The Future Of the Indians...

It’s pretty significant to the future of the Cleveland Indians that Mark Shapiro, who’s been with the team longer than the Dolans have owned it, is packing his kit bag for the move north to Toronto and a similar role with the Blue Jays.  What is probably far more significant to that future of the team is the lesser told story that the Dolans are looking to sell about 30% of the franchise, at an inflated valuation of course, in order to fund the team at more appropriate levels.

According to a story in Monday’s Akron Beacon Journal, the Dolans have hired an investment advisor to market the team to moneyed owner wannabees looking to get into the game.  Now under normal circumstances a smart person might ask why anyone would want to give a quarter of a billion dollars to the Dolans without any meaningful chance to control the franchise’s fate.  But those kind of smart questions don’t really apply in the world of professional sports. Really smart investors generally stay out of sports so the usual math tends to be meaningless.

What the Dolans are looking for is a lifeline, someone to fund the team’s salary growth.  In return they’ll give up a seat in the owner’s box and a seat at the table at the winter meetings.  Implicit though is the motivating factor of that minority owner.  He or she, but likely he, will become a member of the owners’ club and thus be seen as a potentially viable buyer of a majority interest in a franchise down the road.

It’s a construct that tends to work, by the way Jimmy Haslam never becomes the owner of the Browns if he hadn’t started off owning a small piece of the Pittsburgh Steelers first.  It gave the rest of the owners a chance to get used to his glad handing ways.  Steve Biscotti followed a similar path in Baltimore though he struck a particularly favorable deal against a craven, bankrupt owner in Art Modell and essentially stole the franchise out from under the Modell family. And a grateful generation of Clevelanders thank him.

In the near term this is a bit of good news for Indians fans, assuming that the Dolans find the well-financed patsy that their plan requires.  It also demonstrates what I’ve said for years.  The Dolans simply do not have enough money to compete with most other owners in major league baseball.  The franchise doesn’t generate enough money and the Dolans don’t have the wherewithal to deficit spend the team back into the level of competitiveness that would significantly increase revenues.

This is where the story of Shapiro becomes most relevant.  For years Shapiro has guided the direction of this franchise and has had to do it somewhat under unfavorable battle conditions.  Always trying to scrape together enough money to make targeted investments without huge downsides has led the Indians to essentially buy out the arbitration years of its best prospects while setting the stage for those prospects to leave once free agency beckoned.  The history with CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee would be played out once again with the likes of Corey Kluber, Michael Brantley and Jason Kipnis eventually.  It was always just a matter of time and may still be. 

This is what Indians fans have been conditioned to expect and has been a factor, the degree of which one can debate, in the continued muted interest in this team, assuming one judges interest by such pedestrian metrics as attendance.

Shapiro has done his best to divert what’s happening with this left hand by keeping the right hand in constant motion.  The Indians, under Shapiro, have upgraded Progressive Field (mostly with Progressive Insurance’s stadium rights money) and have attempted nearly all manner of low cost distraction in the form of constant, and branded, giveaways.  Shapiro has been a whiz at using other people’s money (other than the Dolans, I mean) to cultivate an inviting fan experience even if the games tend to be boring and the team often on, at best, the fringes of competitiveness.

It hasn’t worked.  The Indians consistently rank near the bottom in major league attendance and there’s only so much for which one can continue to blame “the economy” before you come to the conclusion that winning matters and winning consistently matters even more.

You want to understand why Shapiro would leave for what amounts to the same job somewhere else?  That’s why.  It’s not just more money for him and his family but more money for him and his new team to play with.  The more puzzling question is why he stayed so long.

Presumably Shapiro is well respected in baseball circles.  He’s the quintessential company man.  No one speaks more lingo and knows more metrics.  He’s personable without being obnoxious.  He’s probably a really pleasant guy around the office and maybe even fun in the few unguarded moments when he has a chance to kick back with a beer.  He’s had enough of success to make him seem competent without being so competent as to be out of reach.  In short, the Toronto job couldn’t have been the first opportunity to have come his way in 23 years with Cleveland.

Maybe it’s as simple as Shapiro being the eternal optimist.  Maybe he always figured that at some point the purse strings would loosen and he’d have to stop soliciting virtually every business near and far to partner up on this promotion or that.  At some point, though, life has a way of turning the most idealistic among us into hard-bitten realists and if there is one reality that’s well known under this Indians’ ownership it’s that this team was never going to be funded at a level that would truly allow it to compete on a regular basis.

Shapiro’s timing is a little curious though given how the Dolans are shopping the team.  That seemingly represents the best chance to really infuse this team with money and would seem like the opportune time for Shapiro to stick around.  That’s what actually scares me most.  If Shapiro doesn’t see that as the best chance to right the team than what hope should the fans continue to cling to?

In some ways, Shapiro will be missed and in many ways he won’t.  Under his watch he did bring the franchise forward using analytics.  What will never be fully known are the decisions he was forced to make that ultimately put this franchise in a state of suspended animation.

Paul Dolan is taking over the reins as president, content to take on the role himself rather than look outside.  There’s nothing in that sentence or those fact that suggests, in and of itself, that fans can expect anything different.  That will occur, if ever, when the Dolans find that quarter billion they want for a third of their franchise.

Lingering Items--Branding Edition

The Cleveland Browns’ Johnny Football is the new Johnny Paycheck, having just signed a 4-year $8 million contract with just over $4 million of it guaranteed.  That means we’re about 4 months away from someone, Manziel’s agent for example, looking to redo it on the heels of a couple of completed passes, one of which was for a touchdown.

But on the plus side we’re probably mere weeks, maybe days, away from Johnny Paycheck doing something completely stupid and over the top with his bonus money.  Think Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson character in The Jerk after he became famous, just gaudier.

The last time I visited the status of Cleveland’s premier party boy, Manziel, he was an unsigned gallivant building brand awareness as this generation’s Joe Namath, but with an Instagram account.  In the intervening weeks about the only thing that’s changed, other than a relatively modest rookie contract based on his relatively modest draft status is that his head coach, Mike Pettine, named Brian Hoyer the starting quarterback heading into training camp.

Ok, another thing changed.  Slowly, methodically, the players are aligning behind Hoyer to the exclusion of Manziel, lineman Paul Krueger being one, former Browns’ quarterback Brady Quinn being another. Neither were particularly negative but the first shots across the bow by players who have been there.

Krueger criticized by his constant positive references to Brian Hoyer.  It was telling.  Quinn was more direct, rightly noting that others in the locker room tend to look to the quarterback and how he conducts his business and right now most of Johnny Paycheck’s business is of the drinking, partying and carrying on variety.

Manziel will try the patience of his fellow players, the coaching staff and the fans on a daily basis.  He already is.  Every time a player or Pettine has to respond to a media inquiry about Johnny Paycheck is a minute that Pettine could have spent on almost anything else.  This is a franchise, a coaching staff, a roster that can’t afford any wasted minutes and Manziel has used up any reasonable allocation already.

The arc of these sorts of things is always the same.  An immature kid with too much money pushes the limits of his new found status.  At first it seems reckless but in a fun, vicarious sort of way.  Think Manziel on a floating fake swan, for example.  Over time it goes from amusing to bemusing to vexing as losses mount and interceptions, fumbles and injuries mount.

Eventually there’s a Come-to-Jesus moment where the bad boy, sans eye wink, tries to earnestly convince the fans that he’s reformed his hard partying ways before they got truly out of hand.  Finally there’s the real Come-to-Jesus moment where the career is in jeopardy and rapid maturity is no longer an interesting concept. 

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Manziel will follow this rather predictable arc.  He’s well into phase 1 with as he constantly reminds those who ask that he’s young, single and what’s the harm?  There is none until there is some and there will be some.

The only real question is how long it takes to get through this arc with Manziel.  He may think he’s working hard when he’s not otherwise playing hard but the truth has a way of revealing itself either way.  You can’t wing a NFL career.  You either take it seriously or it spits you out prematurely.

Training camp doesn’t open for another 5 weeks.  That means 5 more weeks of Manziel in borderline embarrassing situations and 5 more weeks of wondering whether this guy is hell bent on partying himself out of the league before he ever sees an actual field.

Manziel’s a young guy and should have his fun.  But he’s not a college guy anymore.  He’s taken his talents to the professional level and eventually needs to act that way.  He seems to have modeled himself after the New England Patriot’s Rob Gronkowski.  That hasn’t been working out too well for Gronk these days as he suffers through injuries one season after another. 

It’s a legitimate question and hope that Johnny Paycheck can stay on the field more than Gronkowski.  But the more immediate question is when he’ll see that field in the first place.  Each moment spent prostrate in an inflatable swan is another minute he’s losing ground to Hoyer.

**
With the NBA draft just over a week away, it remains fascinating, in a dysfunctional Cleveland Browns sort of way, that the Cavs still don’t have a head coach.  For the moment they seem to be following the rubric of the Browns, meaning they are interviewing anyone with a pulse in order to hire someone who wasn’t on anyone’s radar.  Or else they’ll hire a retread.  Dan Gilbert, the Cavs’ owner, has more than sufficiently demonstrated a mercurial almost random streak when it comes to presiding over his investment.

At this point there seems to be no use in hiring a coach before the draft.  Depending on who general manager David Griffin drafts, the potential pool of coaching candidates could greatly increase or shrink precipitously.

There are probably two absolute head shaking aspects to what’s happening to the Cavs.  First, Griffin seemed to be at best a reluctant choice by Gilbert to remain as general manager once Chris Grant was fired.  From that tenuous platform Griffin has parlayed himself into temporarily the most powerful man in the franchise.  With no coach from which to gain input on the draft, the Cavs’ future literally rests on his shoulders.  That’s fine as far as it goes, it’s just that you’d like to think the future would have been entrusted to someone in whom Gilbert had unconditional faith.

Second, if the current model for sustained NBA success is the San Antonio Spurs, the Cavs’ approach couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to it.  The turnover in the front office and coaching staff is the most obvious example but truthfully everything else does flow from that, just as it has with the Browns.

The NBA remains the most difficult sport in which to turn a franchise around.  You need a nucleus as both the Spurs and the Heat demonstrated.  But the difference really is the other 8 or 9 players that fill out the roster.  The Heat lost to the Spurs definitively because most of the roster after the big 3 has simply been cobbled together based mostly on salary and luxury cap considerations.  The Spurs have always been the most methodical team in the league, making sure that every spot had a defined role with a player specifically chosen for that role.

The Cavs right now have a shaky nucleus at best and an almost embarrassing array of players who fit together as precisely as the pieces of 10 separate jigsaw puzzles would if you put them all in one box and shook it.

Never has a franchise been given such gifts by the NBA gods these last several years and while it would be difficult to say that those gifts have been squandered completely it isn’t difficult to say that they’ve been misused.  A team with a more stable ownership and front office would have had a more methodical approach to ensuring that all these gifts were complementary.  Of course if the Cavs had that kind of franchise then they wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.

**

There’s an interesting legal battle brewing at the most mundane of places in the federal government—the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  In a move that seems to have caught, certainly, the Washington Redskins and, likely as certainly, NFL headquarters off guard, the Patent Office invalidated the Redskins’ various trademarks as having been improvidently granted in the first place because they perpetuate racism.

That decision will be held in abeyance while the Redskins appeal, but make no mistake that the death knell on the most racist name in sports continues to sound ever louder.

It is honestly difficult to construct a compelling argument to support Dan Snyder’s dogged insistence on keeping the Redskins’ name.  He’s left with arguing tradition and sounds just as silly as those who argue for abolishing gay marriage. 

Times change as do one’s sensibilities.  The Redskins’ name has always been offensive.  What’s changed is the populace’s sensitivities to it and that’s not a bad thing.  Separate water fountains for whites and blacks were once commonplace and accepted aided by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1896.  Times did change then as did sensibilities and this ultimately was reflected a little more than a half century later when the Supreme Court outlawed it in its seminal Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

The point is that tradition is a flimsy argument because the only real tradition the Redskins name is perpetuating is overt racism.  If/when the Patent and Trademark Office’s ruling is upheld in court, the Redskins will have no choice.  The issue becomes economic and there’s nothing that will change a buffoon like Snyder’s mine more quickly than the lost money from not being able to commercially exploit the name Redskins or, stated differently, watching others do that with no legal recourse.

The more difficult question that’s now getting attention has to do with the Cleveland Indians.  There’s nothing blatantly racist about the name or what that name symbolizes.  A challenge to the Patent and Trademark Office probably wouldn’t be successful if the intent was to rid the team of the trademark “Indians.”

The real issue is the trademark Chief Wahoo, a clownish almost disturbing caricature of an Indian.  The toothy grin, the bright red skin.  Like the name Redskins, the real truth is that American Indians always saw Chief Wahoo as a racist symbol, just as African-Americans saw the Little Black Sambo character as racist.  The only thing that’s changed is that people are starting to better understand what they mean.

To a certain extent the Indians have been de-emphasizing the Chief Wahoo symbol for the last several years and I’m certain that the Patent and Trademark Office’s ruling in the Redskins matter will accelerate this thinking.  If it didn’t, it should.  If the Indians end up in the Patent and Trademark Office with a similar challenge to a patently offensive symbol they’ll get a similar result.

It would be nice to think that the Indians owners would show some leadership and courage on the issue and declare immediately that the Chief Wahoo symbol is now in the past and won’t be used again to market the team.  We all should now call on them to do it.

I don’t think it will happen.  But I do believe the Dolans are more sympathetic to the issue than Dan Snyder is to his issue.  That means fans will see continue to see less and less of Chief Wahoo until the point where he’s disappeared altogether, not officially necessarily but effectively.  Once the team voluntarily takes any economic clout out of the symbol, its use becomes irrelevant.  The only real issue with this approach is that by not definitively eliminating it now, they leave open the possibility of future owners of the team taking a different approach.

Let’s avoid the circus.  Just do the right thing now and move on.  Chief Wahoo, it’s time to report to the front office and bring your playbook.

High Hopes

I suppose one could make the claim that the out of reach theme of the Cleveland Browns, indeed Cleveland Sports, could be High Hopes.  I'm not sure any of the franchises in this town actually dare to reach so far with their dreams.  The Browns seem incompetent by design.  The Cavs were against their head coach before they were for him, again, and the Indians, well, just keep seeing the core of the team that surprised travel elsewhere for market-based wages. 

Then, of course, there's always Bruce Springsteen, not a native son by any means but adopted almost.  Much of his early success outside of New Jersey came in places like Cleveland that always seemed to embrace underdogs.  So in recognition of one consistently high level performer, here's the latest video from Springsteen as he readies his 18th studio album, "High Hopes."  Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving:

Lingering Items--Indians Business Edition

One of the abiding questions of recent times about what’s happening with the business side of the Cleveland Indians revolves around the Dolans’ recent sale of SportsTime Ohio.

The Dolans went to some difficulty and expense to first cancel its television broadcast contract with Fox Sports Ohio and then launch their own cable venture m 2006 with Indians games as the centerpiece.  Yet just a handful of years later they abandoned the project and sold STO, ironically to Fox Sports.  Did the Dolans cash in?  Is that what funded this past season’s free agent splurge?  Hard to know in either case, but perhaps they sold for a more mundane reason: it may not have been generating the profits they thought.

On the surface team owners establishing their own cable networks to broadcast their games seems like a good business plan.  Essentially they sell the broadcast rights to themselves, one pocket to the other, and get cable television subscribers to fund it.  What could go wrong?

Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  The Dolans aren’t disclosing anything other than corporate speak to explain the rationale behind why they abandoned STO but perhaps a story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal shed some light on what was really going on: cable operators don’t want to pay huge fees to carry a channel the overwhelming majority of cable subscribers don’t even watch.

As a backdrop, the Dolans weren’t the first to establish what amounted to an in house cable network as a way of enhancing their revenues.  In some sense they were probably a bit late to the party on that one.  But as it turns out, those ventures weren’t nearly as foolproof as club owners thought they would be.

Tuesday’s story focused on a similar operation in Houston that was dedicated to broadcasting Astros and Rockets games but there’s no reason to think the same math doesn’t apply in Cleveland.

In Houston as in Cleveland, owners and investors wanted to cash in on what seemed to be ever increasing licensing fees passed merrily along to increasingly strapped cable television subscribers.  It’s kind of a “cake and eat it too” plan.  The team sells its television rights to its own network.  That network goes to the various cable operators and demands that the channel be carried on basic cable at a huge per subscriber fee. The owners get huge licensing fees and nearly all the advertising revenue.

And for years, that’s exactly what’s happened.  Indeed, the single biggest content fee passed along to subscribers is that charged by ESPN to cable operators.  Those operators don’t want to alienate viewers and thus carry the channel, passing along the cost to the entire subscriber base.  It’s made ESPN rich enough to bid on the broadcast rights to baseball and football which, in turn, has given ESPN the clout to charge even higher fees to operators which, in turn, has further increased the monthly cable bills of all of us.

As ESPN thrived under the model, a mini explosion of similar channels followed, mostly focused on more discrete subjects such as the NFL, major league baseball, the Big 10, the SEC, and the like.

It works for just about as long as cable operators are willing to offer the channels and pass along the costs.  That is becoming an increasingly more difficult task.  Cable operators often argue that they are merely protecting the interests of their customers who don’t want to keep seeing their monthly bills increase.  That’s true, but a convenient truth.

There is significant evidence, according to the Wall Street Journal story, that sports on television isn’t nearly as popular as perceived.  According to Nielsen ratings cited by the Journal, aside from the NFL and the biggest games in a handful of other sports, the TV audience for sports is about 4% or less of households on average.  That’s a pretty stunningly low number.  For basketball and hockey, it’s less than 3%.  Ouch.

That means that somewhere around 96% of all cable subscribers are tuning in, if at all, only for the biggest games.  For the most part, they could care less.  That means that the same 96% of cable subscribers are paying so that the more rabid 3-4% can watch a midweek Golden State vs. Utah basketball game.

A more reasonable person might ask: why can’t the 4% who want to watch sports on a regular basis simply pay for it themselves?  The answer to that is simple and two-fold.  First, there is a point at which even that 4% would not continue to ante up.  There simply aren’t enough viewers willing to pay enough money to justify the network’s investment into broadcasting the sport.  Second, it’s more lucrative for networks to sell advertising time if they can plausibly argue that their reach is 96% bigger than it really is.

The other truth for the cable operators is less, shall we say, “consumer oriented.”  You see, many cable operators like Time Warner, also own and produce their own content that they like to have broadcast on their cable systems.  Adding content they don’t own competes for eyeballs with the content they do own, although perhaps not as much as they think.  The bigger issue though is that as high cost sports networks push cable bills higher, customers abandon cable for something else, like the internets.  That’s bad for cable operators who have seen flat to declining customer growth for the last several years.

ESPN has enough market clout and diverse programming to mostly get what it wants.  Rarely do you see cable operators drawing a line on them.  But increasingly they are drawing a line with others.  Time Warner, for example, refused to carry the NFL Network for years until the NFL lowered its economic demands and agreed to allow Time Warner to put the network on a sports tier that is paid for separately by the customers who want it.   Undoubtedly that’s hurt the financial model of the NFL Network even as it has expanded its theoretical reach.

All of this gets us back to STO.  The Dolans didn’t get into too many skirmishes with cable operators over the subscriber fees but they had to lower their financial demands to accomplish this and that in turn lowered the profits, not to mention the quality of the overall product.  Outside of the Indians’ game, the programming on STO mostly has the look and production values of a local cable access show and with about the same size audience.

So STO was sold to Fox Sports.  But in many ways this is a different Fox Sports.  In the last few years Fox Sports has been expanding its footprint and is launching its own ESPN clone of a network.  Having regional programming that feeds into a national platform gives it a significant head start in its head to head death match with ESPN.

Given Fox’s imperialistic plans, the Dolans undoubtedly realized a profit in the sale and perhaps that, more than anything else, likely funded the free agent shopping spree this last off season.

While the STO venture was mildly successful for the Dolans, it wasn’t nearly as successful as they imagined.  To the extent that has an impact on future budgets for the team itself, and undoubtedly it does, it makes it less likely that fans will see similar shopping sprees in future off seasons.  Welcome to 2009, Indians fans.

**

Speaking of business plans and because there are no such things as coincidences, the Indians have gone full Monty into what they like to call dynamic pricing, according to Crains Cleveland Business.

Essentially the Indians vary ticket prices like Las Vegas varies hotel prices.  Buy early and you’re likely to pay less, irrespective of the opponent.  Wait until the last minute against a desirable opponent and expect to pay more.

Crains used the example of bleacher seats for the upcoming game against Texas on July 27th, which is a fireworks night.  Initially tickets were sold for between $10 and $26, depending on location.  The prices right now range from $30.25 to $36.

This has generated some mild complaints among some fans and has spurred a slight increase in advance ticket sales, which is the Indians’ goal.

Fans who are complaining do so because they want the right to wait until the last second to buy a ticket without any consequence attached to it.  But that’s not a reality in most any other purchase and there’s no compelling reason it should be the reality when it comes to Indians ticket purchases.

If I book a flight at the last minute, I expect to pay more.   That may seem unfair except that by buying late I gave myself the maximum flexibility to change my plans.  That flexibility came at a cost, of course, and I could have traded that off by taking more of a risk by buying it earlier and hoping my plans didn’t change.  It is a choice.

The same holds true for sports tickets.  It can be hard for a fan to plan in April to attend a game in July without knowing how his plans could change. That’s why many don’t choose to buy tickets that far in advance.  They don’t want to take the risk that they’ve wasted their money.  But there’s no reason, moral, ethical, economical, that the Indians or any other team have to assure fans that tickets can be had at the same price the day before the game.   It’s simple risk shifting and there’s nothing wrong with that.

As mentioned, the Indians are seeing some success with dynamic pricing which can only mean that there’s no going back.  That’s a radical change from the days when you could literally walk up the day of the game and buy a good seat for the same price that the person sitting next to you paid two months prior.  But on this issue, there’s no faulting the Indians or the Cavs and Browns when they inevitably follow suit.  Sometimes a business needs to be run like a business.

**

The Indians beginning the second half of a surprising season leads to this week’s question to ponder: Who is more deserving of the first half MVP, Jason Kipnis or Terry Francona?

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?

Lingering Items--PR Disasters Edition

I wouldn't say that the Cleveland Browns are under siege at the moment, but that’s only because they are perpetually under siege.  Having spent nearly a decade and a half in a bunker will give anyone a bunker mentality.  Still, all the bad press flowing from Berea these days suggests that nothing much has changed and also that the Browns really could use a better media rep.

When the story of owner Jimmy Haslam’s troubles at Pilot Flying J broke, the team seemed particularly ill prepared to understand, let alone respond to, the questions fans might have about it all such as whether this will unravel the underpinnings of Haslam’s financial base and in turn thrown the team into even more turmoil.  That’s probably a question Roger Goodell and the other owners in the NFL might want an answer to as well.  And while Haslam has talked directly to the commissioner, the team’s media reps haven’t done a whole lot to help Haslam regain his footing with the fans. They may not know how.

If Haslam wasn’t talking out of an abundance of caution given the FBI investigation and the pending litigation, fans would probably understand.  But Haslam has been chatty in various other forums though he hasn’t sat down for a lengthy local interview on the subject, not even with a team-friendly media type like Jim Donovan.

What Haslam has said is that he didn’t really want to take attention away from the draft, but that’s just a convenient excuse.  The real problem here is that the Browns media department seems poorly equipped to handle the controversy and thus has just dug themselves deeper into their bunker hoping that sooner or later the shelling has to stop.  It’s a strategy, I suppose, but so was the signing of Brandon Weeden.

Then came the well deserved hit piece on te team on the web site Grantland by Chuck Klosterman, a writer with local ties whose main gig now is as The Ethicist for The New York Times.  Klosterman has a sense of the area having written for the Akron Beacon Journal once upon a time.  In his Grantland piece Klosterman blistered the team’s management for first granting and then essentially yanking supposedly unfettered access during the draft.  It’s not that the Browns looked petty and small during the whole incident, though they did, in spades.  It’s that they looked both paranoid and untethered.

Klosterman’s best line about the absurdity of the Browns’ approach to secrecy was the subtle, stinging “I don’t think they’re building chemical weapons in Berea.  But they might be.”  Of course this could be applied to any NFL team around draft time but it’s particularly telling about the Browns.

No one, I suppose, expects the Browns to lay out a week before the draft who exactly the team plans on taking with the 6th pick, but let’s face it.  I’m not sure anyone much cares outside of a dwindling fan base that’s growing bored with the whole damn thing.  The Browns have been perfectly awful at virtually every aspect of building a team for more than a decade now.  I can’t imagine there’s a team out there that has much concern about the Browns or their strategy come draft time except in a George Kostanza-like do-the-opposite-of-what-the-Browns-do sort of way.  I sense that the Browns could grant unfettered access to its draft room to not just the media but reps from every other NFL team and almost no one would show up except to try and figure out why the Browns are so bad at what they do.  Now that would be an interesting inside story.

The thing about the Klosterman situation is that a team with a savvy media department could have finessed the situation, taken advantage of Klosterman’s national stage and used the opportunity to show exactly why the Jimmy Haslam/Joe Banner/Rob Chudzinksi regime is different than the previous iterations.  Instead they bungle it to the point that if anything they look even dumber than Mike Holmgren or Phil Savage and that’s saying something.

Then comes the column late last week from Pat McManamon writing on Fox Sports Ohio.  McManamon has a bit of a history with the team and an axe to grind so there is that.  McManamon used to be the Browns beat writer for the Beacon Journal and then left that to work directly for the Browns mainly writing the crap that masks for news on their web site.  I’m not quite sure what happened in that relationship but McManamon hasn’t been much of a fan of how the Browns run things since.

Still, McManamon’s column is useful for driving home a slightly different point, that the there’s something indigenous to the Browns that make them media boobs.  McManamon  may not have been able to pinpoint the cause but how hard can that really be?  This is a team that’s been serially unsuccessful in any aspect of its operations.  It should be in the business of embracing the fans and instead acts, at best, as if they’re necessary evils to be managed.

Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that the Browns rarely if ever generate any good news and thus those in the media are just being too sensitive to a team that is sick and tired of reading how lousy they are.  But then I remember that great line from Don Draper in Mad Men, repeated by his mentee Peggy Olsen, that “if you don’t like what they’re saying about you, change the conversation.”

The Browns seem utterly incapable of changing the conversation.  If this new regime is really taking a significantly different approach than all of the ones in the past, how would you know?  If Haslam really feels like he’s got the situation at Pilot Flying J under control and that it won’t come back to somehow hurt the fans in Cleveland, how would you know?

The reason the Browns are viewed with scorn and ridicule, locally and nationally, is related not just to their general incompetence but to a media approach to the fans that fosters that perception.  But on the other hand why should we expect any different?  A team so awful in its core business isn't suddenly going to be good in the rest of what it does.

**

Maybe it isn’t the Browns but the entire NFL.  Word has come down from on high, meaning Commissioner Roger Goodell, that the league will be making, ahem, a few adjustments to its off season in its never ending quest to be ubiquitous 24/7/365.  In particular, the draft is being moved to either an early or mid May date for 2014, at the very least.  The league is still contemplating whether to start free agency a few weeks earlier.  Given how much press coverage free agency garners do you really have to guess what the final decision will be?

The league claims that the move to May next year has to do with a scheduling conflict with Radio City Music Hall and its Easter show featuring, I think, the Rockettes’ re-enactment of the crucifixion.  Funny how that kind of scheduling conflict hadn’t emerged in the previous 8 years.  It’s such a ridiculous and incredible excuse that you get the feeling the league reached out to the Browns’ public relations department for advice on crafting the message.

Anyone who follows the NFL with any regularity will know that the league office has been pushing to move the draft into May for years, particularly when they moved the Super Bowl into February.  The league year starts in March (or used to, we’ll see) followed next by the combine followed immediately thereafter by free agency then the draft and then the rookie camp and mini-camps that move seamlessly into training camp and then preseason and then regular season and then playoffs and then the Super Bowl and on and on, year after year.

The slight problem the league claimed to have in its march toward total media domination is that the combine, free agency and draft all occurred in a 4 week or so period between early March and late April.  It left May without any NFL-branded activity except rookie mini-camps.  And if you don't think finding stories in rookie mini-camps is a struggle then you missed all the Geno Smith is a diva articles, luckily.  Pushing the draft into May is the ultimate no-brainer.

Rather than just admit the obvious the NFL strangely hid behind the shadowy scheduling conflict as if the NFL gives a damn about anyone else’s schedule.  Besides, last time I checked Radio City Music Hall was hardly the only venue in New York let alone the only venue nationally that could accommodate the spectacle that the draft has become.

Coaches of course are up in arms about the change because anything that infringes on their time with the players causes them angina.  But the coaches hardly have a voice in anything that actually takes place in the NFL.  Ask Sean Peyton.

The only problem this creates from a fan’s perspective is that anything that lengthens the draft process by definition lengthens the exposure to Mel Kiper.  It will beget even more mock drafts and worthless rumors and front office executives playing games with the fans about the team’s draft plans as if, again, the secrecy is really masking the fact that they’re making chemical weapons.  If you think you hate the run up to the NFL draft, just wait.

Maybe the NFL is right and there is no limit to how much of the NFL fans want.  It doesn't matter anyway because if there’s one thing we do know about the NFL it’s that it never admits a mistake.  The draft will move to May unless the league can figure out how to get the Super Bowl into March.  Then the draft will be in June.  Suck on that, NBA.

**

Of course one of the reasons that teams and leagues are so bad at managing their public relations is that they are often working with idiots.  If you worked for the Indians’ p.r. department tell me exactly how you’d handle Chris Perez?

When Perez had his dual meltdowns this past week, a certain segment of fans with good memories blasted him on Twitter.  So Perez did what any right thinking person would do in this case.  He deleted his Twitter account.

Perez has been a fairly active member of the Twitter community, usually offering his followers a song of the day or something relatively innocuous.  He typically doesn’t court controversy in that forum.  Instead he saves it for the blow torch approach,  criticizing the team and its fans directly through the media when it suits his interests.

Apparently the only one that didn’t see all this coming was Perez.  His approach to saving games makes Bob Wickman nervous.  But despite his high wire approach he has been an effective closer except maybe to the small group of fans that accept nothing but perfection.   So it wasn’t a surprise that when Perez finally tripped those fans would pounce.  Call it payback, deserved or otherwise.

What’s funny about the whole thing is the way Perez handled it.  Instead of letting it blow over he deleted his account and then let the Indians’ public relations team issue a press release that reflected the collective sensibilities of the Indians’ public relations team imagining what a guy like Perez might say if they could actually script his words, which they did in this case.

That’s why we get a Perez “quote” of the likes of “we have an extremely positive and supportive group of players, coaches and staff members in our clubhouse and I want to participate in activities and routines that contribute positively to the culture we are building here.”  That sounds exactly what Perez would say, doesn't it?

Anyway, I guess fans won’t have Perez to kick around on Twitter for the time being (who doesn't think he reactivates if/when he gets on a save streak?) but that doesn't mean he’ll be less of a problem for the p.r. department.  Perez will go back off the reservation. He can’t help himself.

**
The Cavs just "won" the NBA's draft lottery and thus this week's question to ponder: How nervous are you that Chris Grant is the Cavs' general manager?

Lingering items--Collective Shrug Edition

On Tuesday night, the Cleveland Indians beat the Oakland A's 1-0.  It was the second straight win for the Tribe over the As. It also was the team’s  8th win in their last 9 games and pushed their season record to 16-14.  Overall, a decent start to the season, right?  The answer depends on what you’re measuring.

While the Indians were winning there were a total of 9,474 people in attendance at that game or about 40 less than the night before.  Those are the kind of pre-Jacobs Field numbers that ought to give fans the willies.  Apparently it’s just giving them shrugs.

The Indians have the worst attendance in the major leagues and they aren’t even sniffing the next worse team, the Kansas City Royals.  In fact, the Indians would have to increase their average per game attendance by a whopping 27%, or another 268,000 fans over the rest of the season, just to equal the Royals’ average.

Parsing further, if you eliminate opening day and the first game of the Yankees’ series, each of which drew over 40,000 fans, the Indians are averaging almost to the person the attendance at Tuesday night’s A's game.  That would mean they’d have to attract almost a half million more fans than the current pace just to stay with the Royals' current average.

Lest anyone think this suggests that the Indians’ attendance is in a free fall, that wouldn’t be quite accurate.  Year over year the Indians are averaging a mere 534 fans less per game than at the same point in 2012.  This year’s poor attendance isn’t news, it’s the norm.

When you think about all this in economic terms it’s pretty clear that the Indians’ are losing more and more ground against their competitors.  If you assume that the average fan spends a mere $20 at a game, including his ticket, the difference between the Indians’ and Royals’ attendance translates to more than $5.3 million less in revenue for the Indians and that’s being exceptionally conservative in estimates.  It’s probably far closer to $10 million and likely even more than that.

There are a multitude of reasons for the Indians’ poor attendance including the deadening approach that the owners, Larry and Paul Dolan, have taken over the years.  A seemingly never ending string of poor personnel decisions wrapped around an exceptionally tight budget have combined to make the Indians not just a perennially lousy team but a boring one as well.  The fans have been systemically conditioned to expect the worst.  This past off season the Dolans decided to switch the paradigm, at least for one season, by spending money in advance of the revenues.  It’s resulted in a marginally better team and a less boring one to boot.  They lead the league in home runs, for example. But the revenues at this point aren’t following.  Indeed they are still dropping.  If that trend continues, don’t look for deficit spending next off season and so the spiral will deepen.

The Dolans haven’t been the worst owners in team history or even the cheapest.  But they haven’t done much to infuse the franchise with much excitement either.  They've entrusted their  franchise to Mark Shapiro, first as general manager and now as team president, and the results, well, speak for themselves.  Chris Antonetti is relatively new to his job but he’s a Shapiro acolyte and subordinate so there’s no reason to expect a different approach or result.  The on field results this group has achieved are dubious.  But perhaps the broader indictment is that they’ve been part of a far larger problem.  Their indifferent ownership and poorly executed approach has helped foster a town of indifferent sports fans, people that at best casually care about what's happening but certainly not enough to invest.

The Indians mostly own the spring and summer and as they’ve wallowed in the muck and mire, people who were once fans have been infected not with disdain but indifference.  At least when fans show animosity toward you they’re feeling something.  They’re engaged still on an emotional level.  When they’re indifferent it simply means they just don’t care what happens.

But we can’t lay this all at the feet of the Indians though because they have the longest season they get a slightly larger share of the blame.  Cleveland is a Browns town and it hardly bears mentioning the soul-sucking siege that this team has inflicted on this area.  Randy Lerner was not just a reluctant owner he was an indifferent one as well and it showed in both his approach and in his results.

The sale to Jimmy Halsam was at least two years too late.  Yet even with all the issues Haslam is facing professionally, he still remains the best hope to re-energize the moribund franchise.  Unfortunately, those professional issues are a huge distraction to Haslam personally and will be for months, if not years, to come.  Meanwhile he’s entrusted the day to day operations to perhaps the most boring front office executive ever in Joe Banner.  Holmgren was a joke but his nonsensical outbursts at least added comic relief.  Banner just generally rests his head on his hands and sighs.  It’s the perfect meme not just for the completed draft but for the fans as well.

Then there’s the Cavs, bleeding fans at a faster clip than even the Indians.  The Cavs have been in a free fall for 3 years now coinciding with the loss of LeBron James.  During that time owner Dan Gilbert has been mostly distracted by an expanding empire of other businesses including his casinos.  Fans also know that the NBA is the toughest league in which to turn around a franchise so even a fully engaged Gilbert wouldn’t make much difference anyway.  Fans don’t just know the Cavs are awful right now they know they’ll be awful for years to come as well.  Put it this way, when the biggest selling point going into the next season is to tout the rehiring of a former coach who couldn’t win a championship with LeBron James, the franchise is in more trouble than it realizes.

When you look out toward the horizon on each franchise there’s nothing much to see and there hasn’t been for a long time, especially in the case of the Indians and the Browns.  It’s had an impact, a significant one, on the fans.  They’ve gone well beyond cynicism and are now simply indifferent and if there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear from the Indians’ attendance results thus far, indifferent fans don’t throw good money after bad.

One of these years one of these teams will emerge to reinvigorate this town and give the fans a reason to believe again.  It's just that when you look out into the distance it doesn't look like a ship will be coming in any time soon.

**

One team that isn’t suffering from an indifferent fan base is the Ohio State Buckeyes.  According to a study done by USA Today in conjunction with the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center, the Buckeyes are one of but a handful of schools that have self-sustaining athletic departments, meaning that their revenues exceed their expenses without the need for subsidies either from local governments or student fees. Of the $49 million in ticket revenue generated by Ohio State fans, $41 million was from football.  I'd say that the Indians, Cavs and/or Browns owners would do anything to capture that kind of passion and coin but I know it isn't true.  They've had any number of opportunities and simply haven't done it.

The larger story on the Buckeyes front though is that they are mostly an anomaly in college sports.  They are one of only 23 Division I programs out of 228 that broke even or were in the black.  Within that group of 23 were just 7, including Ohio State, that didn’t receive any form of subsidy from either taxpayers or students in the form of fees.  And of that 7, Ohio State has the most intercollegiate teams to support: 36 overall.

Meanwhile, the NCAA as an entity has never enjoyed greater profits.  It had a whopping $71 million budget surplus in 2012, which, when coupled with the previous paragraph, tells an intriguing and disturbing story about the state of college athletics.

Perhaps the poster child for how wrongheaded things have gotten are our newest bestest buddies, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.  According to the USA Today study, Rutgers spent over $28 million more on athletics then it took in just last year.  To cover the short fall it had to take over $18 million from other areas of the college and the other nearly $10 million directly from the students in the form of additional fees.  I suspect the financial picture for Rutgers will get a bit better as members of the Big 10 but that alone won’t suffice.  Just over half, 7, of the Big 10 schools are running at a profit and only 5, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Indiana and Nebraska are doing that without any form of school or student subsidy.  Michigan needed over $250,000 in subsidies to make ends meet, which isn’t significant but it is informative.  If they can’t at least break even on their own accord with a facility like the Big House in Ann Arbor and its 100,000+ fans for 7 or 8 games a year along with the massive amount of merchandising revenue they generate, then what hope is there for Rutgers?

There are any number of reasons this matters but the most important is the simple fact that getting a college education has never been more expensive or more out of reach to the middle class than it is now.  When a school like Rutgers is draining other academic programs as well as the wallets of its students to pay for athletics, you have to question what it's trying to accomplish as an institution.  And Rutgers is hardly alone. Fully 90% of Division I schools are doing something similar though perhaps not at the same scale as Rutgers.

If you’re looking for another reason this matters consider Indiana University.  Though the school turned a small profit in its athletic program in 2012, about $276,000, it needed nearly $2.8 million in subsidies from the school and the students to get there.  In other words, it didn’t really turn a profit at all.  But let’s suspend that bit of reality and consider the impact of robbing Peter to pay Paul at Indiana.  Because there are no coincidences, that university recently announced that it is limiting all employees there to 29 hours or less of work each week as a way of avoiding the impact of the Affordable Health Care Act, a result it wouldn’t need to worry about if it would quit paying subsidies to its athletic program. Quality employees who have options will eventually leave IU for a school that offers them better benefits, like health care.  It's a topsy turvy world where school administrators fund a mediocre athletic program at the expense of the larger mission and the general welfare of the rest of the school's population.

The real benefactors of this insane race for athletic prominence and its increasingly illusory promise of pots of gold is undercutting the very reason these academic institutions allegedly exist.  The NCAA could do something about it though that would cut against its own economic interests.

I’m not sure exactly how Rutgers can sustain itself as a viable school, let alone a member of the Big 10, if it continues to run up such huge deficits.  Surely its board of trustees must be asking themselves that very question and if they aren’t they should be removed.  The same goes for virtually every school running at a deficit.  At some point some prominent school will drop out of the race either by force or by conscious, but it will happen unless there is a massive change in attitude and approach.  But as we’ve seen for so long, the NCAA traffics in the small problems like tattoos while the rest of the house is literally on fire.

**
The Browns have a rookie mini camp this week and if not for them signing a pile of undrafted free agents it probably could have been held inside a conference room in Berea rather than on the practice field.

To this point two of the draft choices have been arrested with one of them, Armonty Bryant, a serial offender.  I knew Joe Banner was following a rebuilding blue print from other teams, but I thought it would be the Philadelphia Eagles.  I didn’t realize it would be the Cincinnati Bengals.

**
Given the character issues that already have emerged with this Browns' draft class, this week's question to ponder: Does anyone in the Browns' scouting department know how to even do a Google search on prospective draft picks?

Lingering Items--Ownership Edition

There’s no real playbook for how exactly one goes about the business of actually owning a professional sports team except, of course, the requirement that you have or have access to plenty of money.  But once secured, the day to day job of owning a team is mostly a blank canvas.  Jimmy Haslam, the now-conflicted owner of the Cleveland Browns, apparently is still early on in feeling his way through the process and fans here are worried.

As you’ll recall Haslam gave up the CEO job at His Pilot Flying J truck stop empire in favor of doing whatever it is that owners of professional sports teams do.  In the few months he’s actually owned the Browns, that included quite a bit of activity.  He finessed Mike Holmgren out of town, he fired a general manager and hired another, he fired a coach and hired another, he met with city leaders and then, for good measure, he secured a nice little annuity for his team by selling the naming rights to its stadium for a 20 year term.  It was certainly more than 6 days of work.

But having crossed off those tasks from the mental list of “to dos” that he keeps, Haslam started to realize that there wasn’t much left for him to do at the moment particularly if he was going to allow the people he hired to run his football business to actually do their jobs.

So Haslam decided to push out the executive he just hired from Pepsico to run Pilot Flying J by giving him a different role and took back his old job of CEO.  It was kind of a ballsy move, actually, the kind we’re not used to seeing here in Cleveland.  Holmgren for example couldn’t muster the courage to fire Eric Mangini and put himself in as head coach when that was all he really wanted to do.  Indeed the Holmgren example is instructive.

One of the reasons Holmgren ended up being a lousy whatever the hell he was stemmed from his inability to see himself as anything other than a coach.  He lacked the guts to take the job himself when that would have served both him and the fans far better than hiring Pat Shurmur.  Holmgren thus dithered in a role he was ill suited to play, grew bored quickly and mailed in his job performance, figuratively and literally.  In that sense and with that as a data point, maybe it is good that Haslam went back to what makes him happy.

But Haslam better become more sensitive to the fan base he serves.  Fans here don’t like finding out from the local newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee that he’s had a change of heart about how he spends his day.  They wanted to hear it first hand and didn’t.  Haslam owed this courtesy to the Cleveland fans he expects to support his now hobby and not to the citizens of Knoxville who were just getting to know the new guy at Pilot Flying J.

As to the move itself, Haslam is adamant that nothing has changed regarding his commitment to the team, telling the Plain Dealer that “I don’t think anyone would question our passion, effort, intensity or devotion to the Cleveland Browns and, candidly, to Northeast Ohio.  Our family has a tremendous investment, and we want to win as bad as anybody does up there and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win.”

Not a bad rejoinder to those who would question his commitment but it would have been more effective if he had not referred to the fans as “anybody..up there.”  It probably would have been the opportune time to start referencing the collective “we” and not remind everyone that depending on the route you take, there’s one possibly two states between where his team plays and where his real passion lies.

This is where we get into the whole “how exactly does one actually go about being an owner?” discussion.

In Cleveland the last two owners have had no other job beyond owning the team and I don’t think anyone would hold either up as a model owner or a model for Haslam to emulate.  Art Modell didn’t adapt to the idle time well so he tinkered and tinkered with the team, convinced himself that he knew as much about football as anyone on the planet, and set in motion a decades long course of losing everything he built because of it.  Randy Lerner on the other hand had an immense capacity for being bored perhaps the difference from Modell being the fact that at least Modell at one time in his life actually held a job.  Lerner was like the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy, dividing each day into increments of frivolity in order to make his spectacularly inane existence manageable.

I suspect that most owners in the NFL have some outside business interests that keep them busy during the down days of the NFL, meaning mid February through mid July, but on the other hand Haslam is now one of the very few owners in the NFL who has a completely separate full time job as CEO of a pretty good sized company.  That role requires him to satisfy a whole host of constituents, not the least of which are family members with sizeable stakes in said company.  In other words, Haslam as CEO requires a fair amount of attention to that task.

Does that mean Haslam is destined to become another crappy owner of the Browns?  Not necessarily but there is pause, isn’t there?  By default, Haslam won’t assimilate very quickly if at all in the local community.  In that regard, his “up there” comment is very telling.  Then there is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about—the management team he put in place to run the Browns in his absence.  Fans seem relatively sold on Joe Banner as, I guess, club president or whatever he’s calling himself, but are less so on Mike Lombardi who, whatever his title might be, is the guy populating the team with free agents and draft picks.

Haslam as absentee-owner (and a house in Bratenhal that he says he’ll occupy once or twice a week in season doesn’t make him resident) could work but at the very least the jump he made back to the family business was too soon.  Fans have not had an opportunity to get comfortable with the team Haslam put in place and given all of the other similar teams put in place before them there’s a pretty good chance that fans will never get comfortable with them.

I think Haslam owed it to the fans to stay the course he set out, basically promised, when he became owner.  It was a bit of a bait and switch and is now another reason for fans to think that this isn’t going to work out any better than anything else that’s been tried. The fans may not be right, indeed they usually aren't, but it's up to Haslam to prove them wrong and right now he hasn't made much of an effort to do that.

**

Speaking of owners, the Cleveland Indians’ Larry and Paul Dolan are putting together a nice little offseason for themselves.  When they set out to rectify the chief criticism of them it should be noted.  And so it is that the Dolans have pumped an additional $20+ million into the payroll and hired an actual, honest-to-gosh successful manager for this upcoming season in an effort to rebuild fan faith and recapture fan enthusiasm.

For what it’s worth, it’s hard to tell really whether either of the Dolans are otherwise gainfully employed outside of their duties as owners.  They have investments certainly and other businesses but neither are acting as CEOs of other on-going concerns.  Has that helped or hurt the Indians, hard to say.  But I think the fact that they live locally assuage any concerns about their commitment to the town or team.  The concern with them has always been their financial wherewithal and their generally self-fulfilling prophesy way of running a team they purposely labeled small market so that they could justify running it in small market ways.

The Dolans haven’t become the Steinbrenners but no one expected them to.  But for the first time in years they have decided that reinvestment was needed, the growing number of empty seats around Progressive Field being a serious clue.

There’s no way of knowing at the moment whether the Terry Francono, Michael Bourn or Nick Swisher moves will bear fruit except in the Cleveland-curse sort of way that we know nothing ever works out like it should.  But rightful credit is due to the Dolans and to general manager Chris Antonetti for doing something.  They had to.  If the offseason had consisted simply of bringing in a washed up Jason Giambi and a weak armed Daisuke Matsuzaka, and we’ve had exactly those kinds of offseason in each of the last 10 years, then fans would have blown their brains out.  To put a sharper point on it, fans would have stayed away in even bigger numbers than last season and the Dolans would find themselves struggling to meet the modest attendance totals of the Indians circa any year prior to the move to what is now Progressive Field.

At this point there isn’t any question that the Indians are an improved team from the mess that was last season but just how improved is the real question.  Perhaps the biggest question though is whether this is a one year cash infusion or part of a multi year plan to actually reinvest in the franchise and get it back to where it can actually compete.

Where the Dolans have failed the fans in the past has been in not building on a previous season’s success.  That they have finally reinvested in the team is great and is applauded but it must be part of an overall attitude change and not a one time event or the alienation from the fans they feared for this year will simply be delayed by a year.

**

This all brings us to the last owner in town, Dan Gilbert.  He’s closest, perhaps, to the model that Haslam seems to be adopting.  Gilbert is a Detroit person through and through but what he’s done to overcome the perception as an out of towner has been to move some of his business operations to Cleveland.  Jimmy, are you listening?

The other thing though is that Gilbert, in the various enterprises he has going including the new casino, is perhaps the most distracted owner in town.  Has that negatively impacted the Cavaliers?  Hard to say and the reason it’s hard to say is that the NBA is by far the toughest league in which to build a team back up from the bottom.

The NBA’s history is irrefutable at this point.  Once a team sinks to the bottom it’s at least a decade before it’s competitive again and that’s assuming competent management.  You can try to accelerate the timetable but it’s rarely been done.  The salary cap and the draft lottery combine in a unique way to keep bad teams down for as long as possible.  The Cavs seem on track in that regard.

The reason Gilbert seethed when LeBron James left had everything to do with the financial impact it would have on Gilbert’s empire knowing this history.  With James out of the mix, the Cavs overnight became a bottom tier team with all of the bottom tier  perks that come with that status such as empty seats and decreasing revenues.  If the Cavs were a stand alone enterprise that would be one thing.  But the residual impact of those empty seats spills over to concessions and, more particularly, to a difficulty attracting casual gamblers to the Horseshoe Casino.  A full Quickens Loan Arena for 40+ winter nights a year translates to a lot of lost money at the gaming tables and slots.

Would the Cavs be further along if Gilbert were focused entirely on the Cavs?  Again, hard to say.  Gilbert, like Haslam, believes in hiring professionals to run the business while providing oversight that hardly requires a 24/7 level of concentration.  So Gilbert’s success, like Haslam’s, will depend fully on whether the general managers they have on hand are up to the challenge.

**
A popular question floating around this past week, given the Indians' moves, has been which local team is closest to the playoffs? The better question and this week's question to ponder is which local team is the furthest?

Lingering Items--Decisionmaking Edition

At least Chris Antonetti is polite. The Cleveland Indians general manager met with the media earlier in the week to give the typical GM mea culpea that usually follows a disaster of a season that resulted in someone other than the GM getting fired. Such is the state of affairs in Cleveland with the Indians where everything changes and yet remains remarkably the same.

There’s been no rush by anyone to defend former manager Manny Acta, meaning that no one much is questioning his firing. But as I recall no one much questioned his hiring even though he had flamed out in Washington while trying to guide a talentless roster through turbulent times. Why anyone except Antonetti and Mark Shapiro and The Dolans thought that Acta would be any different trying to guide this talentless roster through turbulent times really tells you pretty much all you need to know about why things do remain remarkably the same with the Indians having just experience ANOTHER 90+ loss season.

The players aren’t always the best guide in determining the effectiveness of their boss so taking their word on anything is always risky. Especially risky is giving any weight to anything Chris Perez has to say. I like the fact that he’s quotable and media friendly and I hope that as long as he remains in the game he stays exactly that way. But simply because he speaks his mind shouldn’t be confused in any sense that his comments are particularly well thought out. Most often they aren’t.

The Indians problems didn’t walk about the door once Manny Acta was told to gather his personal belongings and exit stage left, as Perez claimed. The Indians are being run by the Mad Magzine equivalent of the Usual Gang of Idiots and their problems really are rooted in incredibly poor decision-making at these higher levels. Acta had just failed in almost identical circumstances and here he was now being told to succeed. Just as Acta, barely breathing, couldn’t yell competence into players who weren’t, so couldn’t the Gang of Idiots running the team suddenly turn Acta into a successful manager.

The chain of command that is the Indians is responsible foremost for the utter disaster of a season. There’s nothing wrong with living life on a budget and the Oakland As again proved that good things can come when good decision making is the skill most valued on a team with limited financial resources.

So in that sense let’s get past the notion that the Dolans, simply because they lack enough financial wherewithal to be major league owners, are killing this team in and of itself through a small budget. More funds would help, but their far bigger sin given their finances is that they couple it with incredibly poor decision making.

Why, for example, they wouldn’t hold either Shapiro or Antonetti or, preferably, both responsible for the way the season went and simply sacrifice Acta is a question that hasn’t been answered and probably never will, at least adequately. The Dolans are the ones that promoted Shapiro even though nothing about the way he was running the team as general manager suggested that the promotion was deserved.

You can find individual situations that worked and even a season or two that went OK under Shapiro but the evidence against his overall tenure is far more damning. When Shapiro was promoted to club president the team was in worse shape from a talent perspective then when he became general manager. It wasn’t then poised to be competitive and still isn’t. Shapiro is respected because he’s been around, cleans up nice and is rapid fire with the kind of buzzwords that often mask actual ability, but he isn’t respected because he’s accomplished great things. Name one, just one.

Shapiro, having kept his job, continued to demonstrate his lack of competence by retaining Antonetti, who was a bad hire from the outset. Antonetti was basically in charge of the Indians’ drafting process before taking over as general manager and of all the weak links in the organization, player development has been the weakest.

There have been plenty of excuses for this such as the Indians deliberately avoiding players in the draft who had signed with certain agents because they knew they couldn’t meet the agent’s financial demands for the player. But those are just excuses. Over time, and under Antonetti’s specific direction, the Indians consistently made the wrong choices in the draft to the point that there were no viable players they could plug into this team this season when all the levees around the team failed at the same time. And let’s face it, the levees all failing at the same time wasn’t an accident but was the result of maintenance done on the cheap for years coalescing just as August beckoned.

In his role as general manager, Antonetti has shown an amazing level of consistency in perpetuating his bad decisions. I applauded then and still do the idea of the Ubaldo Jimenez trade because it was bold and the timing was right. This team needed some boldness. But big risk comes with either big rewards or big problems. This came with big problems because of massive misjudgments regarding the players involved in that trade. A major part of the reason Antonetti makes so much money is precisely because he is the one that has to take the fall for those decisions.

Then there were the free agent signings, if you can call them that, of this past season. Everyone except Antonetti apparently saw them as wrongheaded, at the very least and that’s what they turned out to be. It’s as if Antonetti was given $75 and told to buy a enough food to sustain his family for a week and instead spent $70 of it on lottery tickets and the other $5 on soda and potato chips. The lottery tickets were all losers and the soda and potato chips weren’t good for anything more than a snack and when it was over the fans, as usual, were starving.

This culture of decision making at the Indians is what is killing this franchise. Whoever the Indians hire as the next manager, be it Sandy Alomar or Terry Francona, will be fine in and of itself. Both are qualified, one more so than the other. But let’s not anyone pretend that it will make a difference. Antonetti will be making player acquisition and roster decisions and Shapiro will be doing whatever it is he does and the Dolans will do whatever it is they do. Until the top of this pyramid becomes better decision makers this team will continue to the same path as the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Kansas City Royals.

**

Speaking of decision making, new Cleveland Browns owner in waiting, Jimmy Haslam III, has let it be known that no major decisions will get made until after the year is over. That’s as it should be, of course.

It doesn’t mean that Mike Holmgren will stick around. He very well could leave of his own accord. But for those worried that Tom Heckert might leave mid year or those begging for Pat Shurmur to leave mid year, neither appears likely, except that I don’t know how even a new owner holds on to Shurmur if this team doesn’t win a game soon.

I wonder, though, whether Haslam has seen or will see NFL Films’ latest installment of A Football Life entitled “Cleveland ’95.” It’s a terrific history lesson on decision making, taking the long view and making sure an owner understands his place in the grand scheme of things.

The documentary on the Browns’ 1995 season was fascinating, at the very least. The narrator made the point early on that if you were there then you can’t forget. Actually, you can. The overall injustice lingers and should. The details though got lost to time.

The Browns were 11-5 in 1994 and won a playoff game under Bill Belichick. The 1994 season had been 3 years in the making. Art Modell, to his credit, gave Belichick enough freedom to overhaul the franchise the way he saw fit and Belichick, to his credit, work tirelessly toward that goal even if he acted like an asshole publicly while doing so.

The success wasn’t immediate though in context to Browns 2.0 wasn’t so bad. The team went 6-10 then 7-9 and 7-9 in Belichick’s first three seasons. But anyone remembering those seasons remembers them mostly for all of the competitive losses the team piled up, similar to how this current Browns team piles up competitive losses.

Then it all came together in 1994 and the Browns really did seem on the precipice. Indeed, the team was picked as a Super Bowl contender in 1995. After starting off 3-1, Modell then sabotaged the season by striking a deal with Baltimore to move the team. The players were every bit as dispirited as the fans. So were the coaches. And as Belichick says now, with every bit of sarcasm that only a Browns fan could love, he kept looking around for help from Modell but he wasn’t to be found. Modell was off in Baltimore, hiding.

When the wreckage of that season was completed, the Browns stood at 5-11. And everything that Belichick had built, and it was formidable, had been mostly wasted when Modell stupidly fired him.

Modell and his apologists can reinvent history all they want, but Modell was a terrible decision maker. He twice fired Hall of Fame coaches and though he ended up with one Super Bowl it was more the product of a system that Belichick built in Cleveland that, as Ozzie Newsome admitted in the documentary, he simply continued in Baltimore. Newsome has been successful in keeping the Ravens consistently in the contenders conversation but the team hasn’t nearly reached the heights that Belichick has with the New England Patriots, a team he rebuilt much like he was rebuilding the Browns.

The larger point though for Haslam is that these are lessons in decision making in the context of professional sports he needs to learn mostly from the way decisions turn out for those whose processes are flawed. Modell was emotional and impetuous. He lacked a both a moral center (obviously) and a fully developed business sense. On the one hand he would give Belichick the freedom to rebuild which shows a level of understanding on how it all works but on the other hand even though he could see the tangible results fired him anyway because Belichick couldn’t pump air into the balloon that Modell deliberately and irresponsibly deflated during that '95 season. Then there’s a revealing moment in the Cleveland ’95 documentary where Newsome recalls that Modell preferred the Ravens draft a quarterback instead of Jonathan Ogden. Maybe Modell finally got too tired for the fight but he let Newsome make the pick the team needed instead of the one Modell wanted and as a result Ogden stabilized the offensive line like only few others of that ilk can. Ogden's arrival made a Super Bowl quarterback out of Trent Dilfer.

Haslam could also learn plenty from how the Dolans dither over their team. Trust, when the only goal is stability, isn’t any better formula for success than constantly changing directions while the game is still being played. I don’t think that Holmgren and Heckert sink to the level of Shapiro and Antonetti, but if Haslam stays with them merely for stability and not for vision, then the mindless, endless wandering through the desert will continue.

**

With the Cavaliers grinding back to life, it’s fair to see this upcoming season as a referendum on Dan Gilbert’s decision making. When LeBron James left town (and, let’s face it, there was absolutely nothing Gilbert could have done to change that outcome, not a single thing) Gilbert discovered that the hole left behind was much larger than it should have been.

Enter Grant. Since taking over Grant has made a number of moves to try and fill in those gaps. Kyrie Irving isn’t James but he isn’t Bobby Sura either. The potential in the moves is promising and while this season isn’t make or break it will start to form the real foundation of whether the Cavs can get back to being a top level team in the NBA-mandated 8-10 years of penance that must be paid during any rebuilding process.

Gilbert is a bold decision maker who seems to put equal weight on both the process and the outcome. He’ll give Grant enough rope but he won’t Grant’s loyalty blind him to Grant’s failures should that be what develops. That’s probably how it should be.

This Cavs season will be interesting not from a win/loss standpoint but more from whether or not Grant can buck the trend of the other GMs in this town who have not been up to the challenges of their tasks and whether or not Gilbert will have the patience to even let us find this out. It’s not a sexy outlook and certainly not one that sells tickets this season but if they get the balance right, it will sell plenty of tickets eventually.

**

As long as we’re on the topic of both bad decision making and the Cleveland Indians, this week’s question to contemplate: Why would anyone renew a season ticket package at any level with the Indians?