Lingering Items--Passing Over Easter Edition

A loss on opening day isn't the end of the world or even the end of the season. It's not even the end of the series.  In a season as long as major league baseball's one game can be pretty meaningless except when you miss a playoff spot by that same game.

But the Indians won't miss the playoffs by just one game anyway so Thursday's loss to the Toronto Blue Jays will just be one that ends up one one side or other of the .500 ledger that will define the season.  Still, why is it that the Indians can't just lose a game and move on like most teams?  Why do they have to do things in such a historic and miserable fashion? And, for that matter, why does every loss have to illustrate exactly why there aren't more wins?

Thursday's excruciatingly boring loss was actually the perfect metaphor for an excruciatingly boring spring training.  There was very little to keep one's interest and most of the team and its coaches seemed to be going through the motions. 

The team that took the field on Thursday was much like the variations of it that took the field throughout spring training.  It featured players of various ill pedigrees trying to catch lightening in a bottle of careers that just don't seem to be panning out.  Behind them is a front office fixated on mining stats for greater truth while the ownership accepts the reality of its financial fate without contemplating how to change the paradigm.

It's not as if there isn't some talent on the team.  There is.  But if that’s the glue, what exactly is it holding together?  You didn't just need a program to identify all the new faces.  You needed ready access to the internet and its various resources to figure out the lineage of the pieces and parts that general manager Chris Antonetti has cobbled together to supposedly make a run at the Detroit Tigers. That's not exactly the textbook way to build a championship team.

The good news in general and with respect to Thursday, which news stands out as much like a sore thumb as anything, was Justin Masterson.  Eight very strong innings on opening day is not to be so easily dismissed.  He could have and ahould have finished what he atarted  Maybe he was tiring and had to be taken out of the game.  And in retrospect the performance of most of the bullpen Thursday was such that it's really unfair to second guess manager Manny Acta's decision to turn the game over to that bullpen.  It's just that you can't help but feel bad for Masterson, whose career here has been mostly of the hard luck variety and will continue as long as the bullpen is anchored by Chris Perez.

Perez made a mess of the game, yes, but in the larger sense it's hardly a surprise.  Perez himself is an undisciplined mess and that stems not just from a truncated spring training spent mostly nursing an injury.  It also stems from the fact that Perez seems to care little about his own conditioning or even his station in life.  Perez is deliberately taking the anti-athlete approach to one of the more critical jobs in baseball and the Indians will suffer for it, just like they did Thursday. Is it any wonder that the injuries he does suffer are suspiciously similar to those of the weekend warriors who throw a ball around about once every six months?

I get the sense that Perez seems far more interested in courting an image as a character then actually going about preparing himself to pitch in the major leagues.  He's out of shape and that doesn't seem to bother anyone associated with the Indians, including Perez.  CC Sabathia wasn’t and still isn’t a picture of conditioning either so maybe that doesn’t much matter.  Still would it kill Perez to visit a salad bar once in awhile instead of Five Guys?

Perez stood up after the game, bloated, unkempt and took the blame for the loss like a pro is supposed to do but yet he seemed so casual about it, the regret about his performance dripping from his mouth with ease like excess barbecue sauce from a pulled pork sandwich, it made me wonder whether his pitching really bothered him.  I doubt it did.

A closer has to have a short memory because saves do get blown. So in that sense there's no problem with Perez immediately putting the game behind him. But the concern with Perez is that he doesn't seem to care about anything—his conditioning, his appearance, his performance, his teammates.  Just cash the checks for as long as they roll in and then figure the rest out later. 

As much of a problem as Perez appears to be, let's also not obscure the fact that with the Indians, Cleveland now has three professional sports teams that can't generate offense.

It's as if Antonetti rehired Eddie Murray to be the hitting coach when no one was looking.  Given how low key the whole spring training regimen was, it's likely that's exactly what happened and we just didn't notice.

All the hallmarks of a Murray-coached offense were there Thursday and throughout spring training however: the lack of approach, the lack of patience, the inability to move runners. 

The Indians played 16 innings on Thursday and scored in only one of them.  Sadder still, they didn't put themselves in a position very often in any of those other innings to score. When they did, they couldn't get it done mainly because of a lack of discipline.   In context there was no chance the Indians were going to score again during that game.  It was just a matter as to when the Blue Jays would and put everyone out of their misery.

Twice Indians' hitters came to the plate with a man on third and less than two outs and twice they failed miserably.  Asdrubal Cabrera's weak grounder with the bases loaded was everything you needed to know about why.  After Michael Brantley had walked on four straight pitches, Blue Jays manager John Ferrell decided to engage in a massive display of over-managing.  Either that or he knew that Cabrera would never hit the ball out of the infield anyway so why not load it up with as many players as could fit?

Ferrell was right.  Showing all the patience of a puppy, Cabrera didn't even wait to see if Blue Jays pitcher Luis Perez, who didn't sniff the strike zone with Brantley, could find his control.  Instead Cabrera offered at the first pitch, which he could barely get a bat on, and grounded into an inning-ending double play.  Honestly it was everything you needed to know about how poorly this team prepared for the regular season wrapped up in one nice little moment.

There's no telling how the Indians will finish this season.  They got rocked on opening day last year and recovered pretty nicely.  It is just one game.  But yet when it comes to this team, why does it never seem to be just one game?

**

About that Gregg Williams tape...

Roger Goodell finally had a smoking gun and the real question now is whether professional football can survive. It's not an abstract question

Let's start with a more obvious point first, however.  Gregg Williams will never coach in the NFL again.  He probably won't be able to get an assistant defensive line coaching job in a Pop Warner league either.  For vastly different reasons, Williams is every bit as untouchable as Jerry Sandusky.

There's also another obvious point as well.  Goodell really had no choice but to do what he did to the New Orleans Saints, head coach Sean Payton and Williams.  On tape and in the most specific way possible, Williams addressed his players on who to hurt and how.  If that was the only evidence Goodell had it would still be enough.  Even if there wasn't a boatload of lawsuits pending against the NFL, Goodell still had to do what he did.

Now here is where it gets tricky. 

I'm not fond of the whole “everyone else does it defense” as a way of excusing what the Saints did but you just know it's true in this case.  The broader question, the one that Goodell doesn't want to contemplate even as he has, is whether the attitude of Williams is so institutionalized in the sport that ridding it is a losing battle. If that is the case then football will eventually die because eventually the pool of people who want to be deliberately maimed for money will go dry.

The NFL has always had and will always have a certain element of miscreants within its midst.  There are simply players that find it perversely satisfying to try and deliberately hurt their opponents. Oddly they aren't the problem so long as they represent the exception.

The problem is that football has too long glorified these exceptions in order to build brand cache. Pittsburgh Steelers' resident thug James Harrison deliberately courts an image as a tough guy and goes about his business on the field proving it with all manner of cheap shots intended to injure. He's been rewarded handsomely for it, his cheap shots shown repeatedly and not just as a cautionary tale but as an illustration of the state of the game. 

It's not as if Harrison is the only one.  Some of the more storied players in NFL history got that way precisely because their violent tendencies are the stuff of legend.  Those legends aren't urban, either.  They are an institutionalized part of the NFL experience, extolled by coaches, rewarded by owners and celebrated by the media that vote them into the Hall of Fame.

The question on the table now that all of the concussion-related lawsuits ultimately will attempt to really answer is whether football can survive in any other way.  If you ask the majority of the players, they will say it cannot because any concession by a player about the violence of his sport is considered cowardly.  But it is this mostly silent majority of players that need to speak up now and defend Goodell and what he's trying to accomplish instead of hiding behind the increasingly reprehensible DeMaurice Smith and his misguided attempt to always blame management for an issue his members mostly control.

It's sickening when Hines Ward defends Harrison each time he deliberately cheap shots an opponent. It's sickening when Drew Brees defends his head coach while abandoning the union brothers like Frank Gore who were deliberately targeted by his coach. It's ridiculous to extol Scott Fujita as one of the NFL good guys most concerned about player safety when he actively participated in the bounty pool.

Players of stature, like Brees, Fujita and Ward should instead have been the most vocal on calling out their teammates for their damaging behavior. Every word and deed in support just furthered the institutionalization of the problem and made it that much more difficult to stop.

The union and its members are on the wrong side of the problem when they openly mock Goodell, as many have, for trying to take a safer route for such a great game. It’s simply not true that football can’t survive without all the cheap shoting. It can and has.  What football can no longer abide is a head in the sand approach to the life threatening nature of the way some players and coaches want to play it.  If it has to abide that because Goodell has failed or because he has been undermined by the very players he’s trying to protect, then that is what will kill the game.

**

Still fixated as I am on the Indians at the moment, this week’s question to ponder: What is the Indians’ back up plan if Chris Perez’s Thursday is a trend and not an anomaly?

Mismanaging Expectations

If the Cleveland Indians are guilty of anything this season, it's mismanaging expectations and nothing more. A fast start out of the gate, something the fans aren't particularly used to, fueled an optimism that the underlying talent ultimately just can't fulfill.

Making it all the more frustrating is the fact that the fast start was in large part due to ank incredible streak of timely hitting. Now that it has ended and the players have mostly regressed to their norms, may fans are apoplectic.

It didn't need to be this way.

Had those norms taken hold as they should have earlier on, the Indians would probably be sitting in about the position most had staked out for them before the season began. In that context, the recent call up of Lonnie Chisenhall, for example, would look a whole lot less desperate.

But the Indians did get off to that fast start, fans got to thinking that this could be the year and Tribe management was left with the rather vexing conundrum of how to make it look like the team is trying to win it all while knowing that there aren't nearly enough horses to make a legitimate run.

So what did they do? Of course, they fired the hitting coach. There's precedent for that move. Almost 6 years to the day from when current manager Manny Acta sacrificed Jon Ninnally to the god of swings and misses, his predecessor Eric Wedge did likewise to Eddie Murray.

This isn't to make the case for Nunnally one way or the other so much as it is to underscore that Nunnally was sacrificed on the altar of unreasonable expectations. But that's just the kind of move teams like the Indians tend to make to placate the fans.

In truth this year's team is hitting remarkably similar to last year's squad. It's a little ahead of last year's pace in terms of runs scored, butnthe batting averages, on base percentage, slugging percentage and OPS are virtually identical.

And why not? It's pretty much the same team or at least the same type of team. Travis Hafner is hitting this year while Shin-Shoo Choo, now on the disabled list, is not. Grady Sizemore was on the DL last year but his contributions this year, particularly lately, have been minimal. And then there's Austin Kearns, taking up space once again but at least doing so on the cheap.

Maybe that actually makes the case for dumping Nunnally because the Indians were a lousy hitting team last year. But at the very least it makes the case that from a hitting standpoint the Indians weren't ready to compete this year at a playoff level. The only reason anyone thought otherwise was skewed expectations and nothing more.

But just as water finds its level so too do major league baseball teams. The Indians are no exception and this perhaps is what fans need to remember most. The grind of a 162 game schedule allows for several peaks and valleys but ultimately it provides sufficient time for a team to reveal its true self.

Where it would really pay for the Indians to better manage fan expectations is in better explaining that this team while this team isn't playoff ready it isn't a miserable mess either. Indeed there are some building blocks exactly in the place they need to be, on the pitching staff. There have been a few hiccups lately but the bullpen has been more than just a pleasant surprise.

Chris Perez is having an all star season. Tony Sipp has been excellent as have Rafael Perez, Vinnie Pestano and even Joe Smith. Any team with a bullpen that is pitching like the Indians' bullpen is going to be competitive.

The starting rotation has three very solid pitchers at the moment in Justin Masterson, Josh Tomlin and Carlos Carrasco. Fausto Carmona has a wicked good arm and a wicked awful mental approach. He doesn't need a new team to get straightened out, just a mentor and more nurturing.

You don't need tape of the late Pete Franklin screaming in your ear to know that the only real way to build a team is through pitching. Once that's in place then you get more of it. And once you have more of it you get even more of it. The game of baseball has changed a million ways in the last 100 years but the one thing that hasn't changed is that the teams with the best pitching usually prevail.

Assuming Indians general manager Chris Antonetti understands this point, and he certainly seems to, it could hardly be argued that he doesn't have the team pointed in the right direction.

But pointing in the right direction and actually arriving at the destination are hardly the same thing. There's a pretty bumpy road in between and that's what the team is really experiencing at the moment.

The fast start made it seem like the Indians long strange trip to respectability had maybe arrived at the outskirts of their playoffs destination when in reality all that happened is that the team bus hit a particularly smooth stretch of highway where they could hit the accelerator without worrying about any speed traps.

But then people started to notice and not surprisingly it's gotten tougher, much tougher.

As a result fans are coming to the rather halting conclusion now that was staring them in the face all along--not this year, folks and it's making them a little angrier than they probably should be.

Fortunately, this is Cleveland where don't stay mad at our teams, only certain players and owners. The resignation that comes when the expectations get rightly downsized has creeped in as evidenced by the ever increasing refrain, spoken seemingly every year, to "just let the kids play."

What many fans didn't realize is that's what the team had be mostly doing all along.

Manuel Labor

When Eddie Murray was fired last week as hitting coach of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Indians fans undoubtedly had a “been there, done that” expression on their face. But no sooner did that expression get wiped off then it appeared again, this time spurred on by Charlie Manuel and his return to Jacobs Field as the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies.

Without having to read one Philadelphia newspaper article or one Philly fan blog, Indians fans instinctively know that Manuel and Philadelphia aren’t likely in it for the long haul. In fact, it’s hard to believe the relationship, however tenuous it might be, is still in tact, if only because it’s Philadelphia.

As most will likely recall, Manuel essentially engineered his own firing here by demanding a long-term contract just as General Manager Mark Shapiro was blowing up the team as part of the rebuilding process that was scheduled to come to fruition just about now. It was summer, 2002, and the Indians were struggling, to put it charitably. By early July, they were nine games under .500 and 9.5 back of division-leading Minnesota. Well before that, however, they had officially entered rebuild mode by trading Bartolo Colon after owner Larry Dolan ordered that the payroll be trimmed dramatically.

Manuel was in his third season as Indians manager after having taken over for Mike Hargrove, whose own relationship with Shapiro was always strained. Manuel’s contract was due to expire at season’s end and since the Indians were entering a different phase, Manuel demanded that his contract be extended, viewing himself as the best person to aid the development of a new crop of younger players. Whether or not Shapiro agreed with that assessment, he clearly didn’t want to pushed into a quick decision given the major changes taking place on the roster.

According to media accounts at the time Shapiro and Dolan asked Manuel to stay on through the end of the season but Manuel was adamant—extend the contract or let him go right then. With this demand, Manuel committed one of the great sins any employee can make by painting his employer into a corner. To accede to the request would have been at the expense of their position in the hierarchy. Even in sports, there is a pecking order. Thus, irrespective of how either Shapiro or Dolan felt about Manuel, they really had no choice but to let him go right then.

Though Shapiro has never said, at least publicly, that he wouldn’t have eventually extended Manuel’s contract, although it’s easy to see why Manuel might have been worried. In the first place, he had a front seat to Hargrove/Shapiro cold war. It would be hard to blame him for wanting a repeat of that mess. Moreover, whereas the team Manuel was managing, at least prior to Shapiro tearing it down, had a lot of familiar faces from Manuel’s days in the Tribe’s minor league system, that was no longer true of the new roster. In fact, in that context, hiring Eric Wedge, who had been managing in Buffalo, made more sense than retaining Charlie Manuel.

But no matter how the actual firing played out, it seemed pretty safe to assume that Manuel and the Indians weren’t in it for the long haul either, whether because of Manuel’s recurring health issues or simply because Manuel never fit the mold of what guys like Shapiro and his ilk, i.e. the modern-day GM, envision in selecting the manager. If nothing else, Manuel is certainly “old school” and Shapiro is certainly “new school.”

Manuel has now been with the Phillies for two and a half seasons, the same as his tenure with the Indians. Although the record isn’t stellar, according to their web site his 173 wins are the most of any Phillies manager in his first two seasons since 1915. That might not be as impressive as it sounds since most new managers take over struggling teams. Right now, the Phillies are playing about the same as they have since Manuel came aboard, not bad not great. They find themselves only two games behind the Mets, having picked up four games on the division leaders in the last week and a half. But they are barely above .500, so it’s really a matter of divisional mediocrity more than anything else.

But it’s doubtful that Phillies general manager Pat Gillick envisioned a .500 ballclub when he hired Manuel. And irrespective of where the mistakes lie—player acquisition, player motivation or a combination of the two—if the Phillies do find themselves continuing to struggle at climbing to the upper tier of National League teams, the “fire Charlie” chorus, which has been in place since the day he took over with only the level of active members fluctuating, will get louder.

When that occurs, not if, mainly because it is Philadelphia after all, the real drama that will be interesting to observe is how Manuel handles it. Will he follow in the same footsteps he laid in Cleveland or will he learn from that debacle and play the politics as they demand to be played?

All this probably matters little to Tribe fans except that, like Murray, Manuel was part of something special when he was here in Cleveland, though, like Murray, not necessarily because of the last role he had in the organization. Murray’s presence in 1995 as a player helped sparked the renaissance. Manuel, who joined the Indians as hitting coach for the second time beginning in 1994, schooled that offensive juggernaut. Their contributions to Tribe history can’t be diminished.

But Manuel was always a much more engaging and beloved figure than Murray. He was accessible to the media and fans alike. Though his tenuous grasp of grammar made some question his intelligence, he was sincere at a time when slick played so much better.

Still, in the end, it was hard to get a good read on Manuel’s managerial skills while he was in Cleveland. He was managing under vastly different circumstances, with a payroll that was $91 million in his last season. In many ways, the Indians were on auto-pilot then and needed a caretaker, not a manager. When the Indians decided to blow it all up and start again, maybe it wasn’t the place for a good ol’ boy with health problems.

Perhaps his managerial career with the Phillies is really the better barometer. Hard to say, of course, but if that is the case, letting him get away in favor of making a long-term commitment barely registers a blip on the list of mistakes Shapiro has made during his tenure with the Tribe.

It’s likely that Cleveland fans don’t think much about Manuel these days, either way. He’s been tucked away in the National League for several years now and the Tribe is off in vastly different directions as well. While his presence here this week will never evoke the same sort of emotional response from Tribe fans as does each and every return of Manuel’s prized student, Jim Thome, hopefully if it evokes anything at all it won’t be so much of a “been there, done that” nod as much as it is even a slight smile for what he did accomplish here. Just like Murray.

Axed. Again

Here’s an item that will have Indians fans wearing a knowing smirk: Eddie Murray was just fired as the Los Angeles Dodgers hitting coach. What’s amazing about the story is how eerily similar it was to Cleveland’s experience with Murray.

As most will recall, the Indians in 2004 were a mediocre 80-82, but it wasn’t for lack of offense. Sound familiar? That year, the Indians had a team average of .276, which was fourth in the American League and scored 858 runs, which was fifth. But they were 10th in the league in ERA and teams batted .271 against them. Really dragging the team down, however, was the return of the bullpen from hell.

Although 2004 was Murray’s third season as hitting coach and he seemed to be having success, there had been numerous rumblings throughout his tenure about his my-way-or-the-highway approach. He was surly as a ballplayer and didn’t seem to change all that much as a hitting coach. There were plenty of rumors about his inability to connect with the players. Still, entering the 2005 season, offense didn’t appear to be the problem.

But on June 4, 2005, with the Indians struggling mightily to score runs, they essentially conceded what was apparent to everyone else: Eddie Murray had to go. At the time of his departure, the team was batting a miserable .243. They replaced Murray with Derek Shelton and almost immediately went on a tear offensively that continued for the remainder of the season. The Indians ended up hitting .271, which was fourth in the league and scored 790 runs, which likewise was fourth.

When he was let go, Manager Eric Wedge told the media “We don't make hasty decisions. It was a process, and ultimately we decided to do it after the game today. There wasn't one particular thing.”

There isn’t anything particularly remarkable about that quote except that it’s nearly identical to what the Dodgers said today when they released Murray. Upon dumping Murray, General Manager Ned Colletti said “We don't do anything here quick or without a lot of thought and a lot of compassion. We feel like there's a lot of the season left and the offense can be a lot better than it is. We decided to do it now.”

Not only are the reasons similar, but so too are the circumstances. Last year, the Dodgers led the league in hitting with a .276 batting average. They were fourth in the league in runs scored with 820. This year, their batting average has dropped 15 points to .261, which is 7th in the league and they are 9th in runs scored. Murray has been replaced on an interim basis by Bill Mueller, just as Derek Shelton was hired on an interim basis with the Indians. Not surprisingly Mueller, like Shelton, said his first order of business will be to build a rapport with the players.

In the end, that was always the problem with Murray. He didn’t communicate with the media and, despite front office statements that Murray was more animated in the club house, he apparently wasn’t very communicative with the players either. It was said in both Cleveland and Los Angeles that one of the biggest problems was that Murray waited for players to approach him rather than the other way around. Maybe he felt that was the respect he deserved given his accomplishments as a player or maybe it was because as a great hitter himself, he felt that advice resonated best when it was sought not forced.

But whatever it was, at least this much is clear: Murray basically didn’t learn any lessons from his firing in Cleveland.

For all his shortcomings as a coach, the temptation to otherwise trash Murray should be greatly resisted. As a player, he was amazing. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame and it was well deserved. He hit 504 home runs and had a lifetime batting average of .287. By the time he came to Cleveland in 1994, he was somewhat a shadow of the player he once was. But he was brought in as the consummate veteran leader for a young and upcoming ball club and delivered mightily in that role. In the breakout year of 1995, Murray hit .323 and had 21 home runs in only 436 at bats. He also had 21 doubles and 82 RBI. It was Murray on the offensive side, with Orel Hershiser and Dennis Martinez on the pitching side, that combined for the final pieces of the puzzle to make 1995 such a magical year. For that Cleveland fans will always owe a debt of gratitude to Murray.

It’s hard to say where Murray may end up after his latest flameout. Given his experiences in both Cleveland and Los Angeles, it may very well be that he won’t find any coaching work anytime soon, which is probably just as well for everyone involved. Thus, in short order, this Hall of Famer will probably be out of baseball entirely, an ignominious end for one who brought so much to the sport.