A Very Thin Herd

There’s no need for the fans to bury the Cleveland Indians before the season starts. Its management already has done the job for them.

With the announcement on Monday of the opening day roster, team president Mark Shapiro and general manager Chris Antonetti have all but scrawled it across the sky that this isn’t going to be a year where fans ought to be thinking playoffs come next fall.

But it’s not like the fans had unreasonably outsized expectations of this team anyway.
In Cleveland, the fans always seem to get the team they expected. No one is much to used to pleasant surprises in these parts. Surprises, to the extent they come at all, are generally bad ones.

It’s possible, of course, that the Indians can tick off more wins than a season ago and hence point to “progress” as the theme of its “Year in Review” retrospective come next October. But a few wins either way aren’t going to be the best way to judge the progress of this franchise anyway. No, that will come when there is no longer a need to field a team fresh out of spring training with players whose resumes as thin as the ones on this team.

Let’s start with one of the more startling revelations. When the roster was announced on Monday it had 4, count ‘em, 4 non-roster invitees making the big league club. That was the first red flag. That was followed closely by another group of players that aren’t quite in the same category, but that’s only a function of the labels we choose to place on them. And that’s all before we get to the prospects on this team, players short on major league experience but counted on to lead this team in the years ahead.

In the final analysis, this Indians roster is one of the most loosely constructed and shaky rosters in the major leagues. It may not be the worst, but neither is it competitive with the upper tiers.

Spring training non-roster invitees generally are of two varieties: prospects with their hands on the bottom wrung but reaching upward, brought in for some experience and big league coaching during spring training and aging veterans hanging on to the bottom rung for dear life and on their way out. In other words, putting the latter group into the same category as the former is a mere technicality because they both occupy the same space at a given moment. The latter category, though, is really just one of those great tags that general managers like to use to place on the players who essentially walked on to the team.

An occasional walk-on making a big league club can happen to any team, particularly those clubs looking to field a team on the cheap like the Indians. But if 4 making a team is not unprecedented, then at the very least it’s unusual.

Call it the confluence of a small budget and the inability to develop your own players as the reason that the Indians have devoted nearly 20% of its opening day roster to guys that were one step into forced retirement before the Indians came begging.

As Terry Pluto detailed last week in the Plain Dealer (and as mentioned in my last column), the Indians have been awful at drafting, so bad that they have but one player on their opening day roster this year from the 2004-07 draft classes. In large part, that explains why holes are getting filled in with walk ons. There is nobody else.

Not included in this group of walk ons are at least two players, Chad Durbin and Orlando Cabrera, who for the most part fall into this same category, if not by label then by age. You cold also lump in Austin Kearnes in this category as well and it wouldn’t be unfair.

All three will probably help out the Indians but then that seems so much related to the simple fact that the roster is so thin in the first place. It’s not as if the Indians were competing with any of the league’s contenders for their services.

Then there two more relievers, Frank Hermann and Vinnie Pestano, who, because of the thinness of their resumes and lack of accomplishments at the major league level, sport the same kind of split contracts as non-roster invitees. Whether either is able to make it at the major league level for a sustained period of time is unknown but the odds aren’t in their favor at the moment.

To put the Indians’ roster in a bit more perspective, of the five actual infielders to make the club (Travis Hafner is listed on the roster as an infielder in the same way that Britney Spears is listed on her albums as a singer), two—Jack Hannahan and Adam Everett—are walk ons and one, Orlando Cabrera, is basically just that. Similarly, 4 of the 7 relievers are of a similar status, Justin Germano, Durbin, Hermann and Pestano.

It’s not so much that any of this should set off alarm bells because, well, the expectations on this club are so slight. But it does illustrate exactly why those expectations are where they need to be and why progress for this franchise won’t be measured in wins but in the ability to eliminate these kinds of players for consideration from your roster in the future.

But there is some positive news on the roster. At least 20% of it is filled with players that Shapiro obtained via the trades of Cliff Lee, CC Sabathia and Victor Martinez.

In the Lee trade, Carlos Carrasco and Lou Marson will be in the dugout at Progressive Field on opening day. Jason Donald starts the season on the disabled list.

From the trade of Sabathia, both Matt LaPorta and Michael Brantley are on the 25-man roster. From the Martinez trade, Justin Masterson is on the opening day roster.
While that in some sense offsets the holes on the roster created by poor drafting, of that entire group the only one anyone is getting particularly excited about at the moment is Carrasco and then just barely.

That doesn’t mean some of the others won’t develop, they can and should. There is still plenty of time for LaPorta and Brantley in particular. But Marson is a light hitting back up who doesn’t appear to have a future as a starter and Masterson is merely serviceable, though there is still time for both of them as well.

What this says is that when the Indians’ management had talent to trade it showed that it was a little better at making trades than in drafting young players. Unfortunately, if you had to be good at one or the other you’d probably want it to be the other way around, particularly for a team like the Indians.

The Indians under the ownership of the Dolans and the leadership of Shapiro have turned this franchise into one that will never buy its way into competitiveness but instead will get there, if ever, by being savvy in the draft, shrewd with the trades, and precise with its free agent dollars.

To this point, that formula hasn’t worked all that well with the current roster, the last really for which you could fully make Shapiro responsible, being the best evidence of it. Antonetti, the protégé turned dealmaker, has a huge task ahead of him to turn this around. It won’t come if all he’s doing is listening to the man that got the team into this predicament in the first place.

Lingering Items--Red Hot Edition

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Following up just a bit on the latest conventional wisdom when it comes to Cleveland Indians manager Eric Wedge, apparently he too knows when he’s starting to see the writing on the wall. No sooner had his players given him a vote a confidence came the second punch, a vote of confidence from his general manager Mark Shapiro.

Wedge knows he’s in trouble. His team is playing as bad as any Indians team he’s had and more and more fans are calling for him to join Romeo Crennel on the list of formers when it comes to Cleveland coaches. Give Wedge credit though, if he’s going down he’s going down swinging, which is more than can be said for most of the players on the team, content are they to usually watch strike three to blow by them.

Channeling his inner Lou Pinnella, Wedge absolutely blistered his pitching, particularly his bullpen, in the media for squandering a 7-0 lead on Friday night, losing to the Tampa Bay Rays in the most inglorious way possible, a walk-off home run on a 3-2 pitch.

The tirade was so out of character for Wedge it was easily the most refreshing sports moment in Cleveland sports this year, outside, of course, of almost anything the Cavaliers have done. With almost perfect pitch, Wedge let both the fans and his general manager know that he, too, sees what every one else sees and he isn’t happy with the players sitting out in the bullpen night after night, and that goes for Luis Vizcaino, the latest band aid acquired by Shapiro.

One can only imagine how Shapiro reacted to that tirade. Make no mistake about it, though, Shapiro could not have been happy. This wasn’t just Wedge expressing his displeasure with a simple loss. It was Wedge telling Shapiro “get me someone who can throw a damn strike that doesn’t end up on the other side of the wall.” It was the first public fissure in a relationship that until Friday seemed to be symbiotic.

It might be fair to point out that perhaps Wedge had something to do with the loss. Though he had been ejected earlier, Wedge was managing from inside the clubhouse and weirdly called for Vizcaino to start the ninth inning with the score tied. This was “by the book” managing at its worst. Not wanting to supposedly waste closer Kerry Wood in a tie game, Wedge instead gave the ball to a guy that was out of baseball until Shapiro through him a lifeline. Scottie Bailes, you’re next.

But for one day, that is just niggling. The overriding theme is that there is a pulse in the Indians’ dugout. Even if this thing never turns around under Wedge, at least fans now know that for once a coach wearing a Cleveland uniform was fed up with another crappy product he’d been handed and had the courage to say so publicly. Welcome, finally, to the big leagues Eric Wedge. For your sake, hopefully it’s not too late.

**
Now for some niggling.

One of the main gripes about Wedge is that he’s generally far too reluctant to make any significant changes hoping instead that players will find their own way out of the darkness.

In this regard it was interesting when Paul Hoynes of the Plain Dealer opined earlier in the week that Wedge’s strategy with Jhonny Peralta is starting to pay off just as it did last season. The premise from Hoynes was that when Peralta was struggling last year, Wedge finally had seen enough and sat him down for a few games. Afterward, Peralta began to find his stroke and stopped playing like a zombie and went on to hit .276! Call Cooperstown. According to Hoynes, the same held true this year as well.

That’s one way to look at it, I suppose, but here’s another. Peralta has a track record of indifference. If it took Wedge 8 weeks into last season to recognize it and react to an ultimately good result, why is it that Wedge didn’t react sooner than last week this season when Peralta was down literally the same path? Peralta has more than proven that he’s a player that needs a swift kick every now and then and Wedge treats it as if that’s news.

Wedge is now facing the same issue with Grady Sizemore. At the moment, there is “talk” about moving him down in the order. How much talk does it take? Sizemore isn’t producing in the leadoff spot and is struggling more than at any point in his short major league career.

No one is suggesting that the Indians give up on Sizemore. He’s a significant piece to this puzzle and will be until he’s a free agent. But what is being suggested is that while Wedge and his brain trust talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk game after game after game after game after game after game, Sizemore’s strike outs become more frequent and his average sinks ever lower.

This is the core of one of Wedge’s main problems as a manager. Ever cautious of developing into a knee-jerk reactionary, he consciously goes in the other direction to the detriment of his team. He waits far too long for problems to resolve on his own. This team could well benefit by some active managing and instead he is content to merely tinker.

It may be tricky, as Hoynes suggested, dealing with a veteran who is struggling, but it’s not impossible. It’s not even that hard, actually, especially if you’re a veteran manager and you’re dealing with an established major leaguer still in a learning mode. But as long as Shapiro and the enablers he’s courted in the local media continue to treat these issues as if they are more intricate than statehouse politics, nothing much will change and the team will continue to founder.

**
While Wedge has been reluctant to address the Sizemore issue, at least he’s moving other players around a bit, looking for a spark from somewhere. Peralta, mercifully, has been moved to third base where his lack of range and hustle are less of an issue. Asdrubal Cabrera, one Indian playing with some heart, has been moved to shortstop, at least temporarily, a far more natural position for him. And as out of character as his tirade about the bullpen was, at least as much out of character was Wedge’s decision to play both Matt LaPorta and David Dellucci at the same time on Saturday.

There’s been a spirited debate on the message boards and among some of the writers on this site and in the local media about what exactly is this Indians’ plan with respect to LaPorta and Dellucci. As these things often do in debates where the stakes are small, it’s resulted in its share of bruised hearts and broken rhythms.

Whatever camp you may be in with respect to these two players, the more basic question is whether or not a strategy even exists. On the one hand it sure looks like they are being platooned even if that wasn’t the stated intent at the outset. On the other hand it more looks like there simply is no plan but rather a series of random acts by Wedge, such as putting LaPorta in left while Dellucci is the designated hitter.

It’s hard telling exactly what the fascination is with Dellucci outside of the fact that he’s a veteran player Wedge had dropped in his lap by Shapiro sporting a contract he didn’t much deserve. With LaPorta, one of the team’s prime prospects, the starting premise was that he needed to play every day in Columbus.

Well, that lasted about as long as the starting premise with the bullpen, except it shouldn’t have. LaPorta is essentially a spare part on a major league team that is struggling mightily. He’s not helping much because he hasn’t had much opportunity. Wedge has never been good at figuring out how to work in players in the first place and he’s showing that again with LaPorta. Given that and given what’s taken place, what exactly is the point in keeping him with the Indians?

What makes this all the more interesting is that Wedge says he will work LaPorta in at first base given the supposed glut of outfielders at the big league level. Even with LaPorta’s huge upside as a hitter, putting LaPorta at first base to compete with both Victor Martinez and Ryan Garko makes as little sense as just about everything else. It just trades one glut for another and to what end?

If LaPorta’s at first then that means Martinez is either the designated hitter or behind the plate. If he’s behind the plate, then Kelly Shoppach is sitting. If Wedge does put LaPorta at first then pick a scenario with the remaining players and it doesn’t matter, the Indians are a weaker team for that game.

This is not, by the way, an anti-LaPorta rant. I’d rather see the Indians clear their outfield gut by putting a fork in Dellucci’s career with the Indians in favor of LaPorta. But this seems to be too obvious of a solution on a team that shouldn’t necessarily play for next year right now, but at least ought to have one eye on that.

**

Given Shapiro’s fascination with bullpen reclamation projects, this week’s question to ponder: Who is higher on Shapiro’s speed dial, Jamie Easterly or Victor Cruz?

Stuck in the Mud

As the Cleveland Indians continue their initial tour of the American League like a piece of wood adrift in Lake Erie, manager Eric Wedge claims he’s starting to see a gleam. Ok, he didn’t quite invoke the spirit of Marty Schottenheimer, but he is in his full Pollyanna mode when he recently said, essentially, that but for the games his team lost, they were really close to winning.

Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective. The Indians’ 9-7 victory against Toronto on Tuesday was notable not for the rare win but for laying out publicly why Wedge, ever the optimist, is going to be challenged the rest of the way as he searches for the bright spots that others can’t see.

Optimistically, Tuesday’s game demonstrated that the Indians can be a good team, or at least a team that can be good occasionally. But like that car in the neighbor’s garage that is perpetually being worked on, to this point it runs only long enough to be shown off around the neighborhood. It clearly isn’t highway-ready, at least without some additional tuning.

Realistically, Tuesday’s game demonstrated that this team needs more than a new clutch plate and a new set of shocks. It is a team not just lacking leaders but an identity. If it’s true, and it is, that a team takes on the personality of its manager, then that adequately explains its rather bland approach to the game. Playing at times just well enough to not embarrass, the team seems too bogged down with underachievers seemingly going through the motions, which is as apt a description as exits for its poster child, shortstop Jhonny Peralta. When you couple this with the occasional managerial blunders you get a team playing as if they’re stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.

The usual disclaimers aside about this being a long season and all, the most telling thing about this team is the fact that it’s longest win streak thus far is 2-games.

Giving due respect for the game’s difficulty, undoubtedly no player can avoid the low tides in a season. There will be times when a hitter will be lost at the plate and others when the ball looks as big as a beach ball. Pitchers go through similar rhythms. One day every pitch is at a batter’s knees and painting the inside corner. The next, every curve hangs there as if suspended by a string just waiting to be hit 500 feet, usually with two runners on. Sometimes there are group slumps and sometimes every batter turns into Manny Ramierez.

In that sense, placing emphasis on any game probably is a bit unfair. Still, there are always a few games each year that serve as a microcosm and Tuesday’s game was this season’s first. The win notwithstanding, it will be seen as a far bigger success if it convinces general manager Mark Shapiro that there are fundamental ingredients missing from this team.

In no particular order, the Indians spent most of the game being fooled by Brian Tallet, a former top prospect with the Indians whose career has mostly been sidetracked by injuries. He now pitches long relief and even then he hasn’t been all that effective. Yet there he was, pressed into a start, mystifying Cleveland hitters as if they were facing Syd Finch for the first time.

If you weren’t watching the game and just saw the box score, it may have looked like Tallet was throwing a decent game. If you watched, you had no such allusions. Somewhere around the 5th or 6th inning, when Tallet was still flirting with a no hitter, announcer Rick Manning was spot on when he said that Justin Verlander may have had no-hit stuff on Sunday against the Indians, but Tallet certainly did not. Tallet was walking batters and hit another. He wasn’t dominating hitters and his control was just average. All he really was doing was putting hittable pitches past a team that did everything but yawn as they approached home plate like so many others already this season.

Until Tallet tired in the 7th inning, you would have trouble finding a team less connected to that game than the guys wearing Cleveland jerseys. Even Grady Sizemore, the one player who almost always seems to be playing full out, looked like he wanted to be anywhere other than at the Rogers Centre in Toronto.

Meanwhile, Indians pitcher Fausto Carmona was doing his part, just barely, to keep his team in the game. He was pitching well early but demonstrated again late that he has difficulty pitching with the lead. More broadly, while the Carmona of this season is an improvement over last season, he hardly looks like the pitcher of two seasons ago. At the moment, he seems so mechanical in his approach that you can almost see the thought balloons above his head before he pitches. “Keep ball down and away.” “Get ahead of hitter.” “Don’t make another mistake.” Either pitching coach Carl Willis has Carmona’s head filled with too much information or Carmona is having trouble adjusting to a league that has adjusted to him. Whatever it is, Carmona hardly looks fluid or natural. It’s why he hasn’t been effective.

But despite these two circumstances, the real markers for this game and this team were the two signature moments of the game: Peralta’s at bat in the 7th inning and 9th inning at bat by the Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista.

Peralta, hitting barely above .200 before the game, was called out on strikes to lead off the 7th inning, sinking his average even lower. He ended the evening 0-5. What was most notable though was his complete indifference at the plate, as if making an effort wasn’t in his job description. When Tallet’s final pitch to Peralta in the 7th hit the inside of the plate, Peralta looked bored by the whole thing. He gave a perfunctory glance back to the home plate umpire as if to say “is it time for Wapner?” Clearly he was in no position or mood to argue. It’s a moment that deserved to get him benched for a week. Instead Wedge trotted him right back out there secure in the belief that doing the same thing in the same way eventually would lead to a different result.

If Peralta really is trying, despite all evidence to the contrary, then what he needs more than anything else is a body language coach. Right now he’s telling everyone watching that he’d rather be in the clubhouse playing ping-pong. Move Asdrubal Cabrera to short for a few weeks, put Josh Barfield at second and let Peralta spend some time on the bench next to Jamey Carroll learning what it means to feel lucky you’re in the major leagues.

The second signature moment came with two and two out in the bottom of the 9th and the Indians with what turned out to be a precarious 6-4 lead. Reliever Kerry Wood was on the mound and actually had Bautista at 0-2. But Bautista got the count back to 2-2 and then deposited the ball in front of Barfield who, in the ninth inning of a game, had been put into left field by Wedge. Did I mention that it was Barfield’s first time ever playing the outfield? Did I have to?

In that moment, all that has gone wrong for the Indians this season did go wrong. You can fault Barfield for not catching the ball or fault the guy who put him in a position to fail in the first place. Through a series of questionable strategic calls Wedge overworked the roster in that way he usually does. While a case could be made for each move he made, that’s inherently the problem. After seven years, fans are still left to make sense of the individual moves being made while the overall effect ends up being the same.

First, Wedge decided that putting Matt LaPorta in a position to fail in the 9th inning of a game so early in his major league career was too much to handle. Maybe that’s right, but on the other hand, if that’s really the case then LaPorta needs to be sent back to Columbus. True, LaPorta has only one hit since he was called up, thereby justifying to some extent Wedge’s concern, but it just happened to be a 2-run homer earlier in the game. Moreover, it’s not as if he looks overmatched at the plate, or, more accurately, any more over matched than anyone else on the roster.

What made the decision to pinch hit Dellucci for LaPorta in that circumstance is that it carried an implied second move. Once Dellucci got on base, Wedge almost had to pinch run for him, given Dellucci’s recovery from a calf injury. That’s how Barfield ended up playing the outfield for the first time in his career.

As it happened, Barfield ended up helping the team mount another comeback in a game that featured plenty. That comeback fortunately culminated with the 3-run 12th inning and, ultimately, the victory. But the victory is almost beside the point. It wasn’t a gritty victory gutted out. It was a stroke of luck and an escape. Over time, it’s a formula that will result in far more defeats than victories.

The sad truth of the moment is that a team that went into the season with such high hopes looks as if it’s playing out the string and it’s not even Memorial Day. Substitute the words “first day of fall” for “Memorial Day” in the previous sentence and it also describes the Browns of last season. In other words, the Indians season is giving beleaguered Browns fans a real sense of déjà vu.

If Shapiro thinks that there’s enough talent on this team to really compete, then the finger of blame is rightly pointed at the manager for not wringing the talent out of the roster he was given. If Wedge thinks that the talent isn’t as good as advertised, then the finger of blame is rightly pointed at the general manager for again misreading the players he acquired. But as those two go about trying to figure out which way is which, the fans already know that both things are true. This team needs players who can actually achieve at their potential and a manager who can make that happen.

When You Say Nothing at All

When You Say Nothing at All

By Gary Benz


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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