Someone Else with Money Problems

On the day that the Cleveland Indians announced the signing of 74-year old Orlando Cabrera to play, what? second base , came the item from Baseball Prospectus that it projects the Indians to finish at 72-90. The issues are completely related.

The Baseball Prospectus ratings are based on the rankings of each player on the team and their respective playing time in the major leagues. It then makes a projection on where that team will finish. While Cabrera being part of the Indians wasn’t part of that analysis, ask yourself whether it really matters.

I certainly wouldn’t begrudge the fine folks at Baseball Prospectus trying to introduce prediction theory to the masses. But in this case it’s wasted effort. Science isn’t really needed to predict that it will be another miserable Indians’ summer.

When the biggest headline in the off season is reserved for the signing of Cabrera you kind of just know this isn’t going to be your year. But if you needed more proof then you needn’t have looked any further than the interview Cabrera gave from Arizona in which he had an ace bandage wrapped around his right shoulder that was masking what looked to be a block of ice the size of a Buick LeSabre.

General manager Chris Antonetti could make it much easier on the team’s accounting department if he just has them hand over Cabrera’s an entire check now rather than in bi-weekly installments because the chance of Cabrera not coming down with a season ending injury during spring training is probably is far less than the chance that the Cavaliers could take the Lakers in a 7-game series.

I fully understand that spring training is all about optimism. It’s the time when dreamers can dream and we’re not supposed to utter the phrase “wait ‘til next year” for at least a few more months. But really, is there anything about the Indians at the moment that inspires optimism?

Actually, yes. For starters, when Cabrera comes up lame, it won’t cost the Indians all that much. Next, we could talk about the parcel of “prospects” that this team stockpiles like so many nickels and dimes, but doing so is to admit defeat in a sense. The prospects arrived via the usual route—the trade of a veteran on the verge of making more money than this ballclub is willing to pay.

But that actually gets us to the real point here and it’s the real reason to be optimistic. The Indians aren’t the St. Louis Cardinals.

Right now the Cardinals are dealing with a real Indians-type problem, a superstar who has dollar signs for eyeballs.

Albert Pujols is in his free agent season and when he and the Cardinals couldn’t reach a deal on the same day that the Indians signed Cabrera (oh, the irony), Pujols did what so many Indians players of the past have done—shut down negotiations until after the season. Cleveland fans know what that’s code for, don’t we?
Pujols, of course, left the door open that a deal could get done after the season. But that’s a game of chicken that usually doesn’t end well for the team. All this means of course is that the Cardinals face the unenviable choice of going all-in on this season by keeping Pujols around and trying to win it all or building for the ubiquitous future that never comes as a parade of Pujols-wannabes dot the roster for the next 10 or so years.

It’s actually refreshing in a way to see another team and its fan base go through the gut wrenching exercise where they curse short-sighted management and skinflint ownership for not tying a million ton millstone around its neck in the form of a contract that will eat up far more of the budget than any sane person would ever recommend.

That, really, is what St. Louis ownership is wrestling with at the moment. It’s almost ludicrous to imagine, but the sticking point in the negotiations is that the Cardinals feel like Pujols can scrape by on an average salary that puts him in the top 10 paid players in the league and Pujols and his agents feel like an average salary that puts him in the top 5 paid players in the league will better help him get through those pesky retirement years.

The Pujols problem, like the CC Sabathia problem, like the Cliff Lee problem, like the Manny Ramirez problem, like the Jim Thome problem, is really a major league baseball problem borne of the unbridled economic Wild West that it allows to exist.

It plays out almost perfectly when you consider the context of Pujols’ demands. According to the USA Today major league baseball salary database, the top 4 salaries belonged to, you guessed it, New York Yankees. The fifth highest salary belongs to a member of, you guessed it, the New York Mets.

But that only tells part of the story. The rest of the story is that what is skewing the numbers the most is the top major league salary of one Alex Rodriguez. His $33 million per season is $9 million more than the Yankees are paying Sabathia. If you eliminate Rodriguez’s salary from the mix, then the Cardinals and Pujols are, at best, a mere few million dollars per season off, irrespective of whether his salary is based on the average of the top 5 or the top 10 players.

The Yankees, in an insane race to overpay nearly anyone who can hit .290 or sport an ERA under 4.50, aren’t just driving the market for superstar salaries, they are the market. It is the reason that the Cardinals ultimately are likely to lose Pujols and for some reason commissioner Bud Selig, the worst commissioner of any sport ever, and the rest of the idiot owners in baseball don’t see anything wrong with it.

To drive home the point of how absolutely stupendously ridiculous this all is, it’s not like Pujols is exactly underpaid at the moment. This year he’s scheduled to make $16 million. Last year that would have put him in the top 20 overall. The difference between what the Cardinals want to pay Pujols and what Pujols wants amounts to about $3 million per season, which is the difference between the averages of the top 5 and the top 10 salaries even when you consider Rodriguez’s ridiculous salary. If you remove Rodriguez as some sort of outlier, then the two sides are really arguing about $1.5 million per year.

Now the devil can be in the details, meaning that the parties aren’t really talking about a one year contract. But according to sources, the number of years of an agreement isn’t the issue, just the yearly salary. Thus it really does boil down to a pittance, relatively speaking, in the difference between the sides.

Yet the Cardinals may very well lose their superstar over this and the Yankees or the Mets or perhaps the Red Sox will get fatter as a result. And in the process of course the salaries will be driven ever higher making it that much tougher for teams like St. Louis or Cleveland to ever compete on a level playing field.

So yes, again, there is reason for optimism in Cleveland. For once the fans don’t have to cope with the emotional toll of watching a homegrown superstar gut the team on his way out the door. But then again, that’s only because there aren’t any of those on the Cleveland roster at the moment and there don’t look to be any anytime soon. So there is that.

One for the Books

The worst kept secret about Cleveland sports fans is that they trudge through daily life with an inferiority complex weighting them down like a 60-pound stone. Their existence in large measure plays out like a Springsteen song where they play out the part of the dreamers caught up in the grind of their daily circumstances. But every so often, they get to the place where they really wanted to go and they walk in the sun.

Saturday was just that day.

If you think it doesn’t get better than watching the Cavaliers drub the Detroit Pistons in Game 1 of the first round of the NBA Finals while the Indians simultaneously are taking apart the Yankees like a golden retriever taking apart a throw pillow, it actually does. Try watching both games in front of TV screens side to side, each the size of a billboard, while in New York City. A more confused lot of New York fans would have been harder to find.

I was in New York this past weekend with my oldest daughter helping her get situated for an internship she has this summer in the city. After a day of walking around the Calcutta that is Battery Park and then heading to Columbus Circle and then toward Times Square for all manner of shopping for the next several hours, we finally found ourselves perched on two bar stools on the second floor of the ESPN Zone on Times Square.

Staring us in the face was the aforementioned TV screens and a couple hundred or so New Yorkers (and tourists of other stripes, I suppose). The setting was perfect. It was now late in the second quarter, the Cavs were up by plenty and the Indians were just getting warmed up in the second inning.

It was around this time that Shin-Soo Choo hit what turned out to be a relatively harmless 3-run homer to give the Indians a 3-2 lead, erasing the memory of another struggle by Indians’ starter Fausto Carmona. (Here’s an aside: I was heading home yesterday via the traveling ‘70s vintage Winnebago that makes up AirTran’s “fleet” of planes when I heard two women conversing about the Indians’ game on Saturday. For some reason, one woman kept on insisting that Carmona hit a grand slam in the game and the other, oddly, completely agreed. Now I did have a couple of Bud Lights during the game but certainly not enough to ever confuse Carmona with, say, Asdrubal Cabrera. The former is the one that throws the 55 foot breaking balls, the latter is the one that swings at them too often. I thought of correcting them but then I thought it was better to just leave some urban legends alone.)

Back to Choo. It was just after he hit that homer that LeBron James sank a nearly half-court shot just as the buzzer sounded at halftime. The Cavs had just let the Pistons close to within 9 points with 2.2 seconds left in the half. Inexplicably, Tayshaun Prince more or less let James get the inbound pass and dribble quickly to the half-court line while he half-heartedly gave James a slight shove with his elbow. Of course we know that James sank the shot, but all I kept thinking was “doesn’t Prince watch ’60 Minutes?’” James sank one of those shots underhanded, on camera, first take. The only disappointing aspect about the James basket was the fact that Prince did foul him and it should have been a 4-point play.

It was at that point that the New York fans were fixated on the Cavs game. Meanwhile, the Indians kept hitting the ball as if it was being pitched by Ed from Brunswick. I was pretty sure that even I could get around on one of Chien-Ming Wang’s fastballs and take it out over that short porch in right field. (Here’s another aside: Every time there’s a technological advance in golf, they lengthen the holes and shave the areas around the greens and grow the rough. It’s why even the best players struggle to get to par during the U.S. Open. Why doesn’t baseball follow suit? The dimensions of today’s ballparks, starting with that goofy short porch in new Yankee stadium, would have trouble containing Duane Kuiper. Today’s players are bigger and stronger than their counterparts of even 20 years ago [insert obligatory steroid joke here]. They throw harder and hit the ball further than ever before [insert second obligatory steroids joke here]. Yet major league baseball officials act as if this is still the dead ball era and the players sell insurance in the off-season instead of training.)

When the Cavs came back out at halftime, the Indians were still batting in the 2nd inning. The inning didn’t end until that third quarter was almost half over. By this point, Yankee fans had long since stopped watching the drubbing in favor of seeing James dominate a playoff game like few players can. And by watching James, I mean that they were watching like a teenage boy watches late-night Cinemax and fantasizes.

James is clearly the object of desire to New York fans and while this seems to scare Cleveland fans I see it as the crowning achievement of local civic pride. It’s one thing to lose CC Sabathia to the Yankees. It was inevitable. There were only a few teams that could really afford him and baseball operates on the same kind of business model as Enron used to.

But James is not just another star athlete biding his time in Cleveland, he’s homegrown. He grew up in the four corners of Akron and every accomplishment he’s had since the first time he dunked a basketball on a regulation hoop (which was probably in first grade but since it was pre-YouTube we lack the video verification) has been done either within a 35-mile radius of Cleveland or on behalf of a team in this area. This may be his sixth season in the NBA, but the locals have known him far longer than that.

With the Knicks again not a part of the NBA playoffs, New York fans were again relegated to adopting a team to follow in the same vein that Browns fans have been forced to adopt a team every year since the Super Bowl started. The Cavs are clearly their team. Unlike the disappointment they were loudly expressing at anyone in a pinstripe jersey on Saturday, New York fans were just as loudly voicing their support for the Cavs in general and James in particular. (Here’s still another aside: I use the term “voicing” because of its generic character, recognizing that I’m probably not doing much justice to what was taking place. In actuality, there was all manner of high-fives being issued, shrieks of delight were ever present, as if the New York fans had suddenly turned into teenage girls and were at a Jonas Brothers concert, and more than a few f-bombs were being dropped, but in that way where the f-bombs are expressing appreciation, not derision, like “that was a f—ing good pass. It sure the f--- was.”)

If you’re a Cleveland sports fans, ask yourself when was the first, last or anytime in between that you were the envy of New York fans? You have something they want in the person of James and a team like the Cavs. And it’s not a money issue. In fact, the Cavs hold all the cards if money is the issue when it comes to James.

Indeed, the only way James ends up in New York is if he thinks that presents him with the best opportunity to win multiple championships. Right now and by the time James has to finalize that decision it’s hard to see how the Knicks could get themselves into that position, at least relative to the Cavs.

Stranger things have happened. It’s what keeps the Cleveland fans fretting. It’s in the genes. While you have to have a healthy respect for all that’s happened to Cleveland sports fans, still they just have to know that right now they not only get to cheer on the world’s best player but they do so knowing that every connection he has to that world is in this area, not New York and in the Cavaliers, from Dan Gilbert on down, is a functional organization that has more than proven their ability to put together a championship-caliber team. All the Knicks under owner James Dolan have done is proven that the Browns can never win an award for the worst run franchise.

Even as they were delighting at James and drooling at the notion that he’ll be in a Knicks uniform soon enough because, hey, it’s New York, they occasionally were forced to witness the carnage of that second inning at the expense of their beloved Yankees, mainly because of the media timeouts during the basketball game. The Shoo homer didn’t do in the Yankee fans. That would have been the Cabrera grand slam. But even before that 14th run was recorded, Yankee fans were predictably bitching about George Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman. The few Mets fans in attendance had double-wide smiles and the few Red Sox fans at the bar had by now pulled out their hats that they were keeping tucked in their pockets initially.

It’s fascinating that this Indians team, of all the Indians teams in the last 15 years, owns a few all-time records against such a storied franchise. When some kid living in the Bronx whose not even born yet turns 12 and is looking at a digital baseball record book that he accesses on his mind-controlled iPod and sees that the 2009 Indians hold the all-time record for most hits and runs in an inning against the Yankees and the most runs scored in the second inning of any baseball game ever, he’ll be as amazed as I was when I learned that the Monkees didn’t play their own instruments.

Even as the Indians dropped Sunday’s game after the bullpen again collapsed and even if the Cavs don’t sweep the Pistons or, God forbid, not win the NBA Championship, at least we’ll always have Saturday. As my daughter said to me as we exited the ESPN Sportszone to venture out to Sephora and a little “her” time, “this is a great day for Cleveland sports.” It certainly was.

A New York State of Mind

One of the more interesting byproducts of Cleveland Indians pitcher C.C. Sabathia’s shutting down of negotiations for his next contract until after the upcoming season is how it plays so perfectly into the massive inferiority complex of the Cleveland populace. Call it the law of unintended consequences.

When Sabathia pitched in a meaningless pre-season game against the Yankees on Sunday, a game in which Sabathia was about as effective as he was in the playoffs last season, it sent both the Cleveland and the New York media into a minor frenzy. No matter how posed, the essence of the questions was the same: will Sabathia find himself in New York after this season?

It’s a question that Indians fans have basically been asking since Sabathia signed his last contract. In fact it’s a question that Cleveland fans ask every time any decent player on any Cleveland team gets within sniffing distance of free agency, if the fascination Cavaliers fans have with the speculation about LeBron James’ next employer in two years is any indication, and it is.

If the deciding factor for Sabathia is money and length of the contract, then the answer as to whether or not he’ll be in New York next season is probably. The Yankees, along with a handful of other teams, don’t ascribe to the same sort of business metrics to which most of the rest of the league pay attention. They stake no claim to adhering to a budget, at least in the common definition of that term, and thus embrace the freedom that comes with the removal of such pedestrian and self-imposed restraints. No one anywhere doubts that if it takes coming up with the most money and the longest term contract to land Sabathia, the Yankees will find a way to make that happen. They always do.

But if securing that last dollar available isn’t as much of a priority as quality of life, then fans of the Yankees probably won’t see Sabathia leading their young rotation next year. This isn’t a slam on life as lived in the big city, either. It has much more to do with not grabbing the last buck as the tradeoff for enduring the unflinching and often unfair scrutiny of the New York media market.

According to Paul Hoynes’ summary in Monday’s Plain Dealer, after his outing Sabathia encountered the usual three or four Cleveland-based reporters. He undoubtedly encountered the usual softball questions as well which would have been followed by the inevitable puff piece profile in the local paper which seeks to neither enlighten nor inform. But when Sabathia looked surprise that the locker room wasn’t overrun with the drones from Sector G in the form of the New York media horde, it was a look that lasted but an extra second or two as several reporters from New York, as Hoynes describes, streamed into the locker room.

Though Sabathia seemed somewhat ready for the obvious questions coming his way this time, it would be best for him to take note that it won’t always be that way. In Cleveland, a bad outing elicits nothing more than a shrug from the local media, or perhaps just a mild tsk tsk. Throw a bad pitch in New York and Sabathia’s liable to find a reporter from the Post sifting through his garbage cans looking for reasons.

Sabathia, of course, isn’t talking much in the way of specifics about his contract status. He merely repeats the same tired lines he’s been coached to say in order to deflect the inquiries his self-imposed status created. But it was that one answer to that one question that undoubtedly that will most feed the inferiority complex beast that hovers over Cleveland in general and its sports team in particular. As reported by Hoynes:

“Q. In a perfect world, is your preference be to stay in Cleveland? [sic]
A. In a perfect world, of course, I've been here since I was 17. We’ll just have to see what happens.”

Locally, that is as much of an admission that Sabathia is going to New York as anything else fans are likely to hear all season. Cleveland is not now nor will it ever be considered “a perfect world.” But beyond the lack of trappings of a city in a perpetual struggle with respectability, it won’t be a “perfect world” because what Cleveland lacks in cache it also lacks in cash. New York is flush with both.

When fans see the fact that Sabathia shut down off-season negotiations without even giving the Indians the courtesy of a response to its four year deal at approximately $17.5 million a season plus a healthy raise on this year’s salary, they naturally draw two conclusions: Sabathia is after the last dollar and there is no chance that the Indians will pay it. It’s hard to argue either point. The fact, though, that Indians fans next assume that Sabathia’s destination has to be the Yankees is fed less on fact and more on envy.

No matter how great a city New York might be in general, it might as well be Gomorrah on steroids to Clevelanders who see the Yankees as an embodiment of the arrogance and swagger that offend the Midwest sensibilities of a once proud industrial town. They may not be alone in that view, but Clevelanders also see a healthy dose of the Yankees success over the last three or so decades being fed in some measure by various Cleveland connections, not the least of which is owner George Steinbrenner.

All this may be true, but it no more places Sabathia in New York than it did Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome or Albert Belle. The odds of Sabathia staying in Cleveland may be slim, but it won’t be because he necessarily desires the last dollar on the table or that he has a misguided notion that success in New York is necessary to legitimize his career.

The truth is that there may be only a handful of teams capable of paying Sabathia the kind of contract his accomplishments dictate, but as long as it’s a handful, the Yankees have probably less of a chance at landing him than some of the others. Leaving one team for another always involves a variety of tradeoffs, but there is enough available cash floating around a variety of major league cities to convince Sabathia that he can land at one of them and the tradeoffs from the sanguine existence he’s enjoyed in Cleveland will be minimal.

As for Indians fans, the inevitable loss of Sabathia will add to a more than healthy inferiority complex to be sure, but it shouldn’t. The loss of Sabathia will no more deal a blow to Cleveland’s status as a major league city than did the losses of Ramirez, Thome or Belle, or even the year after year failures to win the World Series. That little dose of reality may be little solace to those still pining for that one title in their lifetimes, but it is the truth.

The other truth, the one that might elicit some comfort, will have to be in the form of the Yankees likely coming out on the short end in the Sabathia sweepstakes, just as they did with Johan Santana. The guess is that Sabathia won’t chase the last dollar, even if he chases most of them. Striking that modest compromise will keep him out of the clutches of the Yankees, bring him some semblance of peace of mind, and give Yankees fans reasons other than the recent Red Sox domination to feel just a tad inferior themselves. And for the poor soles in Cleveland, who last experienced a World Series title 60 years ago, to this they can say “welcome to the club.”

Another Bad Seed

It’s always nice when the acorn doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

If anyone thought that when Yankees owner and former Clevelander George Steinbrenner voluntarily stepped aside from the daily grind in favor of his two sons, Hank and Hal, baseball’s flagship franchise might be ready to find a better way to balance its self interest with the overall good of the game, think again.

In the short time since he’s become the de facto face of Yankees, Hank Steinbrenner, is proving to be quite a successor to the rather large and boorish shoes of his more famous father.

When Alex Rodriguez initially refused to extend his contract and instead opted out, Hank blew the first of what’s turning out to be many gaskets. He vowed not to negotiate any further with Rodriguez or his agent Scott Boras. A few days later, he was doing just that, ultimately signing Rodriguez to a new, equally ridiculous contract.

When the Minnesota Twins were busy trying to play the Yankees off the Boston Red Sox for the services of Johan Santana, Steinbrenner threw down an ultimatum, threatening to pull his offer off the table. The Twins didn’t bite but the Yankees stayed in the talks. In fact, well after Steinbrenner’s rant, the Yankees kept right on negotiating, up until the point that the New York Mets swept in and stole Santana from the Twins.

Maybe these were just examples of the neglected son finally getting the keys to the car he was ill-trained to handle. Maybe, except that these episodes did signal that Steinbrenner won’t be much of an agent of change in stemming the tide of economic insanity that his father helped usher into this modern era of baseball. That hardly surprises. But where Hank could do some real good is on the issue of steroids. Unfortunately, that’s the real test he’s failing right out of the gate.

Exhibit A occurred when he claimed to be irked that baseball was supposedly being singled out while football in general and the NFL in particular were supposedly getting a free pass with respect to steroids and performance enhancing drugs. Unintentionally hilarious, Steinbrenner told the Associated Press last week “everybody that knows sports knows football is tailor-made for performance-enhancing drugs. I don't know how they managed to skate by. It irritates me. Don’t tell me it's not more prevalent. The number in football is at least twice as many. Look at the speed and size of those players.”

With nothing more than his own gut feeling to back this up, Steinbrenner completely failed to appreciate that as part of baseball’s ownership elite, he and his family are as culpable as anyone in this mess baseball finds itself in.

The last time anyone looked Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Jason Giambi and Chuck Knoblauch were all recipients of the Steinbrenner family’s largesse and all three high profile players are at the heart of the steroids scandal. And let’s not forget that it was the Steinbrenners, too, who employed Brian McNamee, an admitted steroids distributor. Steinbrenner also has been quick to embrace Pettitte’s illegal use, despite the growing body of evidence that Pettitte signed his latest contract with the Yankees, just days before the Mitchell Report was released, knowing but not disclosing to anyone that he would be named in it. If Steinbrenner is irritated, he needs look no further than the family album to figure out why.

But in case Steinbrenner isn’t into self-reflection, then he can at least look at the differences between football’s approach to steroids and that of his own sport. In that same story from the Associated Press, Greg Aiello, the NFL’s spokesman noted “we’ve had year-round random testing with immediate suspensions since 1990 and we conduct approximately 12,000 steroids tests a year.”

What Aiello didn’t say but didn’t have to was that the NFL and its union have mostly been out ahead of the steroids problem while baseball and its union had to literally be threatened by Congress with the loss of their antitrust exemption before embracing even a semi-meaningful testing program.

No one is foolish enough to think that simply having a testing program will completely eliminate the inherent stupidity of some players who think they are smart enough to beat the system time and time again. Indeed each and every NFL season brings its share of player suspensions. It’s just that the public perceives, and for good reason, that the NFL has had a relatively effective mechanism for dealing with its problem players.

Baseball, as everyone knows, has treated steroids with a wink and a smile. It didn’t start testing for steroids until about 10 years after the NFL. Moreover, it’s not as if baseball owners have ever taken a particularly strong stance against them, refusing to draw a line in the sand each time the players’ union refused to negotiate on the subject. By backing down instead of standing up, the owners let baseball’s steroids era flourish. It’s why, even to this day, the public still perceives that baseball’s system for dealing with illegal drugs is a joke.

The other thing Steinbrenner seems to be forgetting is that baseball, under the so-called leadership of Commissioner Bud Selig, purposely singled itself out by ordering the Mitchell Report in the first place. Having placed itself in that white-hot spotlight, it’s a little disingenuous for the likes of Steinbrenner to now complain.

But that won’t stop him of course. It’s a Steinbrenner trait. In comments to the New York Post last week, Steinbrenner said that Red Sox fans shouldn’t jeer Pettitte too loudly because “they [the Red Sox] had plenty of players doing this stuff, too. It’s just that those players weren’t mentioned in the Mitchell Report.” On the one hand, he’s probably right. Given the pervasive use of steroids in baseball, it’s rather doubtful that some members of the Red Sox didn’t have their own version of McNamee somewhere.

On the other hand, why would Steinbrenner think that Red Sox fans should act any differently than, say, Yankees fans? It’s not as if his hometown faithful are known for treating the opposition with respect and dignity. And it’s not as if the Yankees, along with their cross-town counterparts, the Mets, aren’t ground zero in this latest scandal. But in what is looking to be a Steinbrenner family trait, it’s better to attack than fix, deny rather than acknowledge.

At some point, hopefully before it’s too late, Selig and the rest of the thumb suckers that run baseball will speak in one credible voice on all the ills that infect their game. It’s the path to salvation for a sport in desperate need of some good news. But it looks like it won’t happen soon. Given the rather fast start Hank Steinbrenner has gotten himself off to, it looks like Selig and his cronies would have a better chance of nailing Jello to a tree.

Stacking the Odds

It’s easy, convenient and commonplace right now to use the Indians’ win over the Yankees Tuesday night as a symbolic ending of sorts of another Yankees’ era. And if that turns out to be the case, it’s worth celebrating. But hopefully it has a much more useful purpose, that being as a substantive, if temporary, end to baseball’s bizarre economics.

Money matters in sports and always will. But whereas football with its hard salary cap and basketball with its semi-hard cap has brought a level of socialization to those sports that has been anything but evil, the capitalistic experiment that major league baseball has allowed to run nearly amok has created such galling disparities that it threatens the very foundations.

It’s been written many times already and is getting almost cliché to decry how the economics of baseball ultimately portends its downfall. If things continue unabated, that will occur. But thanks in large part to the Indians’ victory over the Yankees and what that likely means to the Yankees, the end of the world may be a little further down the road than it was at the start of the season.

Looking at the results of the divisional series in both leagues one conclusion to draw is that in the end, money didn’t make a difference. The combined payrolls of the Indians, the Diamondbacks and the Rockies do not equal what the Yankees spent on their mess of a team. But scratch a bit below the surface and you’ll find that for many years now there is no surer way to building and sustaining a playoff caliber team than by spending outrageous sums. That kind of spending doesn’t guarantee ultimate success but on the other hand it’s always nice when you can stack the odds in your favor and baseball still has too many teams trying to do just that, even as it threatens the game’s overall health.

The Yankees have been exhibit A. They may have had some trouble over the last seven years or so in terms of advancing to the World Series, but with all the talk about how that supposedly reflects on some mythical shortcoming of manager Joe Torre, don’t forget that in his 12 years as manager, the Yankees have not missed the playoffs. In that same period of time, the Yankees have spent nearly $1.6 billion on players.

The Red Sox have been exhibit B. In virtually that same period of time, the Red Sox have nearly matched the Yankees dollar-for-dollar in payroll and only finished lower than second in their division once, last season when they were third. As a result of their insane spending, those two teams are primarily, but not solely, responsible for baseball’s inflated economics and growing disparities between the so-called large market and small market teams.

Exhibits C, D E, F and G have helped and they are not hard to peg, either, even if their success has been less consistent. The Angels, Cubs, Tigers, Dodgers, White Sox and Phillies all have massive payrolls and have had for several years.

But over the last few years, a variety of teams, including three of this year’s four participants in the league championship series have demonstrated that being a low payroll team doesn’t necessarily translate to failure on the field. The same held true to a certain extent last year as well with the success of the Twins and the As. And while other examples can be had in most any other season, right now it sure feels like there is something about the way the Indians put away the Yankees in this year’s ALDS that could very well change the equation.

It’s unlikely that George Steinbrenner will be pleased with what he got this year for his $194+ million dollar payroll. It’s unlikely he’s pleased with what he got over the last three years for spending nearly a half a billion dollars, for that matter. And while he may be fiscally insane, he’s not stupid. Sooner or later he’s bound to notice the trend.

Indeed it’s actually happening and the Indians victory will only accelerate the process. When you look at the Yankees this past season, Alex Rodriguez, the best regular season player of his generation and one of the best regular season players of all time, helped keep the Yankees from falling completely off the map early. But his presence alone wasn’t enough to make them competitive.

It was only when the Yankees completely committed to youth, in the form of guys like Melky Cabrera, Robinson Cano, Chien-Mien Wang, Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes did they really begin to take off. The combined salaries of that group are around 10% of what Rodriguez alone makes.

Even if Steinbrenner proves to be too pigheaded to see the trends right now, it’s clear they haven’t been lost on their GM, Brian Cashman, who told the media Monday night that he is completely committed to organic growth. In other words, Cashman has seen what guys like Mark Shapiro have been able to do over the last several years and has realized that there may be another, indeed better, way.

The real question is that with religion seemingly suddenly returning to the Yankees, will guys like Theo Epstein in Boston and the lunatics running the payrolls of their clubs into similar ether come to similar conclusions. A year or two ago it would have been sheer folly to even consider that scenario. Now it may be slightly more realistic.

The Yankees payroll this past season was actually down from 2006. More to the point, with all their talented youth, their average salary per player was nearly cut in half, from almost $3 million to nearly $1.5 million. When Roger Clemens drops off and if Jorge Posada doesn’t resign, it’s likely to drop further. The real question is whether Cashman or Steinbrenner will be able to resist the temptation to grab another overpriced trinket if the Red Sox don’t do similarly. We can always hope.

The real likelihood in all this is that the Bostons, New Yorks, Anaheims, Chicagos and Detroits will only commit a payroll of less than $100 million as an acceptable but impermanent business model and that relative economic balance will be returned only temporarily. Instead, their commitment to youth will be as it’s been in the past—a means for replenishing their ranks to create attractive trade bait for teams like Cleveland with players like C.C. Sabathia whose talent and experience will eventually price them out of reach of their existing team.

But until that happens, we all can and should enjoy the respite because teams like Cleveland are likely to have the competitive advantage over their previously free spending counterparts. They have been operating in a budget constrained environment for years and better understand its vagaries. This, of course, doesn’t guarantee sustained success either, but for once it would be nice to have the odds stacked in our favor.

Worry Warts

We live in such a time of scandal and uncertainty, of fear and insecurity, it’s fair to ask: what worries you more, the Indians’ upcoming series against the Yankees or the Browns’ upcoming game against the New England Patriots?

Fans of Cleveland sports can recount all the horribles that accompany their status. It’s an endless checklist of the dues we all have paid over the years to wear a badge that few outside the metro area care to wear anyway. And while the inability of any of the major professional teams to close the deal in most folks lifetimes will forever hang like a yoke around our necks, it sometimes obscures some of the actual success that has been experienced.

In the last 10 years there has been much to root for in Cleveland. The Indians by and large have been competitive for the last 12 years. There have been some down times and missed opportunities, to be sure, but it’s not like they’ve been the perennial bottomfeeders of our youth. The return of the Browns in 1999 was a significant event even if it’s been mostly a disappointment since. Still, in the big picture, there is a team to talk about and if there’s one thing that this town likes to do, it’s talk about its football team.

The Cavs, at least since the arrival of LeBron James, have been transformed into one of the “it” teams of the NBA. They get substantial national attention for mostly the right reasons and they were in the NBA finals last year. And don’t forget about Ohio State. Most in this town will confess to being Buckeye fans and the teams that Jim Tressel continues to assemble in football and the promise of Thad Matta in basketball help ensure a sports environment in this town that is incredibly positive even if not as successful as any of us would like.

Still, this being Cleveland it would be hard to ignore what passes as our favorite hobby, worrying. Thus it is fair to ask with the Indians about to re-enter the American League playoffs and the Browns having just played their single best game in recent memory, whether you’re more worried about the Yankees series or the Patriots game.

The fact that Cleveland fans can even have both issues on their minds at the same time, as if they are of equal importance, probably reveals more about us than anyone would care to admit. After all, the upcoming Browns game against the Patriots is largely meaningless while the Yankees series has something substantial at stake. But to state that is merely stating the obvious yet doesn’t change the fact that this is a Browns town first and so their fate, even at this moment, is of equal importance to the fact that the Indians have the World Series justifiably in their sights.

Dispensing thus with the incongruity of it all, each presents their own boatloads of worry. Looking at the upcoming Browns/Patriots match-up, it would seem that this presents about the least likely of the handful of opportunities the Browns have had to break their nearly four-year inability to win two straight games.

One could look at the wildly disparate statistics between the two teams and draw any number of conclusions, none of them good.

At first blush, the season thus far for the Patriots has been a clinic in how to run a buzzsaw franchise. They are second in the NFL in offense and first in the league in defense. And it is every bit as lopsided as that would imply in a vacuum and by comparison. As a team they have 105 first downs while yielding only 60. They are 20/39 on third down while teams are only 12/60 on third down against them. They have gained almost twice as many yards as they have given up. They’ve sacked opposing quarterbacks 11 times while Tom Brady has been sacked only three times. And if all that wasn’t good enough, they average holding on to the ball a full 10 minutes more per game than the opposition. Feel free to manipulate the statistics any way you want. There is no good news in them if you’re a Browns fan.

While the Browns/Patriot match-up wouldn’t necessarily be the most lopsided contest you could find in the league, it’s pretty close, particularly when you factor in the play of the Browns defense. But given the predilection of Cleveland fans to worry about things they can’t control, you might as well factor in the unwarranted swagger that some of the players have gained as a result of the win over the Ravens last Sunday.

In this regard, it’s nice to see receiver Braylon Edwards coming out of his shell a bit. In a fit of unbridled enthusiasm, he said yesterday that “the offense is sound. When you execute it, it’s easy. We have so much at our disposal, it’s scary.” Well, maybe.

The Browns offensive line is playing as well, remarkably well in fact. But it’s still not nearly as good as the Patriots line. Moreover and more to the point, Edwards description actually fits the Patriots much better. If any team in the league has so much at their disposal, it’s the Patriots. The Browns, not quite so much. But if they have one advantage, it’s the chance that New England may take the game too lightly, particularly coming off of a Monday night game on the road. Not exactly a counterpoint to much of anything, but it’s something nonetheless. Right now, though, it would be nice for Edwards and the rest of his teammates to remember that at most, their two victories thus far just got them upright. They still need to walk steady before they even consider running.

As for the Indians/Yankees series, statistically it’s a mess as well and it has nothing to do with the fact that the Indians are 0-6 against the Yankees this year. Offensively, the disparity is significant. There’s a sizeable gulf between the teams in on-base percentage, runs scored, total bases, walks and strikeouts. In other words, the Yankees get on base far more often, hit better, score more runs, take more walks and strike out far less. If offense decides the series, it will be a short postseason for the Indians.

But the counterbalance to the offense is pitching. The Indians give up almost a half run less per game than the Yankees and have walked 100 less batters. Opposing teams have a .322 on-base percentage against Indians pitchers while opposing teams have an on-base percentage of .340, which owes much, again, to the disparity in walks since both staffs are otherwise holding opponents to the same overall batting average, .268.

But the difference in on-base percentage really shows up in the clutch statistics, meaning how well the teams are pitching, for example, with runners in scoring position and less than two outs, when the teams are within one run of each other and the like. Across the board, the Indians are far superior in this regard, meaning that when it really matters Tribe pitchers are better at keeping opponents off the bases than the Yankees.

But as good as that news is overall, the one cautionary note is that the pitching advantage starts to shrink when you consider that a playoff match-up is much more about the top five or six pitchers on the staff than the 10 or 11 that got you through the whole season. Chien-Ming Wang vs. C.C. Sabathia in game one is basically a wash. At this juncture Fausto Carmona has a huge advantage statistically over Andy Petitte in everything but experience, something not easily discounted. The same can be said of a potential Jake Westbrook/Roger Clemens match-up in game 3.

The difference then will likely come down to the bullpen, where the Indians have the clear advantage in set-up (Kyle Farnsworth, Luis Vicaino both of whom have had health issues of late and Joba Chamberlain vs. Rafael Bentancort and Rafael Perez) but, with all due respect to the season he’s had, Joe Borowski as a closer is no Mariano Rivera.

What this hodgepodge really tells you is that while there is much to worry about if you’re an Indians fan, and they will, it’s not as if the Yankees fans enter this series with clear heads either. Despite the disparity in head-to-head match-ups this season, this series is really an intriguing contest. And given the near impossibly high standards of Yankees fans in light of their relative failures in recent years, it is fair to say that maybe, just maybe, Cleveland fans won’t hold the franchise on angst in this series.