those in the “bring on the Browns” camp, they are nonplussed with the Indians’ ability to impose its will on the Rays. It’s a turn really on the Groucho Marx joke of not wanting to belong to a club that would have you as a member. If any team can let this Indians team push it around for four straight days, it wasn’t a team worth beating in the first place.

Celebrate all you want in Peralta’s latest hot streak, but haven’t we been here before? In fact, that’s the biggest problem with Peralta. He’s becoming a baseball version of Kordell Stewart, a player who impresses just often enough to keep around and fails nearly as much. Peralta may not be a coach killer like Stewart, but if Shapiro’s not careful, he’s on his way to being a GM killer. With intermittent talent spurts, Peralta remains the ultimate tease that keeps Shapiro from finding a more consistent player, ultimately threatening Shapiro’s own tenure.

Injuries may have hurt this team, but its problems were more fundamental in the first place. Even if the chance that the team will be bolstered by the return of its injured players is likely, the impact is far from certain. Of the three key players slated for return, Martinez, pitcher Fausto Carmona and designated hitter Travis Hafner, only Martinez is likely to pay immediate dividends. Carmona will need time to round back into form and build up arm strength. As for Hafner, his problems never appeared to be physical in the first place. Easing him back into the lineup in a way that doesn’t interfere with Peralta will be tricky under the best of circumstances and this year is hardly the best of circumstances.

If you want to put a gloss on the future of the bullpen, feel free but that bit of wishful thinking won’t magically turn Mastny, Lewis and Kobayashi into reliable, proven veterans. If there is one conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from the present administration, it’s that its history of actually developing players is uneven. Neither Mastny, Lewis nor Kobayashi, among others, come with the pedigree of Sabathia. Until manager Eric Wedge actually can eke out the last drop of talent from these borderline kinds of players that dot this roster, mid-level prospects will stay in the suspect corner.

The case is easily made either way. But in actuality, what really took place this past weekend was a little bit of sunshine in an otherwise dismal season. It was a reminder that things aren’t usually as bad as they seem or as good as hoped. In a season full of much consternation and contradiction, it was just another nice slice of irony—a team finally getting hot just as a three-day break arrives.

Trust Me

As if there’s a choice.

Cleveland Indians general manger Mark Shapiro completed what ultimately is a “trust me” trade for C.C. Sabathia on Monday and now fans are being counseled again about exercising just a little more patience with a team and a franchise that hasn’t won a World Series in 60 years.

That may not be as satisfying as the near-term splash that a press conference announcing the signing of Sabathia might have generated but it will have to suffice nonetheless. It’s the kind of move that reminds fans again that despite the billboards, it’s not their team.

The beauty of this trade, at least from Shapiro’s standpoint, is that the time will never arrive for properly evaluating it. The prospects received are in the low minors. Fans are more likely to forget that Sabathia was ever an Indian in the first place well before they have any idea whether this trade was any good. And even if the prospects arrive sooner rather than later, it undoubtedly will be just in time for someone like Grady Sizemore or Victor Martinez to plan his exit. By keeping the team in a constant state of transition, Shapiro has made it nearly impossible to assess.

Speaking at the press conference Monday about the move, Shapiro said nothing unexpected. In fact any fan paying attention the last few years could have written the script. At best, the only possible news was Shapiro’s admission that the Indians were never on the same page with Sabathia’s demands in the first place. But that ceased to qualify as news once the New York Mets signed Johan Santana.

There was the usual talk of the prospects received and the expected rationalization of taking a deal now instead of waiting to see who might emerge with a better offer closer to the July 31 trade deadline and it all made perfect sense. But Shapiro has given this same speech so often, you can now set a watch to it.

The bigger picture in all of this is that it matters little who the Indians received in exchange for Sabathia anyway. The real takeaway is that this is the kind of trade a franchise like Cleveland is always going to make. The Indians, under present ownership and management, are not going to devote a large portion of its self-imposed budget on any one asset, particularly a pitcher and particularly a pitcher of Sabathia’s stature at this point in his career.

There was never any chance that the Indians would pay Sabathia upwards of $20 million over the next seven years, which is the kind of money and the length of time it was going to take to keep him in a Cleveland uniform. The risk in the out years of injury on such a contract are far too great for a team like the Indians to sustain. Like it or not, the present regime is not going to allow itself the kind of payroll flexibility to withstand an extra $20 or $30 million of unproductive money should Sabathia have proved to be ineffective or injured in years five, six or seven. Capitalism being what it is, someone else will. It’s the system that Major League Baseball prefers.

If you focus just on the American League Central, which is as good a barometer of the rest of Major League Baseball as anything else, it is clearly a division of haves and have nots from a payroll perspective. More than anything else, it illustrates why the Indians can’t invest in a player like Sabathia for the long term while Chicago and Detroit can and will.

Both Chicago and Detroit are working with payrolls that are in excess of $120 million. At that level, a $20 million a year salary for one player still allows either team to spend more than 80 percent of the rest of its payroll on the other 24 players. And that’s 80% of a rather large pie to begin with. For the Indians, or Kansas City or Minnesota for that matter, a team that works with budgets well below $100 million, that kind of salary eats up 25% or more of the team’s payroll. That gives the team far less to work with, both as a percentage of payroll and in real dollars, when filling out a roster worthy of investing that much money in a superstar in the first place. Indeed, it’s the reason that the Texas Rangers ultimately decided that their signing of Alex Rodriguez was among the great blunders ever in baseball.

For reasons that still defy any logic, baseball continues to dodge a salary cap as if it were another shattered maple bat. Maybe it doesn’t recognize that all of its markets are not equal or maybe it just doesn’t care, but clearly it prefers a tilted playing field. By essentially ignoring the economic disparities between its markets, baseball creates situations like that with Sabathia in which a team like Cleveland essentially feels forced to give away a player it nurtured and brought to the doorstep of greatness in order to remain a viable franchise years later.

That doesn’t mean that current management gets a free ride to throw up its arms in frustration, although that seems to work season after season in places like Kansas City and, until today, Milwaukee. Shapiro still has an obligation to see the obstacles as opportunities and improve the team in ways that may be as trivial as they are unnecessary for their rich uncles in other cities.

But Cleveland fans will never be able to use this trade to figure out whether Shapiro has met that charge. Instead, they’ll have to be content to judge the dozens of other relatively minor moves that have made this team one year only to break it the next.

There is no doubt that most Indians fans secretly hoped that the team would find a way to re-sign Sabathia, even as they accepted the reality long ago that it would not. It’s not just part of the grieving process but also a defense mechanism for avoiding the nasty reality that baseball has once again stacked the deck against a mid-market team like Cleveland.

A Matter of Style

The race to write off the Cleveland Indians season probably began for most in late April. Let’s hope the race to write off the Browns season doesn’t begin in late September.

Cleveland fans so conditioned for disappointment, particularly after watching this baseball season crash and burn this year in spectacular fashion, it will be completely understandable if the fans want to storm the Cleveland Stadium gates if the Browns start the season 1-3. There’s every chance of course that the Browns could actually start that way, but if they do it won’t be because its front office stood pat. In fact and if anything, it will be because they tried too hard.

Standing in stark contrast with Indians general manager Mark Shapiro is Browns general manager Phil Savage. Where one is passive, consumed by statistics and paralyzed by analysis, the other has displayed an almost reckless sense of now. Whether it turns out better for one than the other remains to be seen but there is no chance that if the Browns fail it will be because Savage didn’t act.

When a team has a deep talent void, the job of the general manager can be much easier. Almost any player he chooses is likely to be an upgrade and thus it’s easy to miscalculate the real value of the moves that are made.

Shapiro made absolutely the right move when he determined that the Indians of the mid and late 1990s needed to be rebuilt. He hatched a plan to get young and good by trading Bartolo Colon for prospects. He assembled some other young talent as well, signed most of it to above-market contracts based on their years of service, and then has been mostly content to watch its uneven development.

To a certain extent, it seems that Shapiro’s inaction the last few season was brought on by a false sense that he had truly built a juggernaut in the making. He wasn’t the only one that thought so. There have been budget concerns, of course, but how else really to explain the kind of fringe moves that Shapiro has made the last few years? In retrospect, by failing to stay vigilant to the plan he initially hatched, Shapiro now faces another rebuilding job, even if he doesn’t admit it publicly.

Savage, too, made absolutely the right decision in invoking an extreme makeover. The pre-Savage Browns were mostly a yearly embarrassment, nearly barren in legitimate NFL players. Almost any progress would have been appreciated, and there was some early, but unlike some of Shapiro’s early moves with the Indians, Savage’s early moves didn’t show the same kind of visible progress. Savage’s steadfast support of head coach Romeo Crennel is a good example.

Though Savage counseled patience, he remained quite active. When things got dicey so committed was Savage to his plan that he almost walked out in protest during a power struggle with then team president John Collins. Having prevailed, Savage has since been even bolder and focused on winning as much as quickly as possible. Savage, like Shapiro, would obviously like to build a machine like the one in New England. But for the time being, and much unlike Shapiro, Savage seems to want at least least one championship season first and then let the chips fall where they may thereafter.

Certainly the trade that brought in quarterback Brady Quinn was firm evidence of a general manager seeking more than gradual progress. But the rebuilding of the defensive line, easily the team’s weakest link in 2007, was actually an even bolder move considering the circumstances. Coming off a 10-6 season, which usually is good enough to make the playoffs, it would have been easy to conclude that all this young team needed was another year to gel.

But here is where Savage and Shapiro parted ways. Savage wasn’t mesmerized by the lure of having a team on the brink. He well understood its weaknesses and went about trying to fix them quickly. It may have cost the Browns a viable defensive backfield in the process, but you had to applaud the effort. One gets the sense that if Savage had been more like Shapiro he would have found more reasons than not to stand pat than move forward.

There really is no right formula when you have a team on the brink. It’s a fair point to suggest that indeed sometimes all a good young team needs is another season together. But if you’re going to go down that road, you just as often end up sacrificing greatness in order to be good. Make the gamble too many years in a row and pretty soon good is sacrificed as well.

One of the object lessons of business school is that standing still is rarely an option. With shareholders to please and customers to serve, companies simply can’t afford to relax even after a great year. There’s always someone trying to knock you off your perch. These competitive pressures mandate a near constant reassessment of every aspect of your operations. Continuous improvement may be consultant-speak, but its underlying message is sound.

So too is it in professional sports, as big a business as most anything else. Fans serve the dual role of shareholder and customer and their expectations never change. They too want a solid return on the time and money invested. They want a championship now and they’re tired of waiting. And even if you just won one championship the next loss is so much an issue of what have you done for me lately? If you own or run a professional sports team and really crave success then you can’t just stay static either. With so many moving parts around you, staying still is really moving backward.

The Indians playoff experience last season was in many ways like the Browns playoff near miss. Both raised reasonable expectations that both teams were about success and were just about there. But where Shapiro got complacent, Savage got hungry.

That doesn’t mean that all of Shapiro’s decisions have been wrong or that Savage’s moves have been all right. In fact, both have a healthy dose of hits and misses over the years. But when it was most necessary to begin the really hard work of stepping up or stepping aside, the edge certainly goes to Savage. Whether that will yield different results is up for grabs. But if it doesn’t Cleveland fans will be even more apoplectic then usual for there is nothing worse than not knowing where to turn next.

The Road From Perdition

For a season with so little to celebrate, Indians’ fans can be grateful for one thing. The front office is on message.

As the losses mount, Cleveland Indians manager Eric Wedge takes the occasional post-game detour to remind the great unwashed how truly hard of a game baseball is to play at the major league level. Mostly he does this as a way of protecting his players from otherwise getting the harsh criticism they probably deserve for their repeated failures.

To the extent that Indians general manager Mark Shapiro has spoken at all publicly and substantively about the disaster that this season has become it’s been to express frustration over several players not playing to his expectations. He may not be couching it in terms of the game’s inherent difficulties, but the underlying message is consistent: it’s the players, stupid.

Don’t get confused. Shapiro isn’t admitting that the team has the wrong players and Wedge isn’t admitting that he has failed to push the right buttons to cajole a higher level of performance. It’s just that this incredibly difficult game has caused this lovable bunch of talented mugs to be mired in a big ol’ collective slump. Oh, and don’t forget about the injuries. And, oh yea, there’s been a lot of rain. And, by the way, gas is $4.00 a gallon. And there might be an actor’s strike.

Though the message is clear that the fault lies not with management, if that’s placating anyone other than the most casual of fan whose awareness comes from failing to change the channel quick enough before accidentally hearing last night’s score, I’d be shocked. The Indians have fallen so hard and so fast, the answer can’t be that simple. And it isn’t.

But don’t think you’re going to get any truly candid response or a coherent and far reaching solution. Self-critical analysis isn’t exactly this team management’s strength.

Consider, for example, the last few games. If you had the misfortune of watching the recently completed Cincinnati series, particularly on Saturday and Sunday, or Monday’s loss to the Chicago White Sox and then listened to Wedge’s post-game comments, you would have thought that these were hard-fought games that could have gone either way and hey, it’s just been that kind of season. Wedge even told the media after Monday’s loss, for example, that at least the team didn’t shut down after being down 8-1.

If that’s true it’s only because it never turned on in the first place. What actually was painfully apparent was that in losing each game, this was a team essentially going through the motions—in June. For either Wedge or Shapiro to acknowledge as much would be tantamount to acknowledging institutional failure. To be as candid as they haven’t, that acknowledgement would be a good start on the road back from perdition.

This lack of enthusiasm, this lethargy on the field is a poor reflection on Wedge. The inability to perform any better in the first place is a reflection on Shapiro. One has a questionable eye for talent and the other has a questionable ability to develop it. Roll these concepts around in your head for awhile as you consider whether or not you really want the Indians to trade pitcher C. C. Sabathia.

Signing Sabathia seems off the table. Indeed, even if it wasn’t from the Indians’ standpoint, Sabathia, far closer to the situation than any fan, can look at the landscape and see one of the more miserable lineups in recent memory and accurately discern that Shapiro and owners Larry and Paul Dolan don’t have the wherewithal to sign him and make the moves necessary to really improve the team.

But even with the Sabathia situation begging for obvious resolution via a trade, the far more pertinent questions revolve around whether anyone trusts Shapiro to make the right kind of trade or trusts Wedge to make the most of whatever “talent” Shapiro acquires. Take all the time you need at arriving at the answers. Time’s up.

Put as fine a point on it as you’d like or be satisfied with the broad strokes. Either paints an easily discernable picture. Shapiro for all his supposed statistical wizardry is far too accommodating to reclamation projects and utility players as a way of completing a roster. His decision-making comfort zone occupies the space between A and B in the alphabet. He’s got the same risk profile as the person who puts his money in mason jars because the banks are run by some shadowy Tri-Lateral Commission.

Wedge, for all his patience, has trouble motivating his players and constructing a batting order. Three seasons into the Jhonny Peralta experiment and Wedge still hasn’t found a way to get solid performances from him in two straight games. A team with the worst batting average in the American League and close to the worst average in the major leagues, and Wedge still has Grady Sizemore batting leadoff.

And neither Wedge nor Shapiro has given anyone reason to think that any of this will change anytime soon or ever.

That’s why the thought of Shapiro making another “signature” trade is every bit as scary as the Indians’ next road trip, or the one after that. Granted, keeping Sabathia around until the season ends isn’t much of an option either. After all, if Sabathia stays it likely will be the same cast of characters that would have to somehow do something with the two extra draft picks the team would get as compensation. Different problem for a different day.

Neither alternative offers much comfort to the fans that have been so let down by the endless string of front office and on field bungling, but all a trade, any trade, now would do is buy Shapiro a few more years to see if this week’s version of the grand experiment can gel, or congeal as the case may be. It’s time he hasn’t quite earned.

Though the Dolans seem blissfully ignorant of Shapiro’s shortcomings, plunging attendance and a roster in complete disarray should be enough to at least give them some pause before allowing Shapiro to pull the trigger on what is sure to be a desperately conceived quick-fix trade that will only yield more white noise and a bench full of reclamation projects and utility players.

It’s barely July, but the best way to get the fans back in the fold is for the Dolans to declare fan appreciation days early and send Shapiro to Tierra del Fuego until at least August and cut off his cell phone. We all could use the vacation.

Just Fine is the New Better

It was pretty clear early in the season that Indians pitcher Cliff Lee was having a big year. For everything that went wrong last season, that much and more went right early and often this season. But who knew that in the process Lee would be the one more than anyone to help General Manager Mark Shapiro withstand the coming storm?

That coming storm would be, of course, the loss of Indians ace C.C. Sabathia. Lee was an afterthought going into the season, barely holding on to the fifth spot in the rotation. He’s emerged as the most effective starting pitcher in the American League, pushing his record to 11-1 and giving up well under three earned runs a game. And as he’s done so, he’s also becoming a key stake holding the safety net that Shapiro hauls out to blunt the impending loss of Sabathia.

Though Lee has a firm grasp on one corner of that net, he’s also being assisted by Jeremy Sowers and Aaron Laffey. When Fausto Carmona comes back in a few weeks, he’ll be able to grab another corner of that net as well. In other words, as Shapiro will tell you, even without Sabathia the Indians starting pitching will be just fine.

As far as that goes, it’s true. It just won’t be better and that’s the distinction Shapiro will coolly avoid. Be it at the trading deadline or when this miserable season closes, whenever Sabathia does leave the Indians won’t be immediately better and for a fan base that grows more exasperated by the day with what they see on the field that safety net offers very little solace.

More than anything else, what this season is revealing, particularly placed in context with the previous four, is that the Indians remain in perpetual rebuilding mode under a general manager prone to occasional delusions. At times, that yields a team good enough to compete with the best in the league. At other times, like now, it finds itself looking up at the Kansas City Royals. Being fine, no matter how much fans are told otherwise, is not the new better.

What this season also has revealed is Shapiro’s growing tendency to sacrifice action at the expense of analysis. Time and again, Shapiro has expressed his disappointment with this team’s performance in terms of the inability of several players to meet internal expectations. The reality is that these were hopeful projections masquerading as foregone conclusions. The further reality is that by turning these hopeful projections into the expected reality, Shapiro was really providing himself cover for why he stood pat with a roster that begged for further manipulation.

To illustrate the point, as last year’s trading deadline approached, the Indians were struggling mightily to score runs. Designated hitter Travis Hafner was a big part of the problem, but hardly the only reason. I noted at that time:

… the Indians may be second in the league in runs scored, they also are second in the league in runners left on base. … But where the real difference starts showing up is the simple act of putting the ball in play. If you have the sense that the Indians strike out a lot, it’s because they do. Only Tampa Bay and Texas have struck out more than the Tribe….Digging deeper one can see why that lingering feeling about the offense is well justified. Not only is Hafner, for example, struggling with the bases loaded, so too is the rest of the team. Overall the Indians have had 104 at bats this season with the bases loaded and have just 24 hits for a .230 average….If that doesn’t tell enough of the story, consider the averages with runners in scoring position. The Indians have had 879 at bats with runners in scoring position. They have 230 hits for an average of .261. That’s a full 14 points under the overall team average.

Given these flaws, which were on full display for weeks at a time, it was reasonable to expect Shapiro to attack the problem in the offseason. Instead, he was seduced into thinking that any offensive woes were magically solved by the temporary spark provided by rookie Asdrubal Cabrera. When Cabrera became just another struggling sophomore and no one else stepped into to fill the breach, the Indians offensive woes returned with a vengeance. To date, the Indians have scored two or fewer runs in 27 games. The resulting record is hardly a surprise.

Listening to Indians’ broadcaster, Tom Hamilton, try his best to put lipstick on this pig of a season as the team was losing to San Francisco 4-1 on Wednesday evening, what struck me was how he touted the recent signings of Tony Graffanino and Juan Rincon as evidence that Shapiro is trying to improve the team. Hamilton’s a team employee and it’s hard to begrudge him the occasional suck-up to his employer. But seriously, if signing these two is evidence of a team working hard to improve, then it’s not hard to figure why things have gone wrong: management is nuts.

What those signings really signal is that Shapiro’s never-ending quest to find chicken salad among the chicken droppings continues unabated by prior failures. Shapiro has become Fred Sanford, always looking for gold among the junk because once or twice he spotted something shiny under a pile of discarded jock straps. Soon enough though Graffinino and Rincon are poised to join the likes of Trot Nixon, Roberto Hernandez, Aaron Fultz, Keith Foulke, Aaron Boone, Todd Hollandsworth, Brady Anderson, Jason Johnson, Lou Merloni, Alex Cora, Chris Magruder, Chad Paronto, Shane Spencer, Jeff D’Amico, Jose Jimenez, Rick White, Scott Stewart, Ricky Gutierrez, Jason Bere and Scott Sauerbeck on the island of misfit toys. And those are just the charter members. There are several other potential members on the current roster and others still to be signed by Shapiro.

If Shapiro is really hell-bent on improving this team, he must lose his fascination with reclamation projects and utility players. He also must lose his fascination with building a team for a just-out-of-reach future and focus much more intensely on the presence. But first and foremost, Shapiro needs to lose his fascination with the rose-colored glasses he wears in the off-season. They’re giving the fans a migraine headache.

The Snowball Effect

You could read the tea leaves or just trust your own eyes. Certainly by this point, though, you’ve concluded that the Cleveland Indians will not make a run at a division title this year, let alone a World Series crown.

Sure, it’s irritating and aggravating but it’s not as if Indians fans don’t know how to deal with it. If disappointment was a degreed program, Indians fans would all qualify for a master’s. But the problem is that the rest of the American League Central division refuses to let you stew in peace.

In losing four of their last six games, the Indians only fell behind one game in the standings. What this signals is that the AL Central is ripe for the taking and the only ones not paying attention are the stats freaks in the front office. General manager Mark Shapiro seems caught in an endless loop of indecision, trying hard but failing to figure out if this disaster of a season is the result of injuries or bad luck. Manager Eric Wedge is acting every bit the company man, encouraging his light-hitting charges that though they might not be scoring runs, they are at least putting together good at-bats.

Meanwhile, it’s almost as if the rest of the division is deliberately taking a breather or two in order to actually give the Indians a chance to get back in this thing, as if they are themselves surprised at what a mess the team has become. They shouldn’t be surprised. This season was several years in the making.

The injury debate has gone on far long enough. At present, there are three legitimate injuries, four if you count what’s going on in Travis Hafner’s head as an injury, which the Indians have to overcome. But it’s time for everyone associated with the Indians to stop using these as the reason to completely write off another season. It is unrealistic to think that Shapiro believed that the Indians’ chances this season hinged on the team being injury free. It’s a part of every season. The good teams overcome. The flawed teams make excuses.

On closer analysis, the only injury that seems to have really had an impact is Victor Martinez’s ailing elbow. Losing two starters in Fausto Carmona and Jake Westbrook is far down on the list of why this team isn’t performing. Their substitutes may not be the equivalents, but they aren’t exactly killing this team either. Not having Hafner around just continues the status quo from last season. Reduced to its simplest terms, the Indians are essentially saying that can’t overcome the loss of Martinez.

If you buy that, I have the deed to the Detroit-Superior Bridge that I’ll sell you at a bargain price. If you don’t, then what you’re left with is the chilly reality that the lack of production is the end result of a series of bad decisions by Shapiro stretching out over several years.

Though it could be, this isn’t about revisiting the Hafner contract. It’s not about revisiting Brandon Phillips either. It’s also not about revisiting Kevin Kouzmanoff. Giving up on Jeremy Guthrie could be questioned, but won’t be here. Ryan Church? Ditto. What is worth re-visiting for a moment as the microcosm of all of that is Omar Vizquel, who Shapiro put out to pasture four seasons ago, deeming him unworthy of a three-year contract extension.

Vizquel was clearly one of the most popular players in recent Indians’ history. A nearly peerless defensive shortstop, Vizquel is a Hall of Famer. But at age 38, Shapiro decided it was Jhonny Peralta time. Shapiro didn’t pretend the Peralta would ever possess more than a fraction of Vizquel’s defensive skills. But the lure of a young (i.e. cheap) power-hitting shortstop was too much for Shapiro to resist. Perhaps if Vizquel had changed his name to Dellucci, Shapiro might have reconsidered.

What has always been less than clear is why Shapiro simply didn’t let the two co-exist. Peralta could have been moved to third base, still a hole on this team, or even to second. Either situation would have been far more stabilizing for far longer than the current state of flux that still finds Casey Blake at third and now role-player Jamey Carroll at second.

Ok, I lied. It’s not less than clear. In fact it’s crystal clear. Shapiro wanted Vizquel for maybe one more season but Vizquel wanted a multi-year deal for more than $4 million a year. Shapiro took a look at his skinny budget and made a value judgment that this money could be better spent elsewhere with negligible impact. Penny wise meet pound foolish.

By sacrificing Vizquel to the budget gods, Shapiro turned his back on a player who actually could have supplied the Indians with the kind of veteran leadership that he tries to wring out of such lesser talents as Dellucci or Jason Michaels. He also turned his back on a player who wasn’t done and still isn’t, although four seasons after the fact it’s finally starting to look like retirement is near.

When Shapiro had to confront Vizquel’s impending free agency, he guessed correctly that Vizquel probably wasn’t going to hit .333 again like he did in 1999. But he was painfully wrong in guessing that Vizquel wouldn’t live out a multi-year deal. Vizquel was the steady clubhouse presence while the Barry Bonds circus played nightly. In the process, he didn’t embarrass himself in the field or at the plate. He hit .295 in 2006 and stole 24 bases in both 2005 and 2006, the most he had stolen since 1999. If anything, his defense over the last four years has been better than the previous four seasons in Cleveland.

In short order, Vizquel at $4 million for each of the last three seasons would have been a good deal and not strictly because of the production. It also likely would have kept Kouzmanoff in Cleveland playing third, Peralta would be at second and Josh Barfield would be back in San Diego. Casey Blake might have survived another season or two but by this point he’d likely be the odd man out. If you think all this would have resulted in a far better lineup then the present mess, you’re not alone.

This season will not do anything to diminish Shapiro’s status in the eyes of his employers, but a few more like it will. The problem with personnel mistakes is that they tend to snowball until they begin to smother you seasons later. The decision to not re-sign Vizquel may not have been the lynchpin for why this season’s team is suffering, but it certainly helped sow the seeds of this latest season of discontent. And, if past be prologue, then there’s little doubt that a few years from now we’ll be dissecting another egg laid and pointing probably to the decisions to offer long-term contracts to Hafner, Peralta and Jake Westbrook, coupled with the inability to sign C.C. Sabathia, as the culprits.

A Return to Boldness

As the Cleveland Indians’ slide deeper and deeper into mediocrity this season you can see the fan base breaking into three distinct camps. The first advocates trading C.C. Sabathia. The second advocates trading C.C. Sabathia RIGHT NOW. The third has lost interest in the whole damn thing and just wants Browns season to start.

The fact that virtually no one believes that Sabathia will be re-signed speaks volumes to how effective general manager Mark Shapiro has been over the years in slyly lowering fans expectations after initially promising something that seems impossible in retrospect, a consistent contender.

Shapiro blew up the team in 2002 when he traded Bartolo Colon. It was a bold and audacious move. Recall that when the Colon trade was consummated, Shapiro was candid about his intentions: “This very clearly and very definitively demonstrates that we are moving into a formal rebuilding process with players that we all feel are going to be here in the ‘04 and ‘05 seasons which are when we feel we can start to emerge as a contender again. From the start of the offseason, we stated that if the difficult goal of transitioning and contending was not successful, we would have to enter into a more dramatic and profound rebuilding process. That is the juncture we find ourselves today.”

As unpopular as that trade was at the time, Shapiro sold it by staking out his part in the bargain: the team needed to take a step back in order to re-capture the past and re-build back into a team that would consistently contend. It sounded difficult but reasonable. In practice, it was naïve.

Exactly when the storyline changed is a little harder to peg, but clearly Shapiro realized his mistake and changed course by embarking on a different sort of sell job the last several years, one aimed at convincing the fans that Cleveland is a second-tier city, at least when it comes to major league baseball. Fans have been told so often that the economic realities of this market make it difficult to invest in Sabathia or any other premier free agent, it’s now accepted fact.

The frustrating part of this story line is that there’s a healthy amount of truth to it. Slightly below the surface, Shapiro is really saying that it’s not the near term money a free agent gets that’s the problem. It’s the millions on the back end of the contract that will still get paid even when the free agent has long outlived his usefulness either because of an injury or ineffectiveness or both. Backing up Shapiro are reams of examples, particularly of pitchers. No team likes paying out dead money, but some teams are in a better position than others to withstand the hit. The Indians aren’t one of them.

For as much truth as the story line holds, it’s not complete. It’s hard to begrudge the business model of owners Larry and Paul Dolan that bases the team’s budget on its revenues. But there is a point at which this mentality can overtake another accepted business maxim: you have to spend money to make money.

To this point, Shapiro has been the person most responsible for balancing these two sometimes conflicting principles. To be incredibly generous, the results have been decidedly mixed and the trends disturbing.

What really started the Indians down this path was Shapiro’s signature trade of Colon in 2002. Shapiro became convinced that a team that had averaged over 90 wins a season for seven consecutive years was on the decline. He was right. He acted with a forcefulness and sense of purpose not seen since, parting with the team’s pitching ace for three very young prospects, Brandon Phillips, Cliff Lee and Grady Sizemore. To make the long term plan work, however, he needed to remain ever vigilant, ever bold. Instead he’s been a passive and often ineffective tinkerer.
Dolan has shown some willingness on occasion to spend a little extra to foster Shapiro’s original blueprint though he and now his son Paul don’t make a habit of it. Shapiro has made some good decisions in pursuit of his quest but he’s not been making a habit of that either. As a result, you get these radically inconsistent on-field performances. A team that won 96 games last year is on a pace to win 74 this year. Of course, that 96-win team only won 78 games the year before. But then again that 78-win team had won 94 games the previous season. Whatever the merits that the Dolans and Shapiro find in their approach, one thing is clear. It’s not yielding the consistent, competitive team they envisioned when they blew up the team in 2002 by trading that team’s Sabathia, Bartolo Colon. Maybe it never could.

Whether you’re in trade Sabathia camp that wants to still wait another 15 or so games to really see if this team can turn it around, or you’re in the trade him yesterday camp, keep in mind that either way you’re throwing your faith in a system that hasn’t necessarily served you well.

Here again is where Shapiro is doing another effective job of lowering expectations, this time on his own ability to perform. Consider how many times fans have heard Shapiro caution not to expect another Colon-type trade. According to Shapiro, teams are no longer making those trades in order to rent a pitcher, even one of Sabathia’s caliber, for a few months.

The frustrating part of this story line is that there’s a healthy amount of truth to it as well. Even the New York Yankees, with general manager Brian Cashman tentatively in control, is seeing the prudence in holding on to low-priced high potential prospects. With the Yankees exercising a degree of responsibility, substantial trades will always be more difficult.

Another related factor is that teams are taking a much more serious-minded approach toward the draft. Knowing that trading Sabathia means that he’s giving up the two compensatory draft picks that he’d otherwise get if Sabathia leaves after the season is reason enough to give Shapiro pause to pull the trigger. A team trading for Sabathia now better feel like whatever they give up will be worth it either because they can sign Sabathia for the long-term or because the compensatory picks they’ll get if Sabathia signs elsewhere will make up for what they traded to the Indians.

But, too, for as much truth as it holds, it’s also not the complete story. The Indians of 2008 are far different than their 2002 counterparts. It’s not a formerly good team on the decline, but an occasionally middling team with potential. Fixing it doesn’t necessarily require the bold strokes of 2002 but a kind of courage and finesse that Shapiro now seems to lack. The need to blow the team up with a Colon-style trade isn’t there now. But the need for boldness remains. If the Indians are to ultimately succeed under Shapiro, indeed if Shapiro can ever going to deliver on the audacious promises of 2002, he’s going to rekindle a little audacity himself. Right now, Indians fans have a right to wonder whether that’s the most naïve thought of them all.

Another Lesson from the Local Media

If the average Cleveland Indians fan was surprised by the team’s announcement last week that catcher Victor Martinez was being shelved for the next two months because of elbow surgery, apparently it paled in comparison to the shock felt by the local reporters covering the team on a daily basis.

Crank-in-residence Sheldon Ocker of the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday really upbraided Indians’ management for all the mystery surrounding both the Martinez and Travis Hafner injuries. Ouch. Jim Ingraham of the Lake County News-Herald and Lorain Morning Journal matched Ocker indignant word-for-indignant word. Double ouch. Paul Hoynes of the Plain Dealer couldn’t personally muster the energy to register his protest formally, but once someone wakes him up I’m sure he’ll get right on it.

Sure, as Ingraham said, the Indians look bad. Guess what? The reporters covering the team look worse. Lost in the convenient rage by the local press is their complete lack of appreciation for irony. Doing what reporters often do best, pointing fingers elsewhere, these three should really be asking themselves why they were scooped on this story by the Indians’ public relations office. They supposedly cover the team on a daily basis, spending more hours with the team during the season then they do their own families. Yet not one of them was even aware that Martinez had a chronically sore elbow until Martinez left the game or if they were never mentioned it.

The complacency of most of the local media covering the town’s various pro sports teams is hardly breaking news. But then again, either were the injuries to Martinez and Hafner, playing out as they did over the course of months, not days let alone hours.

This episode really provides a nice backdrop to a column I wrote last week and the feedback it received about how the Indians management, utilizing their local media enablers, were busy weaving a new story line into the collective conscious that injuries alone were the real reason this team was performing well below the misguided preseason expectations. Injuries are playing a role certainly but the far bigger culprit is general manager Mark Shapiro’s increasingly disastrous decision to essentially stand pat this last off season.

A reader, agreeing with the points made and wondering why Hoynes, for example, wasn’t willing to come out publicly and say that that this team wasn’t wearing clothes, sent the column to Hoynes for a response. Hoynes, expressing far more anger at the reader then he could muster at Shapiro, suggested first that I got the idea to write the column from the Plain Dealer and, by the way, it must be nice sitting in the safe confines of an ivory tower and pontificating while he and his ilk slug it out each day, going down to the locker room, talking to the players and writing on a deadline. Who knew Hoynes had such contempt for Bill Livingston and Bud Shaw?

The surprise though came at the end of the email. Essentially Hoynes said you can’t use injuries as an excuse but you can’t ignore them either. In other words, he really didn’t disagree.

I’m not suggesting that anything that happens in the world of sports, particularly pro sports, is worth the wrongheaded emphasis we place on it as a society. But so long as we’re going to cover sports, there’s nothing wrong with taking it seriously. In the bubble that Hoynes, Ocker and the rest occupy the only ones apparently capable of taking it seriously and reporting on it with requisite insight are the beat reporters that “go down to the locker room.” Without them, we’d miss manager Eric Wedge saying after another loss, “we’ve just got to keep playing hard.”

What Hoynes’ email really reveals is that he like many others in his line of work these days has taken on a bunker mentality when it comes to their internet competitors. Rather than embrace the diversity of voices or accept the challenge they present, reporters like Hoynes have increasingly taken on the tone of the aging ex-wife pushed out for a younger version. In the process, the loss of relevancy they fear is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s a fair point to make by whoever makes it that Shapiro and Wedge cheated fans by not being more forthcoming earlier in the season. Indeed, it’s equally fair for anyone with a keyboard and access to an audience to second-guess the thought process that led to Shapiro and Wedge thinking that it was a good idea to initially play two obviously injured players and then keep them in the lineup while their failures and the losses continued to pile up like sandbags fending off flood waters. The problem is that it would have been far more useful for those with the supposedly inside access, like Hoynes, Ocker or any of the rest of them, to be on the front end of the story, not the back.

If the secret to insight is in the locker room, then why, again, did Hoynes, Ocker and the rest completely miss the Martinez and Hafner stories? They missed it because, gosh, Shapiro decided to be deceptive with the fan base. That doesn’t get Shapiro off the hook but a little after-the-fact indignation doesn’t mean the local reporters that were sleeping all along shouldn’t likewise hang with him.

Incapable of self-reflection, the local press has long since taken on the clubby persona of a jaded insider. Indeed, what Hoynes is essentially saying is that he and his brethren pull punches and play it safe in order to maintain access that they don’t really utilize in the first place. Shapiro and others like him know it and play into it, doling out access to them just infrequently enough to make it seem special. The reality is that Shapiro didn’t volunteer the information about Martinez sooner because he knew he could get away with it. He has a complacent pack of reporters covering this team, a pack whose interest doesn’t extend much beyond the relative merits of whether or not the chicken picata on the pre-game buffet is a bit too spicy. If Shapiro takes a little flak afterward for not being completely truthful, so be it. It isn’t going to change the coverage of his team going forward.

The lesson here is that access is overrated and insight underrated. A valid point isn’t any less so because it was made by someone on this site and not by one of the drones sitting in the press box. If you’re still relying on the local media to hold the team and its management accountable, then you’ll surely be disappointed and ill-informed. Then again you’re probably not reading this anyway. And, for the record, I couldn’t have gotten the idea for my column from reading the Plain Dealer. That would have meant that someone like Hoynes would have had to have written it in the first place and we all know by now that didn’t happen.

It's Only Business

Beware the fist in the velvet glove.

Channeling Hyman Roth, Browns general manager Phil Savage essentially positioned Wednesday’s release of center LeCharles Bentley as purely business, nothing personal. Bentley said pretty much the same thing. But just as Michael Corleone’s business move of snuffing out Moe Greene had its repercussions don’t be surprised if there isn’t some attendant fallout from the Bentley situation.

To many fans, the news that Bentley supposedly asked for and received his release probably came as a surprise. Bentley had just passed his team physical and looked poised to finally pay some sort of dividend on the Browns’ heavy investment in him two years ago. On the surface, Bentley’s request looks to be motivated by the numbers, as in there are too many incumbents that currently block his desire to resume his career as a starting center. Just below the surface and promising to rise soon enough are Bentley’s lingering feelings that Savage hasn’t quite treated him fairly. It’s a complicated set of emotions with no right answer.

Bentley, of course, was Savage’s first legitimate big name free agent signee. Bentley was the marquee free agent of the 2006 class and his six year $36 million contract, with $12 million guaranteed, cemented that status. In Bentley as well as Kevin Schaffer, who was signed at the same time, Savage saw an opportunity to finally improve the offensive line. Bentley was a perfect signing, really, because it involved a highly skilled lineman with a desire to return triumphantly to his home town.

It didn’t work out that way because Bentley got hurt during his very first drill in his first Brown’s training camp. Amazingly in a non-contact drill he suffered a torn patella that morphed into a staph infection that morphed into even more surgery. Bentley’s career wasn’t just in jeopardy, so too was his life.

The injury was devastating to Bentley personally and to the entire Browns organization. It set in motion a pall that hung over the 2006 training camp and started a confluence of bizarre events that ultimately resulted in Savage making a trade for Hank Fraley, who today occupies the spot that Bentley coveted upon his return.

When Bentley went down, there was no way to know at that moment how serious the injury ultimately would become let alone whether it would truly imperil Bentley’s career. But as the season progressed, it became clear that Bentley was not going to be ready for the following season either. This put the Browns in a difficult spot.

Under the collective bargaining agreement, if a player is injured during the season and cannot play in the team’s final game, he can be waived the next season if he is unable to pass the pre-season physical. If he’s waived, he’s entitled to an injury protection settlement of $250,000 but otherwise the team has no further salary obligations unless his individual contract provides otherwise. But player contracts in the NFL are never guaranteed so in Bentley’s case, the Browns had an opportunity to avoid paying off the remainder of Bentley’s rather large salary over the next five years by simply waiving him prior to last season.

Making a move like that on a marquee player is rare and not just because of the public relations hit. Generally, a team will put a player like Bentley who can’t pass the pre-season physical on the physically unable to perform or PUP list in order to keep that player in the fold. When that occurs, the player receives his salary for that year as if he were actively playing. The reason a team puts a player on the PUP list is because they believe he will eventually recover and become a valuable player again.

As Bentley’s situation progressed and the extent of his injury became clear, it’s pretty obvious that Savage played a bit of poker with Bentley and his agent before last season. Knowing that Bentley couldn’t pass the pre-season physical, Savage used that fact as leverage to get Bentley to re-work his contract. Bentley chose not to call Savage’s bluff and instead agreed to a shortened contract, three years instead of the original six, and a salary at the league minimum of $605,000, more than double the $250,000 injury protection payment he would have received had he been waived. The Browns got out from under a large contract at a cost of an extra $350,000. Plus Savage got a bit of upside protection for the Browns if Bentley could actually return in 2008. The re-worked contract was loaded with incentives that could have pushed this year’s salary to more than $4 million.

But this wasn’t quite a win-win situation. Savage proved to be a shrewd and clever general manager, leaving the team with cap room by reworking a contract that would otherwise have been a burden. And while Savage arguably did Bentley a favor, it was of far lesser magnitude. Bentley got that extra $350,000 over the injury protection payment last season by agreeing to the new contract and he also got an extra year of retirement benefit credits when he sat on the PUP list last year rather than being cut. He also got the chance to further rehabilitate his knee knowing that he still had a salary coming from the Browns.

But he also got the situation that played out on Wednesday. Rolling around in his head had to be the thought that the Browns might cut him anyway and perhaps too late to really catch on with another team. That kind of move would cost him his salary of $605,000 and possibly the chance of continuing his career with another team until at least 2009. Frankly, it was a situation he couldn’t risk and didn’t. It’s why he asked for his release.

Anyone watching Savage operate in this case shouldn’t be surprised by this turn of events. When Kellen Winslow, Jr. had his motorcycle mishap that almost ended his career, Savage threatened to void Winslow’s contract in order to wrangle out a more club-friendly deal. Fans may have understood that better, but the impact of that move still lingers like a rain cloud over Berea as Winslow subtly threatens to sit out if he doesn’t get a new deal or at least get the benefit of his old deal.

In each case, Savage acted properly and ethically. But it won’t go unnoticed, particularly by the players and that could very well sway a future free agent. Fans, egged on by team owners and general managers, get all sanctimonious when a player under contract seeks to re-negotiate forgetting what it looks like when the team basically does the same thing.

What this situation really did was provide resonance to the prophetic words that John Matuszak’s character O.W. in the movie North Dallas Forty said to his coach after his North Dallas Bulls lost the conference championship because of a fumbled snap on an extra point “every time I call it a game you say it’s a business. Every time I say it’s a business, you call it a game.”

Making the Wrong Excuses

The only thing that could be more disappointing than the Cleveland Indians performance thus far is if general manager Mark Shapiro blames it on injuries. With the losses piling up, the talk about the impact a host of injuries allegedly is having on this team is growing louder. All that means is that Indians’ vice president of public relations, Bob DiBiasio, is doing a good job getting weaving the institutional message into the public conscious via team broadcasters Tom Hamilton, Mike Hegan, Rick Manning and Matt Underwood and the enablers in the main stream press. It doesn’t mean it’s true.

Injuries can be an excuse or a rallying point. But talk about them enough and the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. Even the healthy players will use them as an excuse for why they can barely muster enough energy to stay interested in a game for nine innings.

The Los Angeles Angels have two starters out and several positions players on the disabled list. Vladimir Guerrero has turned into Travis Hafner. Yet, the Angels have the best record in the major leagues. The Indians have been beset by a similar rash of injuries but only Detroit (but not for much longer), Kansas City and Seattle have worse records in the American League.

The Eric Wedge haters will naturally say that the difference lies in the simple fact that Wedge is no Mike Scioscia. If that were only the case. In actuality, the two are quite similar. In one all important category Wedge, like Scioscia, has never been big on making excuses for non-performance. The difference lies in what they had to work with. If the Indians’ top management really thinks that the injuries are at the root of this team’s problems, then it’s time for Shapiro to go into the Cleveland Clinic himself for either a reality transplant or some ego reduction surgery, maybe both.

This team hasn’t been right since the opening bell. Shapiro took a tinkering approach to the offseason and it’s turning into one of the worst decisions of his career. The sad fact is that going into the season there wasn’t enough pop in the lineup anyway to sustain the team through the inevitable valleys of slow starts and 0-22 slumps. Far too much emphasis was placed on Hafner regaining his swing and his confidence without recognizing that even as the best case scenario that still wouldn’t have been enough to allow this team to consistently score runs. It wasn’t last year.

Short of taking the deposition myself of Hafner’s doctors, I’ll cynically remain unconvinced that his right shoulder is the source of his issues. It’s an injury of convenience, a way for the Indians and Hafner to save face while he quietly re-works his game without having to suffer the indignity of doing so in the minor leagues. The Hafner Indians’ fans grew to love disappeared over a year ago and was replaced by a guy that sort of looks like him, but with the swing of Gorman Thomas.

With Hafner’s track record, it’s easy to get see why folks get caught up in hopes and prayers. But what’s ailing Hafner is far more serious than a supposedly balky shoulder and the other various aches and pains this guy seems to pick up at an alarming rate considering he doesn’t even play defense. Even if there once was a physical reason for his slide, it’s far more psychological at this point, a diagnosis I feel safe in making even without having stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

As for Victor Martinez, there has been so much talk about his lack of home runs thus far, you’d think he has been the second coming of Johnny Bench. In his first four full seasons, Martinez has averaged just under 22 home runs per year. Those are good, but not great power numbers. His real value is as a consistent hitting presence in the middle of the lineup, someone to keep rallies going. While Martinez’s power numbers are obviously down, his streakiness as a hitter is hurting the team far more. And for the last few weeks, that streakiness has resulted in a precipitous drop in his batting average and hence his effectiveness at a time when because of injuries the Indians really needed him to go in another direction.

The bigger picture to all of this is that the rest of the lineup, and that includes Grady Sizemore and Ryan Garko, doesn’t look like they’re in slump. Instead, it looks like they are pretty much where they should be, give or take a few percentage points. Unlike what’s remained of the Angels’ lineup, the Indians don’t look to have anyone in their lineup that can be consistently counted on for either power or average, which means rallies will be sporadic and sustained win streaks will be rare, an apt description actually of the 2008 season. It would be nice to think that Wedge could fix this by getting more emotional, but he knows full well by now that you can’t yell someone into competence.

Though the injuries haven’t defined the season any more than they have defined the Angels’ season, what they have done is unsettled the one strength of the team—pitching. A team that now seems bound to have struggled anyway wasn’t good enough to overcome weakness elsewhere. Closer Joe Borowski’s injury early in the season appears to have been another injury of convenience much the same as Hafner’s. What’s apparent is that Borowski simply wasn’t ready to start the season, a lack of arm strength seemingly brought on by a lack of preparation.

But the domino effect of Borowski’s “injury” early in the season was to expose a bullpen that wasn’t quite capable of producing at last year’s level. Given slightly different roles for a limited period of time, virtually no one in that bullpen could make the adjustment. Returned to their traditional roles, the bullpen still is struggling, either because of that early season jolt or because they are, well, bullpen pitchers. In the end, what you have is a bullpen with the highest ERA in the majors (4.90) and 10 blown saves and with Rafael Betancourt serving as its poster child.

The injuries to Fausto Carmona and Jake Westbrook haven’t quite ravaged the starting pitching rotation in the same way, but those injuries are making it abundantly clear that the real advantage depth gives a team is in its ability to withstand just these sorts of challenges. You could look at Jeremy Sowers’ start Sunday against Detroit and conclude it wasn’t all that successful. But ask yourself what will have a longer term negative impact on the team: one ineffective start by Sowers or Jhonny Peralta’s strike out with the bases loaded in the eighth inning?

Sowers had trouble finishing off hitters Sunday and it cost the team five runs. Peralta had a chance to be the Edgar Renteria of Sunday and failed, again. It may have been too much to ask of Peralta for him to hit a grand slam like Renteria did on Saturday, but it’s not too much to note that the next meaningful run Peralta drives in will surely be his first.

It may be that a loss is a loss, but not all of them are created equally. The losses attributable to the unsettled starting rotation should end relatively soon as that situation stabilizes. Carmona will return, C.C. Sabathia will pitch better and Aaron Laffey and/or Sowers will settle in. Far more concerning are the losses attributable to the rest of the team’s failures. You could stick Scioscia in for Wedge and it wouldn’t make a difference, unless Scoscia also brings a large part of his roster with him. What troubles this team looks to stick around for awhile, like an obnoxious dinner party guest who doesn’t have to work tomorrow, an apt description actually of the 2008 season.

1968, Revisited

With another lost weekend under their belt, you can almost feel the last ounce of optimism dripping from the entire Cleveland Indians organization. In a season of dispiriting losses, these were just a few more. But given that the Royals were on a bit of a tear themselves, 12 straight losses and counting, possibly the only positive from the Indians’ trip into Kansas City was that this team might finally have reached rock bottom. If not, then hide the children.

The Indians may not be the most disappointing team in the major leagues this year, but they are on a fast track to the top two. Laying waste to exceptional starting pitching with impunity, the team that was one game from the World Series last year right now can’t beat Kansas City. Baseball fortunes can certainly turn quickly and teams can get hot, but seriously does anyone see that in the near term for this team, particularly as presently constituted?

The most frustrating aspect about Version 2008 of the Indians is the unrealized promise of its starting pitching. Done in mostly by a lack of offense this year’s Indians ought to be clothed in the vintage uniforms of their 1960s predecessors. In fact, if you want to throw darts and pick a year, the summer of 2008 is taking on the look and feel of the summer of 1968, meaning all pitch and no hit.

Baseball is far different today than in 1968. Most notably, pitching dominated in a way it hasn’t since. The mound was higher, there were fewer teams. There was no designated hitter. Ball clubs had to be built to withstand a 10-team race. Before the march to expansion and ultimately three divisions in each league, baseball in 1968 has the American League and the National League. No wild cards, no ALDS, no ALCS.

In 1968, the Indians had one of the better pitching staffs in the league, most of which was a holdover from the previous year. Alvin Dark was in his first full season as the Indians’ manager, which was not surprising given that the team was coming off what can only be characterized as a miserable season the year before. Despite a pitching rotation that in 1967 featured Sam McDowell, Luis Tiant, Steve Hargan and Sonny Siebert, the Indians finished eighth in the American League at 75-87. The team ERA was 3.25, a figure that would be leading the major leagues right now but was only fifth best in the league then. The far bigger problem is that the Indians couldn’t score runs. That didn’t change much in 1968.

On the surface, things did seem much better when compared to 1967. The 1968 Indians finished third in the American League with a 86-75 record. By 1960s Indians standards, that’s a pretty good record. In fact, it was only the second time since 1959 that the team finished above .500. Unfortunately, the Indians will still a far, far cry from first place, finishing 16.5 games behind Detroit and Denny McLain, who led the league with a 31-6 record and 1.66 ERA. Though McLain had one of the great pitching seasons of all time in 1968, the Indians were still a disappointment. They could have made a much better run at the Tigers if they simply could have hit.

On the mound and despite McLain, the Indians had the best pitching staff, finishing first in ERA with an amazing 2.66. They yielded the third fewest home runs and had the most strike outs. Four of the five starters had at least 12 wins. Luis Tiant had an amazing nine shutouts and 19 complete games.

Offensively, though, was a different story. The Indians were eighth in runs scored, averaging just over three runs a game, nearly a full run per game behind Detroit. They had little power, finishing ninth in home runs, and their on-base percentage was only sixth. Lee Maye hit .281and catcher Joe Azcue hit .280. Unfortunately, Jose Cardenal was next best, but at .257 was 24 points behind Maye. Hurting the Indians even more were the disappointing seasons of both Tony Horton and Max Alvis. Horton had hit .281 in 106 games in 1967 but dipped to .249 in 1968. Alvis’ drop was similar, hitting .256 in 1967 but dropping to .223 in 1968.

Go up and down the 1968 lineup and you will find a team that, offensively, begins to resemble the 2008 Indians, and not just because one of the leading hitters was again a catcher and one of the biggest disappointments was a first baseman (or former first baseman in the case of Travis Hafner). More to the point, despite its relative success to its previous seasons the 1968 team underperformed. Starting to sound familiar?

Fast forward 40 years and you see a pitching rich team that still can’t hit. Consequently, it’s crashing to the ground as if it were dropped by Ted Stepien from the top of the Terminal Tower. The players keep saying they are looking for a spark, well into denial that they lack the basic chemistry to sustain any sort of fire in the first place.

If you were building a team, starting pitching is where you’d start and the Indians have it in spades. The fact that Paul Byrd, the team’s fifth starter, pitched like a fifth starter on Sunday is so far down on the list of concerns with this team as to be almost meaningless. If Byrd ultimately fails, there are plenty of others to take his place in the rotation. There is every chance, by the way, that any of those others would be an upgrade over Byrd anyway. Still, as we learned in 1968, pitching may be most things but it’s not everything.

Though the bullpen has been closer to awful than good, mostly, though, and without much further comment, the problem with this team has been the hitting. A lack of power, diminishing skills and misguided hope are to blame.

The question facing Indians general manager Mark Shapiro is really the same one facing White Sox general manager Ken Williams. How do you improve a team’s offense in June? White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen went on one of his trademark expletive-filled tirades on Sunday, this one aimed at Williams and the lack of improvement in the team’s offense. Williams responded the same way as Shapiro, by channeling Kevin Bacon: “remain calm. All is well.” That’s probably going over as well with Guillen and Chicago fans as it has with Indians manager Eric Wedge and Cleveland fans.

It’s hard to tell whether Williams and Shapiro really are in a state of denial as they watch their best offseason intentions lay waste to expectations. But the reality is that the economic structure of baseball these days makes meaningful trades in June nearly impossible. Teams on the bottom run economically are never looking to take on salary or part with cheap young talent. Teams in the top tier always think they can compete and, while not as reluctant to take on veteran salaries, usually aren’t willing to part with major league talent in return. With a trading deadline almost two months away, there is no pressure on any team, really, to act any differently.

The crushing reality is that organic improvement is the only real option at this point. For Chicago, that means their trio of underperformers, Jim Thome, Jermaine Dye, and Paul Konerko, have to start hitting. For Cleveland, with Hafner shelved indefinitely, that means that their remaining trio, Victor Martinez, Grady Sizemore, and Jhonny Peralta must do likewise. And if organic improvement doesn’t come to fruition, then head to the thrift store and buy a Nehru jacket, some love beads and alava lamp, it’s 1968 all over again.