Lingering Items--Bigger Truths Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

The World According to Bill

Losing games is never easy, though no one ever said it would be. Some games are more meaningful than others certainly and thus those losses sting harder and linger longer. All you can really do is try to learn something from the experience and move on. You cannot alter the past only your future. Though that doesn’t mean we don’t try from time to time.

The outpouring of emotion following the Ohio State Buckeyes second consecutive loss in a national championship game is following that natural order of things. It’s been almost a mini version, actually, of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, with most fans currently stuck somewhere between denial and anger. The feelings are too raw, apparently, for lessons learned.

There have been postings to the message boards at TheClevelandFan.com that have been all over the map. Almost every body with access to a computer and a forum has weighed in, including, of course, yours truly. Some can’t believe that the Buckeyes laid an egg for two years in a row. Others are simply angry about it and lashing out in every direction. There’s been some transient levels of bargaining and depression but little, to this point, acceptance. Then there’s Bill Livingston.

In Wednesday’s Plain Dealer, Livingston again proves, as if he had to, that while others can have their ups and downs, his ability to be consistently wrong knows no parallel. Rather than put the Buckeyes loss into some sort of perspective or to offer some greater insight (he did attend the game didn’t he?), he instead uses his allocated column space to once again take a hack at one of his favorite targets, Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel.

In Livingston’s world, Tressel is a poser and a phony whose accomplishments are always less than they otherwise appear to be, the latest example being the LSU loss. It’s fine, of course, if Livingston or any other columnist wants to paint a more complete picture of Tressel than some fans who have deified Tressel might want to see. But it’s another thing altogether to simply hack away unfairly.

In this regard, it’s not as if Livingston hasn’t done it before. You can compile a pretty decent size library of Livingston columns about his criticism of Indians manager Eric Wedge, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Does it mean that Wedge has done everything right in his tenure of Indians manager? Of course not. But Livingston’s inability to provide perspective or discern trends, which really is the core of his job, is becoming legendary. He’d rather continue to grind the axe he has against Wedge, even at the expense of his own credibility.

Livingston has been on a similar crusade when it comes to Tressel for years. There was the column in November, 2006 (no longer available, mercifully, in the Plain Dealer’s archive) in which Livingston seemed to credit Tressel for successfully making the transition from Division I-AA to Ohio State but really was a vehicle for criticizing Tressel’s supposed inability to discern quarterback talent. He claimed, for example, that Tressel was slow to see Troy Smith’s talent while not acknowledging that Justin Zwick was a much better and higher profile prospect. Smith was a late bloomer, to be sure, who really didn’t come into his own until, under Tressel, he learned to think pass first, run second. (My view on Livingston’s column appears here)

Then there was the column last season (likewise no longer available from the Plain Dealer’s archives) in which Livingston took Tressel to task for not voting in the final USA Today coaches poll as to who should take on the Buckeyes in last year’s national championship game. This was, of course, after Livingston initially came out and supported the move. (My view on this Livingston masterpiece appears here) Straying for from his intended point, Livingston used Tressel’s non-vote as a launching pad for a broader criticism of the coach, implying that his ethics and values were, if not questionable, then at least not where they should be. His chief evidence for this character assassination was the supposedly too soft punishment he leveled on former linebacker Robert Reynolds for a cheap hit in a 2003 game.

Wednesday’s column follows the same worn formula but also reveals more than a touch of inconsistency, demonstrating perhaps that Livingston likewise must not have access to the Plain Dealer’s archives. In it, Livingston uses the loss to LSU as another reason to take down Tressel another peg or two, but not in a way that makes much sense.

First, he basically minimizes the 2002 national championship out of existence by alternatively suggesting it was either unfairly gifted on the heels of a bad interference call or that it was essentially nullified because of Maurice Clarett’s substantial legal troubles since that game. Second, he then subtly suggests that Tressel’s pursuit of Pennsylvania high school wunderkind Terrelle Pryor is an act of desperation, an act that will be further played out if he lands Pryor and then starts him ahead of incumbent quarterback Todd Boeckman.

If you’re having trouble following the logic of that last paragraph, no need to adjust either your minds or your eyes. Only in Livingston’s world would it make sense anyway.

The inconvenient fact remains for Livingston and his ilk that Tressel has won a national championship at Ohio State. That victory, which was every bit as big of an upset as Florida’s victory against Ohio State last year, if not more, isn’t tainted in the least. However you decide to come out on the interference call in overtime, the one thing that can be fairly said is that it was a close call. Maybe the referee should have swallowed his whistle, maybe not. But one thing is certain, that penalty call wouldn’t even make the list of the 50,000 worst calls by officials in sports in the last decade. As for Clarett, the fact that he let his own outsized ego and desperation take hold of him to the point that he committed a crime years after that game doesn’t magically invalidate his performance in that game. To even offer the suggestion, as Livingston does, is as ridiculous as it is bizarre.

As for Tressel’s pursuit of Pryor, Livingston is as off-base as ever, which is a pretty far-reaching statement, actually. Pryor is the consensus number one high school player in the country. He’s number one in every scouting service and was the USA Today high school offensive player of the year. Nearly every coach from across the country has pursued Pryor. Indeed, if Tressel was not doing so, he would be rightly criticized, likely by Livingston.

Further, Livingston’s underlying inference is that Pryor has a shady background or, in Livingston’s words, he’d be a “shortcut” for the program. Exactly, why, however, he doesn’t say, meaning he can’t support it. Pryor did have an incident last fall when he was allegedly given a citation for disorderly conduct for reportedly being “mouthy” with security officers at a Pennsylvania amusement park. But if this sole incident is the basis for Livingston’s implication that Pryor is trouble, then he should just level it and let others make a judgment. Instead, he simply dangles the implication out there that landing the nation’s top high school recruit, who happens to be African-American, would be a “shortcut.” Nice.

The other interesting aspect to Livingston’s criticism is how inconsistent it is with his other column, noted previously, in which he criticized Tressel for not being able to recognize quarterback talent. Anyone who saw Pryor play last Saturday in the U.S. Army High School All American game in San Antonio, a game in which Pryor not only won the MVP award but looked as if he were playing a different game at a different level than anyone else, knows he’s a major talent. Only a fool wouldn’t allow him to compete against the incumbent, whoever it is. If Pryor ends up with the Buckeyes and can overtake both Boeckman and Antonio Henton, then he would deserve to start. Any other decision and you could almost see the next column Livingston would recycle, saying how Tressel can’t properly evaluate talent.

The issue isn’t whether Tressel should be subject to criticism for his performance and that of his team. Even Tressel understands that’s fair game and comes with the territory. The issue really is why the Plain Dealer continues to provide Livingston with a forum to exorcise his personal demons against those with whom he harbors personal jealousy for accomplishing far more. Given the deteriorating quality and readership of the paper, the answer lies in what appears to be the Plain Dealer’s overarching problem, they just don’t care.

The Real Villains

It’s hardly a State secret that Cleveland sports are cursed. Pick a sport, pick a season and whatever good might have occurred is usually offset by something far more insidious.

And while Cleveland fans have had their fill of any number of players and teams over the years that have contributed to the massive inferiority complex that envelops this community like a plague, they’ve also had their fill of any number of outsiders reminding them of their misery. It’s one thing to criticize your spouse. It’s a whole other matter to have someone to take a shot at her, too.

But that’s exactly what Cleveland fans got Friday morning from carpetbagging Plain Dealer reporter Jodie Valade, a Michigan native who has spent most of her professional life in Dallas, when she compiled her list of the 15 or so villains who supposedly have haunted Cleveland sports.

The list was a good premise. That’s why the ClevelandFan.com did something similar and much better a few months ago (search under “brackets” for the 32 most heartbreaking moments in Cleveland sports). Maybe she should have checked, first. The problem with Valade’s effort is that it so lacking in basic credibility that it’s hard to take it seriously. Another effort like that and she may actually replace Bill Livingston on another list Cleveland fans maintain: least liked Cleveland transplants.

Valade, apparently in trying to establish her street cred, leads off with the name Carl Mays as the number one villain. Really? If Valade had conducted a quiz of 100 random Cleveland sports fans in any sports bar in any part of the city, county or state, not one would have named Carl Mays as a Cleveland sports villain, let alone number one. Maybe Valade should have asked.

The fact that Mays’ “crime,” the unfortunate beaning of Indians’ shortstop Ray Chapman, happened 87 years ago is not a memory that very many living Cleveland sports fans actually have, which would seem like somewhat of a prerequisite to any such list. That may seem like an odd way of looking at things because, for example, some of the world’s greatest villains have long since passed on and yet are remembered vividly. But that’s the key. The villain has to be remembered, preserved by history in a way that still burns freshly in the minds of the general populace.

Not only is Carl Mays generally not remembered, neither is Chapman. He was a good shortstop on a good Indians team in 1920 and his accidental death in August of that season at the hands of a Mays spitball was tragic, to be sure, but other than that it’s not as if his career was all that memorable to most Indians fans. It may be that Chapman would have gone on to real greatness, we’ll never know. More likely is that Indians fans remember his replacement, Joe Sewell, much better because Sewell played most of his career in Cleveland and eventually became a Hall of Famer.

To portray Mays in that context as a villain, indeed Cleveland’s number one sports villain, is ridiculous. In fact, if Valade was going to use unintended tragedy as the barometer, a much better pick would have been Gil McDougald, whose line drive hit Herb Score in the face, essentially ending Score’s career. But McDougald doesn’t even make the list, despite the fact that he is a name many more Cleveland fans remember. Although Score technically was in the league for five more seasons after his injury, he only really pitched two of those seasons, mostly ineffectively. McDougald’s unintended blast snuffed out the promising career of the next great Cleveland pitcher, someone who had been Rookie of the Year in 1955.

Which takes us right back to where we started, naming the number one Cleveland sports villain. If Valade had any feel whatsoever for Cleveland sports and its fans, she would know that hands down and forevermore the number one villain is Art Modell. Laughably, he’s number two on Valade’s list.

Most old time Browns fans didn’t like Modell when he fired Paul Brown, one of the greatest coaches in the history of the sport. They were right. But that act was a mere precursor when Modell more than permanently cemented his position as the most evil person ever in Cleveland sports by cutting the legs out from every Browns fan by moving the team to Baltimore. Financially destitute and morally bankrupt, Modell nevertheless had the last best chance to avoid his own negligence by doing the right thing and selling the team so that it could remain in Cleveland. Instead he whined about having no other choice, took Baltimore’s blood money and ran like a coward.

But karma eventually caught up with Modell in a multitude of ways, most notably when he and is idiot son David ran the Baltimore franchise into the ground and he ended up having to sell anyway. Thankfully and with due justice, he now finds himself a pathetic outsider, nearly alone and without the audience and adoration he so craved. It couldn’t have happened to a better guy.

The Modell placement was hardly Valade’s only mistake. Well down on her list but no one else’s are the twin terrors, Michael Jordan and John Elway. Put it this way: when you’re place is Cleveland sports lore is secured through phrases like “the Shot” or “the Drive” you’re pretty darn high on the list of villains. But if Valade thinks that Bill Cowher, Bill Belichick, Jose Mesa and Frank Lane place ahead of Jordan or Elway, then Valade needs to quit reading from the Livingston’s Big Book of Sports.

Mesa isn’t so much a villain as a choker. There’s a difference. It’s not as if he deliberately failed to convert the save in the seventh game of the 1997 World Series. Mesa was a player of somewhat questionable character to begin with and it finally caught up with him when he was tested most. That may make him a permanent member of the Cleveland Hall of Shame, his failure one of the all time great disappointments, but it doesn’t make him a villain. Besides, it’s not as if he went on to further greatness anyway, which also somewhat a prerequisite for a decent villain.

As for Cowher, how he makes the list at all is a mystery. As Valade notes, Cowher practically begged the Browns to hire him. It was Modell, as dumb as he was evil, who turned him down. What was Cowher supposed to do, quit the sport? The fact that Cowher went on to success in Pittsburgh doesn’t make him a villain. Rather, it is but another example of Modell’s bad karma biting Clevelanders in the backside.

Belichick, on the other hand, probably does deserve a place on the list but not for the reasons cited by Valade, who mostly gets the history wrong. She suggests that Belichick deserves his status because he was a lousy coach here and great in New England and also because he “benched” Bernie Kosar. The fact that Belichick has gone on to greatness is, again, more Modell bad karma than anything else. Besides, though he deliberately alienated the fans and the media alike, Modell was in the process of moving the team anyway. And for the record, Belichick didn’t just bench Kosar. He cut him—out of spite. Remember, the Browns were leading the division at the time and the only healthy quarterback on the roster then was Todd Philcox. Valade should have dug deeper.

In that sense, Belichick was even more of a villain than Frank Lane, also on her list, who traded another favorite son, Rocky Colavito. At least Lane arguably got value in return in the form of Harvey Kuenn, who hit .358 in 1959 and .308 in his one year with Cleveland. Belichick got nothing in return except his just desserts when Kosar was immediately picked up by the Dallas Cowboys and subbed for an injured Troy Aikman in the NFC Championship game, helping seal the win that allowed the Cowboys to advance and win the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the Browns fell to 7-9 and missed the playoffs.

Valade puts Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome and Albert Belle on the list for ostensibly the same reason—greed. Each may be a villain to some but the truth is that most Cleveland fans put in exactly the same position would have done exactly the same thing. Not one of these players was a native Clevelander in the first place and while the Indians nurtured and helped develop each into the player he eventually became, the fact that each turned down less money in Cleveland hardly shocks the conscious. If you need a villain in that scenario, put it on the Dolans, though that’s an incomplete view as well. Under Valade’s logic, if the Indians can’t/don’t resign C.C. Sabathia, will we have to add him to the list as well?

Carlos Boozer, who is last on here list, is a different story. Greed is at the core, too, but it was the manner in which he pursued that greed that caused him to earn his status. Through outright deception, he manipulated his way out of Cleveland so he could grab more money from the Utah Jazz. That puts him on much different footing than the various athletes who have played out their contractual commitments to Cleveland teams and went on to greater riches elsewhere.

Rasheed Wallace? What makes him a villain, the fact that he’s a loudmouth? It’s not like he’s tormented Cleveland fans in any substantial way. Sure, there was the elbow to the head of Zydrunas Ilgauskas in the 2006 playoffs, but it was hardly a difference maker. If Valade had a better feel for Cleveland sports, she would know that two other Pistons rank much higher on the most hated list: Rick Mahorn and Bill Laimbeer. Mahorn threw a vicious elbow to the head of Mark Price in a game in 1989 that put Price on the sidelines with a concussion. It made Wallace’s cheap shot look like a love tap in comparison. As for Laimbeer, he wasn’t so much a villain as a complainer, but he was hated in ways far greater than Wallace.

Valade, pandering and running out of steam by this point, throws in the ubiquitous “any New York Yankee, Pittsburgh Steeler or Michigan Wolverine.” What Valade doesn’t get is that it’s not necessarily the players on those teams that were villains so much as the mere existence of those teams. Too many times the Yankees and the Steelers, in particular, have rained on Cleveland’s parade. As for the Wolverines, I’d buy that reference if Valade had narrowed it to those Clevelanders, like John Kolesar and Desmond Howard, who betrayed their home state and this area to play for Michigan. In each case, they came back to stick it to the Buckeyes.

In the end, Valade’s column is not necessarily of any great consequence, except as an unintentionally amusing and slightly insulting affront to actual Cleveland fans. In actuality, it reads like a semi-desperate plea to look more like a native and less like a tourist. But that status is earned, not bestowed, just ask Livingston. And still the Plain Dealer wonders why they are losing readers?

Wasted Asset

You can tell the Cavaliers are on their annual winter west coast trip and the games are being played past the bedtime of at least one Plain Dealer columnist. It’s January 19, 2007, the Cleveland Browns played their last game three weeks ago and now, just now, Bill Livingston offers his take about Braylon Edwards and Phil Savage in this morning’s Plain Dealer.

Of course, you had to sort through about three paragraphs to figure out what the heck Bill was talking about since he started his column talking about Eric Snow. Usually Bill doesn’t start to veer wildly off course until five or six paragraphs into his thrice-weekly mess. As near as we can figure, Bill has come to the conclusion that the Browns and Savage just don’t “get it.” He surmises that Savage just doesn’t understand Cleveland fans. According to Bill, we don’t dislike Braylon Edwards because he’s a Michigan Wolverine, we dislike Edwards because he drops passes.

Actually, we do dislike Edwards because he is a Michigan Wolverine and because he’s a loud mouth, me-first prima donna whose mediocre production doesn’t match his overinflated opinion of himself. And because he drops passes. But thanks, Bill, for the observations. Day late meet dollar short.

In another story from this morning’s paper that we think is directly related to our overall point, Plain Dealer editor Doug Clifton announced that he’ll be retiring on June 1, ending an 8-year stint at Cleveland’s only daily newspaper. When Clifton looks back on all he surveys, hopefully he’ll come to grips with the notion that at this point, the best people can say about the PD is that it used to have a good sports section.

But that was years and years ago. Pick up the Plain Dealer sports on any day and no day in particular and there is an undeniable sameness and blandness. The game stories, irrespective of the team, are largely uninteresting. The columnists, particularly Livingston, rarely venture very far out on a limb or say anything remotely controversial. The fact that now Livingston chose to write about Edwards and Savage at a time when he doesn’t have to run into either for several months just illustrates the point.

Perhaps this is the kind of malaise that creeps into an organization when it doesn’t perceive a need to be competitive. And at the Plain Dealer, they still act as if they have the market to themselves. That’s true, but only if one defines the market as narrowly as the PD does. What they fail to realize is that on any given day, there are probably a dozen better sources on the internet for Cleveland sports fans to gain a more interesting and deeper perspective into what’s happening than the Plain Dealer seems willing to offer.

Sure, the Plain Dealer has a modest internet presence. It consists of providing the same bland columns that one can find in print and an occasional podcast from Tony Grossi. Pretty ground breaking stuff. Given their modest objectives, it seems like the PD is still worried that this internet thing may be a fad as they hardly even begin to take advantage of the potential that the immediacy of the internet offers, which is good news to sites like this.

But we don’t think that daily newspapers are ever going to suddenly disappear like Chuck on “Happy Days.” Nor do we think it is ultimately a good thing that the Plain Dealer is a mediocre presence in this community. As we’ve said before and we’ll say again, part of the problem in this town is that the sports teams in this town have produced such crappy products for such a long period of time, the fans have come to embrace mediocrity as an acceptable state of affairs. We no longer push for excellence and thus get what we deserve.

And the Plain Dealer, as the only Cleveland daily newspaper, is a big part of the problem. It is so casual in approach to how it covers sports these days that it simply isn’t in the position to even identify excellence, let alone demand it from the various teams and their representatives and hold them accountable when they fall short.

Despite its continuously dwindling readership, the PD could still play a vital role in helping shape this community. But the institutional boredom that seemed to set in years ago shows no signs of abating. As a result, a needed asset and advocate for change is absent. But on the other hand, as long as they keep letting Livingston chew up newsprint three times a week, there will always be a reason to laugh. It’s just not for the reasons the PD probably intended.