Losing It

Managers or head coaches tend to get fired for a variety of sins, the most ubiquitous and least defined is when they’ve “lost” the team.  How does one actually lose a team?  Hard to say but like porn, you know it when you see it.

To look broadly for a moment, here’s an example.  Former Cleveland Indians catcher/journeyman Kelley Shoppach seems to be doing his level best to ensure that Bobby Valentine has a one-and-done season in Boston.  He sent text messages to upper management complaining about Valentine, which is the modern/coward way of registering dislike for your boss.

The point, though, is that Shoppach, when found out, had no problem fessin’ up.  That means that Shoppach is fearless or stupid or both.  I’m guessing both but leaning to fearless because there’s nothing easier for a general manager to do than to cut a journeyman catcher, particularly one who’s bitching about the manager.  But consider that if Shoppach isn’t the dumbest player in the majors and understands the relative lack of leverage his modest career provides he’s done the math and figures Valentine must be gone.  Who am I to argue the point?

But let’s localize the example.  The Indians have fallen off a fiscal cliff of their own due in no small part to imprudent management with an amazingly consistent ability to make bad decisions.  And while it wouldn’t surprise if the players all looked around and said to themselves “if the owners don’t care why should we?” why is it that Manny Acta can’t seem to channel Lou Brown, the manager of the fictional Indians in the movie “Major League” and rally the troops against the avarice of the owners?

Maybe because he’s lost the team.

I’ve seen 40+ years of Indians teams and in well too many of those years they have been lifeless blobs of protoplasm so it is worth remembering that when you try to contextualize this year’s model.  Still, the team that slept walked through a recent west coast trip in which it won one game, barely, but mostly embarrassed itself for nearly two weeks is in the running for its own special place on the bobby prize shelf.

Particularly dispiriting was the series against Seattle.  Up until the recent series was completed, these two teams were twin sons of different mothers.  In truth they still are.  But as the Indians barely registered a pulse in losing three straight, the Mariners ended up looking like a much better team.

Is that how this is going to go for the rest of this season?  Probably.  The better question though is can Acta survive it?  The answer depends on what Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti want out of Acta. 

Presumably Acta was hired to develop the young talent on the roster and get them to a place where they could compete.  Of course that was Acta’s charge in Washington and his teams then pretty much look like his teams now.

That’s not to lay all or even the lion’s share of the blame at Acta’s feet for how miserable the Nationals were under him or how miserable the Indians are under him now.  In both cases he was saddled by bad upper management that delivered to him an odd mix of young players with some potential and aging veterans that came cheaply.  In truth few managers around can make that mix work.

I suppose you could just focus on the young players on the Indians roster and ask yourself whether they are developing under Acta.  That’s where it gets difficult.  Asdrubal Cabrera has hit some sort of wall the second half of the season and has been mostly a non factor.  Jason Kipnis is finding his second year difficult.  Michael Brantley is developing but Carlos Santana is struggling.

This isn’t to lay all or even the lion’s share of the blame for this on Acta, either.  Young players develop unevenly and the additional pressure placed on them by the various veterans who are not even meeting modest expectations isn’t helpful to the process.

Still, since this is a bottom line business, the blame will fall somewhere.  It would be far more useful, probably, to fire the roster and keep the manager but I suspect Antonetti wears rose-colored glasses and thus will fall back on what is more easier and probably cheaper; fire the manager.

That said, if Acta does survive this season it will only be because it really doesn’t much matter anyway.  There are no miracle workers in sports, just other voices from other rooms.  The problems with the Indians run deeper than the manager but that doesn’t mean they don’t also run to the manager. 

Which should cause some concern for Acta, considering how the bad facts are stacking up like dishes in a frat house sink. 

The Indians have had two losing streaks of at least 8 games this season.  If not for a good start to the season, the Indians would easily be on a pace to lose 100 games.  They are 4-21 in their last 25 games.  Every time you turn around the opposing team seems to have 7 or 8 runs on the board.  They fired their pitching coach in mid season.  They have a closer who is essentially out of control, which, in truth he always was but now that he’s failing to save games it’s become apparent again.

Anyone of those things would be a good marker for believing that the wheels have fallen off.  Collectively the wheels aren’t just off, the whole damn vehicle is stuck in 8 feet of mud somewhere off the coast of Lake Erie.  None of that speaks well for Acta.  Managers and head coaches have been fired for far less.

The case for Acta probably comes down to two main points.  He didn’t put this roster together and despite the shitstorm, he’s remained calm throughout.  Maturity shouldn’t be underrated.  It’s the lack thereof that will be Valentine’s downfall in Boston and forevermore.

Yet as calm as he’s been, it would be hard not to notice a certain “read between the lines” quality to Acta’s comments lately.  It’s not direct criticism of his bosses, certainly, but it’s not as if it couldn’t be taken that way.

That’s the kind of thing, too, that gets managers fired as well, unless they already know their fates.  Acta’s been down this road before.  I suspect he knows how this all turns out.

Lingering Items--Talking Heads Edition

Imagine if you can that you’re a 17-year old first baseman from the Dominican Republic. Playing every day since you were old enough to stand upright, you get good enough that a major league team, say the Houston Astros, signs you to a contract. You beat around the minor league level for several years but never get past Double A ball. It happens.

But you hang in because you want to coach. You eventually work your way up that ladder through various fits and starts, landing, amazingly at the major league level as a coach.

Your real goal, though, is to be a big league manager. You’d do almost anything to make that happen. So when a destitute franchise that had relocated to a new city just a few years prior wants to hire you, you jump at the opportunity even if it really isn’t a great one. You rationalize away the objectively lousy job opening by convincing yourself that succeeding there will prove you can succeed anywhere.

You eventually convince yourself that this really is the ideal situation. The team isn’t very good and so the pressure to win isn’t great. Your job is to help develop the young players and eventually get this team competitive.

It doesn’t go well. The players management has collected over the years are terrible. In your first season your team wins only 73 games and that becomes the high water mark. In your second season, the team wins just 59 games. It’s not your fault, you say. You can only coach the players they give you.

The general manager decides to bring you back for a third season, but about halfway through and the team is on pace to be even worse, so you’re let go. It’s time to move in a new direction, management tells the media.

It’s the first time in years that you’ve had most of your summer free. There’s no team to manage, no players to coach. You start thinking about your future and wonder whether professional baseball will even be a part of it. You could probably find a coaching gig somewhere, maybe latch on to a managerial job in the winter leagues. But you’ve had your shot as a big league manager and you wonder whether it will ever come again. You don’t think your firing was fair; the deck was stacked against you. But there’s no use complaining, no one’s listening anyway.

Then, another moribund franchise being run on the cheap has an opening for a manager just like you. Instead of putting your previous experience in perspective, you jump head first into exactly the same situation that didn’t work out the first time and just like that the cycle begins again.

That’s the story of Indians manager Manny Acta, a manager seemingly sentenced to a life of pounding his head against the wall, just because it feels so good when he stops.

Acta held a team meeting Thursday night to address the team’s most recent stretch of misery. He told them that this team wouldn’t always be rebuilding and that this was their opportunity to seize the day. If only. When you’re Manny Acta, that’s the only thing you can say even if, down deep, you know it isn’t true.

The Cleveland Indians, under this ownership and this management, will forever be building for a future that doesn’t exist except in the abstract. If by chance enough of the current crop of prospects gets good at the same time and before free agency beckons, a moderately successful season will emerge. But given the team’s financial underpinnings and a weak-willed commissioner leading an even weaker-willed group of owners, baseball in Cleveland isn’t going to materially change until new ownership emerges or the financial structure of baseball is fundamentally changed.

Acta needs to throw some hope into his young players, just like he needs to throw some hope into his own prospects, but let’s not kid anyone. Acta isn’t going to be around for the long-term and neither are these prospects.

To generate interest and a false sense of hope in the fans, whichever Mark Shapiro protégé that’s in charge at the time will eventually fire Acta in order to give this team a new voice, a different direction. Meanwhile, that same protégé will be trading good players on the cusp of free agency for the next group of prospects.

Acta is a good guy that probably deserves better, but he’s brought this all on himself. When his time is done in Cleveland, be it after next season or the season after that, he’ll find work somewhere, just probably not as a manger. That’s too bad but ultimately what happens when the desperation to fulfill your dream through any means possible runs head first into the desperation of an owner looking for just another in a series of cheap and fungible caretakers.

**

There’s a cloud hanging over the NFL at the moment and it probably isn’t going away any time soon.

Commissioner Roger Goodell earlier this month made his rounds of various training camps in a preemptory strike of sorts to win over the hearts and minds of the fans as the league heads toward a labor showdown with its union come season’s end.

Goodell has talked about head trauma issues and other very important safety related initiatives and yet in the same breath has positioned the extension of the regular season to 18 from 16 games as a key priority to be achieved in the upcoming negotiations. In making his pitch, Goodell painted it as good for the fans because it will lessen an already meaningless preseason.

Whether it’s really a good thing is all a matter a perspective.

For the owners, it’s a potential cash bonanza. The networks broadcast preseason games out of obligation knowing that the ratings are similar to a rerun of “Lockup: San Quentin” at 3 a.m. Saturday morning on CNBC. Turn those preseason games into something far more meaningful and suddenly the networks will take notice, in the form of higher rights fees. In a struggling economy it’s never a bad thing to find new revenue streams, even for a cash cow like the NFL.

For the fans, the preseason is as meaningless as an Indians game in September. They get charged full price only to witness glorified scrimmages in which starters make token appearances and a slew of undrafted free agents vie for the last 10 or so remaining spots on the roster. All these games do is whet the appetite for the real season but otherwise they’re mostly ignored.

From a head coach’s perspective, the preseason isn’t nearly long enough. If a lot of good evaluation can be made in 4 games, just think how much better 6 or 8 games would be!

For the players, it’s a potential nightmare. The one constant in the NFL is that players get injured, far more frequently and far more severely than in any other sport. All an 18 game schedule does is increase the risk even further. Players may be just commodities but they are the most important commodities. With injuries as a given, championships are won or lost on depth at all the key positions and that is simply something most teams don’t have.

But don’t expect the NFL to balance these perspectives because the only thing that matters are the owners. To them it’s a priority and in the NFL’s game of cards, that is like holding the ace of trump.

Teams like the Browns will suffer most initially because their depth is almost non-existent. And while I’m sure some of those games the last two weekends will be compelling, just as they are in a 16-game season or were in a 14-game season, there will also be plenty of games that are meaningless.

In other words, Goodell can try his best to sell an 18-game season as something good for the fans but in reality it will cost them most. Increases in rights fees eventually find their ways into the average fan’s wallet, either because his cable bill has increased or because ticket prices have. Usually both.

**

Has anyone outside of Tiger Woods ever done so much so quickly to hurt his image and brand than LeBron James?

The latest comes in the form of a mostly forgettable interview he did with a completely forgettable magazine, GQ. James is now in full third-person mode as if he’s separated in his mind real life from the character named LeBron James that plays basketball.

The problem is that most of us mere mortals can no longer tell the difference. To us, James just looks like another clueless, spoiled athlete completely lacking in self-awareness, on or off the court.

His take on Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is near priceless. Asked about Gilbert’s letter and its not so subtle criticism of James, LeBrand says that he was reminded by his mother that adversity brings out the real character of the person and that Gilbert never really cared about him anyway. James sees that letter as all the confirmation he needed that his decision was the right one.

Forget how Gilbert and the rest of the Cavs catered to every whim of James during his tenure. Just focus on the part where James says that adversity brings out the real character of the person. It was James who provoked the response from Gilbert in the first place by deliberately staying out of touch. It was James that decided to stab his team and his town in the back on national television.

Maybe The Letter wasn’t Gilbert’s proudest moment, but on the scale James established with LeDecision, it hardly creates a blip.

**
Phil Dawson is the only member of the Browns still with organization since it came back. That leads to this week’s question to ponder: Shouldn’t that fact alone qualify Dawson for the Hall of Fame?

The No-Buzz Zone

Maybe because it’s in Goodyear, Arizona with its attendant time difference, but doesn’t this seem like the quietest spring training in Cleveland Indians’ history?

There Indians open the regular season on April 5th and it almost seems like there ought to be another three weeks of spring training left, just to build some excitement. As it is, even with a crazy 16-6 record in the Cactus League, the Indians are maybe the second or third story every day.

Certainly the distance from Cleveland to Arizona vs. Cleveland to Florida has something to do with it. In these parts, people tend to take their winter vacations in Florida. It’s almost as if everyone around here knew someone who had been to Vero Beach and took in a few spring training games. That alone helped build some buzz.

But of course it’s so much more than that. Even with a new manager in Manny Acta, this team has zero buzz around it. If they come out of the gate roaring, meaning they are playing at least .500 ball at the end of April, I get the sense it won’t matter much. It just seems like the average fan fully understands that this team isn’t equipped to contend for an entire season and even if it were, the Dolans wouldn’t be in a position to finance a late season move to put it over the top.

In more ways than I care to count, the Indians of 2010 are like virtually every Indians team of my youth, which spans the late ‘60s to the late ‘70s. There are a few players scattered about that are intriguing. But there are far too many players mixed in that would have fit in too well on those past teams to get anyone overly excited.

The key difference, though it won’t make much of a difference on the field, has everything to do with the economic realities of baseball in 2010.

The Indians of 2010 are a far better capitalized team than those teams of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but in other ways they are far worse off financially. The economics of those years were rather quaint. In the last 15-20 years, the economics of baseball have exploded at a pace far greater than at any other time in baseball and in the process it’s created a nearly untenable situation in which far too many teams struggle to put a competitive team on the field.

Maybe a salary cap fixes that or maybe a better distribution of the wealth among the owners does. But until something is done, major league baseball will continue to teeter on the precipice of financial collapse while operating in a construct in which only a handful of teams have a realistic chance of making their fans happy when October rolls around.

The league simply can’t sustain a business model where the median team payroll is just a little over a third of the highest team payroll. Even if you throw out the Yankees for a moment, in 2009 there still were three teams with payrolls that were $100 million less than the league’s second highest payroll team, the Mets. To give you an idea of how out of whack it is when you throw in the Yankees, those same three teams had payrolls that were around $160 million less. In other words, the Florida Marlins, at a league-low payroll of $37 million, could have fielded 5 separate teams with the same payroll and still have had another $16 million or so in walking around money.

Payroll figures for the ‘60s and ‘70s aren’t readily available, but to give you an idea of the kind of scale and change we’re talking about, look at the earliest year in the USA Today database for which total payroll is available, 1988.

In that year, no surprise, the Yankees had the highest payroll at $18 million. Today that barely even buys you CC Sabathia. The White Sox were the laggards in 1988 at around $6 million. It’s a decent gap between them and the Yankees certainly, but isn’t anything close to the gaps that now exist.

For further comparison, consider that in 2009, 22 teams had less than half the payroll of the Yankees while in 1988 only 7 teams had half the payroll of the Yankees. If you went back 10 years from that, you’re likely to see even less disparities. Indeed, even when you go back just 10 years ago, only 8 teams had half the payroll of the Yankees.

Major league baseball has never seen this as much of a problem or at least as enough of a problem to do anything meaningful about it. But the impact on the fans is significant.

The Indians of the ‘60s and ‘70s were undercapitalized because they had lousy, undercapitalized owners that had no money to spend on the team. But even in that paradigm, the differences between the haves and have nots and the salaries of players from team to team were not nearly as dramatic meaning that as much as what kept the Indians uncompetitive was simply the fact that the were lousy at developing players and even worse at trading players.

Right now the Indians are undercapitalized because even though the Dolans aren’t particularly rich in comparison to other owners there doesn’t exist an economic scenario in which it would be profitable for them to keep the Indians competitive with the Yankees anyway. Given that, in one sense you can’t blame the Dolans for keeping tight reigns on the purse strings. What would be the point in loosening them up a little? The team won’t be appreciably better anyway and all it will end up doing is taking money out of their own pockets.

Ask yourself if you’d do something different if you were in the Dolans’ shoes and if you’re being completely honest the answer is a resounding “no.” A better funded owner could change much of this but it will take someone who is significantly better funded, someone who literally doesn’t care to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. There aren’t a whole lot of them kicking around at the moment.

It’s a depressing thought certainly and has more than an air of inevitability about it when it comes to the club’s fortunes on the field. And while that is all the root cause of why there is no buzz around this team, all the fans really bother to internalize is what they see on the field.

The Indians’ lone free agent acquisition of note this past off season was Russell Branyan. The only reason it’s even of note is not because Branyan has anything approaching a credible major league career but because his signing marks the return of sorts of a prodigal son.

But even that signing has been nothing short of a disaster thus far. Branyan will start the season on the disabled list with a bad back that he’s trying to rehab instead of fix through surgery. Even if/when he comes back, his contributions will be minimal at best.

The hiring of Acta wasn’t intended to create a buzz, leaving the only other story line as the young, intriguing players on this team, which is the same story line that generally rotates around minor league teams. It’s kind of fun to pay cut right prices in Akron to sit up close and watch potential major leaguers. It’s a whole other kind of fun to pay major league prices to sit far away and essentially watch the same thing.

The opening of the major league season used to hold so much promise. In a way it still does, except the promise that it now holds isn’t one of hope but one of resignation.