Never Building, Always Rebuilding

Cleveland: a city where the skies are grey, the sports teams are consistently rebuilding and the front offices are always saying the same thing.

At about the exact same time that Cavaliers general manager Chris Grant was explaining why the Cavs traded away an opportunity to get into the playoffs now for an opportunity to get into the playoffs later, Browns’ president Mike Holmgren and general manager Tom Heckert were offering similar reasons when explaining to season ticket holders why not doing anything now will give them a better opportunity to do something later.

The Cavs on Thursday traded Ramon Sessions to the Los Angeles Lakers in order to acquire another first round draft pick.  That gives them seven first round picks over the next four years, which is less impressive then it sounds since the NBA draft is but two rounds.  Still, the Cavs also have four of the first 40 picks in the next NBA draft.  So to the extent that the next draft is deep, the Cavs legitimately benefit by acquiring 10% of the 40 best players available.

Of course the key is to make the correct pick at each particular slot and when you hold anything other than the first or second pick of the draft, pick a sport, it becomes more and more of a crap shoot.  But putting that bit of mystery aside for the moment, the bigger story revolves around the conscious decision by Grant not to make a playoff run this season.

Grant couched it in terms of making the best decisions for the team right now and for the future because in Cleveland the future always holds more promise than the present.  Yet Grant isn’t necessarily off base, as odd as that seems on the surface.

In the NBA, hell isn’t reserved for those teams missing the playoffs.  It’s reserved for those who just make the playoffs.  The bottom feeders get in the lottery.  The next tier gets the few extra bucks a playoff series brings in exchange for a near perpetual invitation to the NBA’s version of the Jetsons’ treadmill.

The only way off that crazy thing and onto a the upper tiers where the real contenders hang out and drink Cristal while reciting lines from Party X is to spend big in free agency.  The draft isn’t going to be any help.  But even if you’re Pat Riley and notwithstanding the antics of players like LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, spending in free agency just isn’t as easy as it used to be. 

The NBA’s rules, further enhanced by their new collective bargaining agreement, make it far more lucrative for free agents to re-sign with their own team.  The players that move tend to be on the back sides of careers and are usually a missing piece or two and not, say, a centerpiece.  

The problem is that these bottom run playoff teams, particularly those at the very bottom, are generally more than a missing piece away.  They usually have fundamental issues.

The Cavs illustrate the point.  They are only a few games out of a playoff spot right now but does anyone really think that this team could either a) do anything exciting in the playoffs or b) improve the team by ending up with a worse position in the next draft? 

That’s essentially the point that Grant made yesterday in talking about the Sessions trade.  In language that will sound hauntingly familiar in a moment, he talked about the need to build for the future and that such building can be a slow process.  It takes time to work your way through the next two or three drafts and to find the right pieces to complement what you already have.

It’s a story, even if true, that we’ve heard over and over before.

But in the kind of synchronicity that underscores the nature of professional sports in this town, if you had your eyes closed and just listened, Grant’s words were almost word for word what Holmgren and Heckert were telling their beleaguered season ticket holders and with roughly the same effect.

The news out of the conference call getting all the run was Holmgren’s furled brow and chafed backside over coming up short on moving up to the second pick of the draft so that the team could draft Robert Griffin III.  Apparently Holmgren doesn’t like hearing himself criticized on local radio.  He felt the team made a spirited run but were done in by what was mostly an inside job between friends, you know sort of like when Bob Lamonte steers all of his clients toward the Browns and not other teams.

Holmgren’s words were not without subtext.  Heckert told the media a week ago that fans shouldn’t get amped up like a college kid on Red Bull over the prospect of any big name free agent signings.  That meant no quarterback (enjoy the sun, Matt Flynn, this generation’s Kelly Holcomb) and no front line receiver.  What it did mean was some spare parts, akin to the kind the Indians tend to sign in their version of free agency, who could add depth to a sport where the lack thereof all but kills any playoff chances.

I’m all for bench strength, but the Browns have a plethora of bench strength, assuming you relegate most of the current starters to the bench in favor of legitimate starters.  It’s something Heckert and Holmgren know but cannot say.  So instead they talk about the long haul, about building methodically, about their future days in the sun and a plea again to be patient.

Truthfully, who would have expected anything different and what choice is there anyway?

That means, of course, that the Browns now have to pivot back to Colt McCoy and in a bit of damage control, Holmgren and Heckert  then took to rebuilding his psyche by claiming with straight faces that they think he’s just fine as a quarterback, has a high ceiling (coachspeak for potential)and that if they could just get him some better players, things will be fine.

If you’re starting to see a circular nature to all of this, you aren’t alone.  But it’s that circular nature that is at the core of the entire fan experience.  The only thing worse than not winning it all is winning it all.  The pressure on the Green Bay Packers to repeat as Super Bowl champs was so much so that an otherwise wildly successful year, particularly if measured against any season in Cleveland, ends up mostly in disappointment and despair in Green Bay.

What keeps fans as fans is the eternal hope that things indeed will one day be better, even if fleeting.  So Grant, Holmgren and Heckert mine that tract repeatedly knowing that if they can suck the fans into tomorrow, they’ll still buy tickets today.

I’m not bothered by the underlying cynicism of it all because this sort of back and forth with the fans’ emotions and expectations is the grist for the mill of professional sports.  

But let’s face it, Grant can maneuver like JLo in a Pepsi commercial but he’s not going to be able to move the needle nearly as much as he’d like us to believe.  In the NBA, the rebuild process is about 10 years, minimum.  That seems impossible to believe given the relatively small rosters, but their entire system precludes a quick turnaround.  The rewards go to the truly patient.  

Once in awhile a player like James comes around and there’s a chance to shorten the time frame, but even then not significantly.  As much as one player should make a difference in the NBA is as much as one player rarely makes that big of difference in the NBA.  That James came to the conclusion that he couldn’t win a NBA title on his own sooner than Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant came to that conclusion underscores that fact.

You have Grant talking about taking a methodical approach over the next few years as a sort of implied promise that he’ll buck historical trends and get this team in the NBA Finals sooner if not soon.  Don’t count on it.  Even with clever drafting, the Cavs won’t find themselves lounging in the penthouse for years.

At Cleveland Browns stadium, the odds are weirdly much better for a faster turnaround, all results of the team’s operations for the last decade notwithstanding.  In the NFL, teams are constantly turning at least 1/3 of their rosters a year, sometimes more as they build around a core that was created through good drafting.

It’s not the system that’s kept the Browns down.  It’s been the Browns.  Too many incompetents at too many levels for too many years are the reason this team can’t improve.  If Heckert and Holgrem can buck that trend, then the system will reward their efforts far more quickly than the system will reward Grant and the Cavs.

That’s another reason Holmgren’s pursuit of Griffin is so puzzling.  I understand the notion that if there’s a once-in-a-lifetime player, you do all you can to grab him, which is why apparently the Browns pursued RGIII in the first place.  But in truth the team is better off with actually doing what Holmgren and Heckert now seem resigned to do: surround McCoy with better talent by using all of those high draft picks they’ve cultivated over the last few years.  It’s what the system wants and what the system needs.

The only hiccup, and it’s a big one, is that the Browns have so many holes to fill that there simply aren’t enough high draft picks to go around.  That’s why the Browns being content to sign the Frostee Ruckers of the world is likewise so puzzling.  The Browns don’t have to sign a guy like Mario Williams and bust the cap.  But they do have to do something meaningful and it will only cost them money and not their blood.

Holmgren gave his crowd one last bit of red meat to chew on and that was the notion that incremental improvement next season, like a 6-10 record for instance, is not going to be satisfactory.  That sounded good, too.  But until he oversees a front office that’s not satisfied moving at the current snail’s pace, he better start getting next year’s speech ready because he’ll have to explain to an even more skeptical season ticket base exactly how a 6-10 record was part of the plan all along.

A Position of Strength and Weakness

In football as in life, it’s always best to deal from a position of strength. The corollary is likewise true: it’s never best to deal from a position of weakness. But as bad as that may be, it’s always worse to deal from a position of weakness that is contrived, which is why the Washington Redskins’ stupefying trade for the rights to presumably draft Baylor quarterback Robert Griffin III is so, well, stupefying.

The Redskins, like much of the NFL frankly, wanted an upgrade at quarterback. Believing that Griffin is the next coming of fill-in-the-blank, the Redskins over exaggerated their need to the point where they made a deal unlike anything the NFL has seen since Mike Ditka traded away every one of his draft picks in order to obtain Ricky Williams. Does anyone remember how that worked out?

When desperation meets stupidity, bad things often happen to a franchise.

You could analyze the trade in every conceivable way but keeping it simple illustrates how completely dumb Redskins owner Dan Snyder really is. It’s something we’ve known for years but still appreciate the occasional reminder.

If you believe, as most likely do, that RGIII is a better quarterback prospect then Sam Bradford, the St. Louis Rams’ quarterback, then the case could have and should have been made that the Rams should have held on to the pick and traded Bradford, a fine prospect with some significant but not RGIII-caliber market value.

But the Rams, knowing that good is good enough at quarterback in the NFL, felt it was far better to stand pat with the quarterback already in the fold and work from a position of strength by picking the pocket of the addle-brained Snyder. It kept them from having to perform the more complicated calculus of building around RGIII, who would have arrived with the same sort of limitations that (along with injuries) plagued Bradford last season, namely a flimsy supporting cast.

As it is, the Rams now have 5 first round picks in the next 3 drafts, courtesy of the Redskins. Even for teams with mediocre drafting ability, those kinds of odds bode well for creating massive improvement, particularly when compared to the work the Redskins will have to do without the benefit of decent draft choices in the next several years.

Just watch how much better Bradford suddenly will get with blue chip talent around him.

I’m sure that Snyder mollified himself with the bromide that if RGIII is who they think he is, the first round picks he gave up will be late in the first round anyway and hence less valuable. Could be, but let’s remember, they’re still first round picks, which always trumps them being second round picks.

The Redskins end up with RGIII (presumably) and now will have to overpay in the free agent market over the next few years if they are to have any hope in creating a credible support system for their new asset. And let’s just be charitable and say that under Snyder, the Redskins have participated in the free agent market with disastrous results. If we were being unvarnished, we’d point out that the reason Snyder is so disrespected as an owner has everything to do with the ridiculous bets he’s made in free agency. Another column for another day, I suppose.

On most days the malfunctioning of Snyder’s stupidity alarm would be the top story in the NFL. Right now, though, it’s competing with storylines involving a handful of other quarterbacks, such as Matt Flynn, Peyton Manning and perhaps Tim Tebow for adequate air time. That’s because teams like the Browns, who made a spirited push for the draft’s second pick, are impacted by all the other machinations involving quarterbacks, including the bonehead move the Redskins just made.

All this demonstrates once again that left tackles are prized and speedy wide receivers are coveted, quarterbacks are still the most important assets in the NFL. But even as the most prized, their value has a limit.

When Browns’ general manager Tom Heckert decided not to pull the trigger on giving up both of this year’s first round picks in order to be able to draft Griffin, it served as a reminder that the only way to cultivate the most important asset in the NFL, you have to surround him with adequate weapons. As important as the quarterback is, he’s not so important as to sacrifice the rest of the offense.

It means, too, that Heckert likely reached the same conclusion of McCoy that St. Louis reached of Bradford. Good often is good enough.

It’s amazing, really, how good or bad a quarterback can be based on the players around him. McCoy hasn’t yet sold himself to Heckert, Mike Holmgren or head coach Pat Shurmur. But it’s pretty clear that McCoy’s done enough to keep Heckert from having to deal from a position of complete weakness in trying to craft an acceptable trade for the Rams. Limits do get drawn and Heckert, far better than someone like Snyder, understands that constructing a good team has much in common with completing a 1000 piece jig saw puzzle then it does in finding one corner piece.

Heckert, in just two seasons, has demonstrated that his ability to draft good, solid football players eclipses any other who’s held a similar role with the Browns in the last 12 years, at least. Granted, it’s not a high bar he’s had to scale, but he’s scaled it nonetheless.

The fact that Heckert set a reasonable price to trade up for RGIII and then wisely got out when Snyder went all in is reason enough to continue to trust that Heckert is doing the right things for this franchise now and for the next several years to come.

Heckert is correct, for example, when he underscores the simple fact that free agency is no way to build and sustain a football team. There are gaps that can and should get filled but it’s rarely done by overpaying for a superstar.

Yet if Heckert had made that trade, he would have been forced to dip deeply perhaps in the free agency pool to get Griffin a viable supporting cast. It wouldn’t have been a one and done dip in that pool, either, but a sustained effort for the next few seasons in order to bridge the gap created by surrendering so many draft picks in the first place. That gets expensive fast and hasn't proved to be successful for any team, including those aforementioned Redskins.

This is what brings it all back around to Snyder. The NFL has watched in both horror and amusement as Snyder has run the Redskins franchise in the ground for a variety of reasons, including one imprudent free agent acquisition after another.

Indeed the case could be made that the Redskins were so desperate to get Griffin because of all the personnel screw ups they’ve made in the last several years. Yet here they go again, seemingly covering up one mistake while simultaneously opening up new holes.

It reminds me of when the Texas Rangers and owner Tom Hicks signed Alex Rodriguez to a contract worth in excess of $250 million. Unencumbered by a salary cap, Hicks went all in and then spent what he didn't have without even stopping to consider two important points. Rodriguez couldn’t play all 9 positions at once and it takes even more money to surround Rodriguez with enough talent to actually win a World Series. Hicks more than demonstrated that an endless bankroll does indeed have an end.

It’s not an accident that the Rangers got better after they unloaded Rodriguez on the Yankees. And it won’t be an accident when Snyder wakes up some time in the next few years and realizes that he was a tad impetuous when he mortgaged his team’s future for one player. That will probably come when his fortune dwindles and he's forced to sell the team like a junior Art Modell.

RGIII has every chance to be a very special player in the NFL. But there isn’t a scenario where it would have made sense for the Browns to match the Redskins’ offer or, God forbid, better it for the Heisman Trophy winner. The Browns are far more likely to get better faster without Griffin then with him, at least at the price he would have cost both directly and indirectly.

Another Masterpiece

Bruce Springsteen has just released his 17^th album and he can't seem to get much love. For reasons of both outsized expectations and abject misunderstanding, a number of critics and fans are at the least unenthusiastic about the release. It's not the first time so many will be on the wrong side of history. It's not as if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unopposed.

Wrecking Ball isn't an accomplishment on the level of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, certainly. But in the long and tortured history of art and artists, it's an epic accomplishment that history most assuredly will eventually hail as one of the key pillars in the career of one of America's most accomplished, most respected, most talented rock musician of all time.

I'm not so much interested in reviewing Wrecking Ball on its own merits. There are those better suited to that sort of thing then me. But I am interested in having a conversation about Wrecking Ball and its rightful place in contemporary music.

Given Springsteen's age and iconic status, I rather doubt that this album will receive airplay, if that's even a concept these days. My interaction with terrestrial radio mimics most of the rest of society these days, which is to say that it's not much. It's still the best place for news on the hour and traffic reports when you're stuck bmper to bumper on the interstate, but as an abiding outlet for the discovery of music, it's usefulness has long been supplanted by any number of other options. So airplay as a goal seems so 1982, doesn't it?

Where music is heard and experienced these days is far more a function of social media. But even at that, I don't see the majority of Facebook or Twitter users or whatever equivalent platform someone is using these days giving much buzz to the album. Whatever else Springsteen may be, he's not Adele.

It's way too late for Springsteen to be the next flavor of the month anyway, not that he ever made any effort in that regard. So the album will be experienced if at all by those who deliberately seek it out. And those who seek it out will be prodded often by the reviews they read about it. In that sense, getting the review correct carries a fair amount of responsibility.

Most of the negative reviews focus on the simple: The lyrics and themes seem too familiar, almost cliché. The melodies aren't interesting. The production is boring, strange, weird take your pick. And if I have to hear one more pennywhistle, just shoot me.

In some sense, the lyrics and themes may be familiar but that is because Springsteen, particularly in the last 10-15 years, has become much more familiar. Early in his career he was media shy. During the last two presidential elections, he was everywhere. He gives plenty of interviews where lazy reporters/journalists/entertainers ask the questions he's answered already. If you don't know where Springsteen stands then you deliberately aren't listening.

When Springsteen talks about the distance between the American Dream and the American Reality, we have heard it before. It's what's on his mind. That he would push his art in that direction shouldn't be a surprise. That's what artists should do. In that context it makes the “lyrics and themes” argument silly.

At the same time, what these reviewers consistently have missed is how Springsteen can take those familiar themes and personalize and localize them in a way that he hasn't quite done before. For example, the desperate two-bit criminal in Easy Money may at first blush not seem all that different from the desperate two-bit criminal in Highway 29 from The Ghost of Tom Joad album. But on further review they couldn't be more different.

In Highway 29, there's no sense of that criminal's motivation. In some sense he's a continuation of the theme first developed in Nebraska that there's just a meanness in this world. But you also get the sense that he robbed the bank not out of desperation as much as boredom. He was a thrill seeker who had picked up a girl in a shoe store and off they went.

The criminal in Easy Money is acting out of both desperation and defiance. He didn't just watch but lived the picking of his pockets at the hands of forces he couldn't control and decided to turn the paradigm on its head. He figures “why shouldn't I do what's been do to me?” “Why can't I grab what I need when a banker can gut the financial system and send the economy into a near death spiral and get away in plain sight?” It's a far different question that Springsteen is trying to pose even if the theme seems familiar. Can there be morality in a more honest, direct crime?

That's true, frankly, of every song on Wrecking Ball. I could listen to Jack of All Trades 10,000 times and have my heart broken each and every time. The melody is incredibly simple, yes, and amazingly effective. The narrator expresses the thoughts we've all had at one time or another. Who hasn't said that they would flip burgers if that's the only work left and you had a family to feed? Well, the narrator isn't just faced with the prospect in theory. He walks the street every day in search of work only to come home empty handed to a wife that's growing increasingly worried. What can he do but reassure her that everything will be all right? Can he? Will it?

Springsteen has said that this is his most direct album he's ever written but in typical Springsteen fashion, I suspect that statement has been misinterpreted. On many songs over many albums, Springsteen's point of view can be far more ambiguous. A song like 41 Shots, for example, if written for Wrecking Ball might have taken more of a position then it does. But it's just this gift for ambiguity, of understanding that there are more then just a few points to any story, that's made Springsteen such an effective songwriter for so many years.

While the points of view on each song on Wrecking Ball may be far more direct, they don't lack for nuance. Who exactly is the narrator of Rocky Ground? It could be any number of people—a priest, a parishioner, a man on death row-- and it still works. What about We Are Alive? Are those the ghosts of heroes past, who fought the other wars worth fighting, talking or are they just the thoughts that are in our heads?

I just don't buy the view that Springsteen is mining familiar ground instead of breaking new. Indeed, you don't have to look all that hard to see the new ground broken on this album. That's what makes this such an astonishing accomplishment for a songwriter as prolific as Springsteen. He still has something new to say and something worth saying despite a career that's spanned 45 or so years at this point.

Then there's the argument that as a soundtrack for the Occupy Wall Street movement, the album falls short of capturing the sentiment. This line of thought suffers from a faulty premise or, as we say in the legal business, from facts not in evidence.

On a basic level, three of the songs precede the Occupy Wall Street movement. From that standpoint alone it could hardly be said it's purpose was to give voice to the cacophony emanating from that movement. But I suspect it never occurred to Springsteen to try and give voice to that movement in the first place. Rather, this work is borne out of the same set of circumstances that gave rise to the movement. In that sense, it's at best intended as a companion piece and not a 5,000 foot observation.

Maybe the real problem for certain reviewers is that Springsteen didn't try to give voice to Occupy Wall Street like Dylan and others gave voice to the Viet Nam protest movement. God knows it could have used it. The Occupy Wall Streeters had a real opportunity to create a viable counterpoint to the Tea Party nabobs but blew it out of an abiding sense that there was more virtue in being disorganized. Their message got diffused and derided not because it wasn't valid but because it wasn't coherent. There's a real and palpable frustration still with an economy that is too slow in recovery and a government that is too cynical to act. It's a movement that should have a voice and here's hoping it finds one. But to blame Springsteen for not stepping forward to fill that void or, worse, to assume he has and then fell short, is an unfair burden and clouds the judgment.

At its core, Wrecking Ball is both a product of these times and of all times. When this album is still celebrated decades from now, some enterprising types will dig up some of these old reviews and shake their heads and laugh at the foolishness. Art is often best appreciated in retrospect so there is precedent.

But there's no reason not to enjoy the gift that's here and now, those opinions aside. Wrecking Ball is a gift that will keep on giving even if the jaded among us are too hip to notice.

Lingering Items--Bounty Hunter Edition

The NFL, which is no stranger to scandal anyway, has another full fledged problem on its hands. After taking longer to investigate the New Orleans Saints’ bounty system then the Warren Commission took to investigate the assassination of the John F. Kennedy, the NFL concluded what had long been assumed anyway. NFL players are motivated by money to the point that they'd injure their opponents for more of it.

But the subtle subversion of the salary cap system, not to mention the tax laws, by paying defensive players to injure opposing players, is the least of the NFL’s problems. Far more of a problem is the pending lawsuits from dozens of former players who are claiming that the NFL did little to protect them from concussions and how these revelations play into that.

It’s one thing for a group of defensive players to pool their money and reward each other for particularly vicious hits. It’s a whole other matter when the activity was institutionally sponsored, as it appeared it was in New Orleans. That kind of thing tends to get the attention of plaintiffs lawyers.

And if this kind of unofficially official activity was present elsewhere around the league, and there seems to be evidence that it was, how can the NFL adequately defend itself from allegations that it was doing its level best to protect the players from unnecessary injuries?

The “Spygate” incident was a public relations nightmare for the NFL but it wasn’t team sponsored assaults on opposing players. But this Bountygate business creates a boatload of legal issues for the NFL just as it’s trying to defend itself from claims that it looked the other way as players came up lame over the years.

Gregg Williams, the defensive coordinator for the Saints in 2009, the year in which this activity appears to have peaked, has acknowledged that he oversaw this “reward” system not just in New Orleans but pretty much everywhere else he’s coached. That may tell you plenty about what a lousy coach Williams really is, but it also tells you plenty about why certain ex-players, those still suffering from the effects of all those concussions for example, feel the way they do about the league.

Williams may be portrayed as just some rogue coach and if I’m the NFL’s lawyers, I’m arguing just that. But the fact remains that Williams was a member of his team’s management and he had the power if not to fire players directly, to effectively recommend them for that fate. If Williams is telling players to injure opponents and is paying them to do it, what choice does a player have not to participate?

If you follow the Twitter feeds of NFL players, it’s been an interesting few days. Just as they did for James Harrison, you have a number of players defending the Saints' actions as just a part of the game. That should be expected, mainly because many players aren’t particularly deep thinkers.

But just as there are those that see this as no big deal, there are plenty that feel differently and I suspect most of them go by another name, “plaintiff.” They’re the ones suing the league who now have powerful evidence in the form of the league’s own report to help make their case.

The NFL knows it has a problem on its hands and though it should be given credit for announcing the results publicly, the low key approach to this situation as compared to its bombastic response to “Spygate” is directly attributable to the vast difference between the two situations.

“Spygate” was incredibly stupid and overblown. The NFL acted as if stealing another team’s signals, which is at the heart of the allegations, impacted the integrity of the game, despite the fact that no one gives a second thought, let alone raises integrity issues, when baseball does the same thing night after night.

“Bountygate” on the other hand spells real trouble for the NFL and they know it. Because the NFL can’t look as if it condones sponsored violence, except of the more typical variety for which it charges fans a small ransom, it will come down much harder on the Saints and their management then they did on the Patriots and its management in Spygate. Expect significant loss of draft picks and significant fines. If Williams is allowed to coach in the NFL this coming season, it will be a miracle.

The NFL really has no other choice. If it is ever going to defend itself against accusations that it is not indifferent to player injuries, it actually has to not be indifferent to player injuries.

When the Browns allowed Colt McCoy back on the field without adequately checking whether he was still functioning adequately, it didn't help the league's cause. But that was a mostly isolated incident. Long term sponsorship of brutal, incentivized head-hunting is a whole different matter. And the fact that it took this long for the NFL to root it out doesn't much help their cause either.

**

There's a local angle to this Bountygate and it involves one of the team's best defensive players, the self-aggrandizing Scott Fujita.

As reported initially by Sports Illustrated's Peter King, Fujita is more than implicated in Bountygate. According to King, Fujita was one of a handful of Saints defensive players to pledge between $2,000 and $10,000 to the overall bounty pool, something Fujita both admits and denies. Yes to the pool, no to the whole injury aspect of the pool.

While King talks about all the good Fujita has done for Steve Gleason, a former player suffering from ALS as well as the work put Fujita put in on the NFL’s labor council, that doesn’t lessen the gravity of Fujita’s involvement here. If anything, it enhances it.

Fujita, who railed against the NFL this past offseason for all manner of sins, including what he termed was its lack of concern over safety issues, is nothing if not a hypocrite. While he was chidling the NFL for its approach, he knew full well that he was accomplice in it, not so much because he was a hard-nosed player but because he allegedly sanctioned with his own money bounty hunting on opposing players.

Off the field and completely away from football, Fujita may be a wonderful sort. But on it or near it is a different story. What we really know about Fujita in that regard is that he’s not just a hypocrite. He’s a phony. At no point did Fujita come to Colt McCoy’s defense publicly when James Harrison deliberately tried to sever his head. Instead Fujita took to criticizing team management and NFL brass for not having good enough procedures in place to deal with concussions, ignoring the fact that McCoy’s concussion was completely preventable. Maybe Fujita supported McCoy behind the scenes. I hope so. But given Fujita’s apparent role in Bountygate, his not backing McCoy publicly at the expense of Harrison now makes far more sense.

Screaming about solutions when you're part of the problem isn't the best recipe for success. But there's more.

We also know that Fujita isn’t just a hypocrite and a phony. He’s also a coward. During the heat of the NFL’s labor dispute, Fujita had his wife “write” (most likely ghostwrite) a column for The Nation in which she excoriated NFL owners for exploiting the players as mere pawns in a game of high commerce. (See my column here on this subject) She railed about their relative indifference to the care these fat cats showed for injured players to underscore her point.

Maybe she wrote those eloquent words without knowing that her own husband was effectively undermining her arguments by allegedly helping to incent his co-workers to injure opponents through whatever means possible, late hits or cheap hits be damned. But Fujita let his wife publish those comments knowing full well his role in all of this, which is a pretty cowardly act for a guy who paints himself as one of the NFL’s tough guys.

There is much that can and should be done to reduce injuries in the NFL. As much as I love the game, it’s frustrating each year to see teams decimated by injuries. Playoffs and Super Bowls increasingly aren’t won by the best teams but the least injured. So purely from an entertainment value, the quality of the NFL’s product is repeatedly compromised by the absence of so many players nursing injuries.

But the far bigger concern is the lingering effects of those injuries. You need only to meet retired players to understand how all those hits add up to permanent damage. It may be the mentality of NFL players that injuries are part of the game and must be endured. But is it really the mentality of NFL players that unnecessary injuries are a part of the game?

And while the primary obligation may fall on the NFL to find the best ways to reduce injuries, through a combination of technology and rules, it’s all for naught when players find ways around it just to earn a few extra bucks from a bounty pool.

If it turns out that Fujita actively participated in this system while in New Orleans, he should be punished and I wouldn’t care if it were for an entire season. The near term hit to the Browns is worth it if it brings this kind of activity to an end.

Indeed, if it does turn out the Fujita was one of the ringleaders, then considering that the Browns are trying to rebuild with better players of higher character, cutting Fujita would certainly qualify as addition by subtraction.

**

With the Bountygate scandal is expanding to other teams, this weeks’ question to ponder: Given the relatively weak performances by past Browns defenses, is it possible their was an organized effort within the Browns to pay players for deliberately trying not to hurt opposing players?

Bring On Your Wrecking Ball

On Monday evening, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed live on the Jimmy Fallon show.  At age 62, Springsteen still has no idea how to just mail in a performance.  As vital and vibrant as ever, Springsteen showed everyone once again why he's the best that ever was.  The song "Wrecking Ball," which serves as the title track for his next album (available March 6th everywhere), seemed like a throwaway romp when he performed it on the last tour, ostensibly in honor of the tearing down of the Meadowlands.  And yet, with just a few word twists, it serves as an incredibly worthy anchor to what is going to be an epic album.  In context to the rest of the album, the protagonist stands defiant telling all the forces that serve to bring him, us, down to step to the line, take their best shot.  And even when you knock down the structure, the spirit always remains.  A powerful reminder, indeed.  I can't help but see this as the rest of the story to the wide-eyed teen that was running from anything and everything some 37 years ago. Now in his mid to late 50s, having survived the rattle and hum of every day life, he now knows that you can run but you can't hide. There are forces greater then us all that can take you down even when you've tried to do everything right.  And yet, and yet, not even the wrecking ball can tear us down.  Remain resolute, if you think you've got the balls.

Enjoy this video from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and please, please, please buy the album:

A Matter of Trust

Never has a moment in baseball made me feel more like Michael Coreleone in Godfather III then the rescission of the 50-game suspension handed down to last year’s National League MVP, Ryan Braun, when he tested positive for extremely high levels of testosterone.

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I thought I was through with screaming from the rooftops about how poorly baseball is run and how foolish they've been in dealing with the drugs. Weren't they getting better? Hardly.

At this point, major league baseball remians popular by accident. It has a business model that makes no sense. It has too many teams that never have a realistic chance of competing. It operates under separate sets of rules between the leagues, which is idiotic. But perhaps its biggest problem is that it is presided over by Bud Selig, The Worst Commissioner in Baseball History™, a point I’ve made before and now need to make again.

My issues with Selig stem mostly from his fragile spine. He’s never once stood up for the game in a meaningful way by staring down narrow-minded owners who care only about their bottom line and not the health of the entire sport. And even in those rare cases where he could get consensus with the owners, Selig had no ability to take on a players’ union run by short-sighted shallow thinkers over any issues of substance, including substance abuse. By not standing up, Selig has fallen for almost every issue, not the least of which was baseball’s rampant drug problem, one of the worst scandals in American sports.

Selig’s apologists point to his leadership in bettering baseball’s drug policy as proof of his effectiveness while conveniently forgetting that Selig’s conversion on this issue came not of his free will but at the business end of a gun pointed at his head by Congress.

And yet, while baseball’s drug policy is indeed far better these days along comes a case like Braun's to put baseball and its approach nearly back to square one. Losing the Braun arbitration in the way they did makes it look as though baseball is being run by Peter Griffin. Maybe that would actually be better.

The Braun case more than demonstrates that baseball's brain trust can't even handle a urine sample effectively. How can it be trusted on anything reeking of even slightly more complication?

Let’s set the background.

Braun has claimed that his elevated testosterone levels aren’t the result of illegal drug use, which seems dubious if only because I’m still waiting for the first person to test positive to actually admit that they really did ingest illegal drugs.

Braun’s argument raised questions about the integrity of the testing process and was buttressed not by his actual test results but by the inherent distrust most people have toward drug testing in the first place. Anyone who has ever been subjected to a drug test, and by now that’s most of us, always fears the mythical “false positive” test. Despite the sophistication of the testing at this point that makes it nearly impossible to get a “false positive,” the potential for a false result hangs over the program like Billy Crystal hangs over the Oscars.

And so it is, sometimes to extremes, that we let irrational fears like these drive results that don’t seem plausible. Irrational or not, however, the fact remains that whenever there is any sort of hiccup in the protocol related to procuring and then securing the urine sample the results will always be suspicious. But that's not news. Nearly every drug testing case that is lost is because of an issue related to the testing protocol, no matter how small or insignificant of an issue it might be.

Had baseball’s deep thinkers remembered this while taking a more sober view of their case and acknowledged this fact before they ever decided to suspend Braun, this mess could have been avoided and Braun, if he is a drug user, caught under circumstances that could never have been questioned.

Braun based his claim of a false positive on what his lawyers argued was a broken custody chain in the handling of his urine sample. That’s not really true, but it’s true enough, which was also enough for neutral arbitrator Shyman Das.

The reason it’s true enough is simply that the person who took the urine sample for major league baseball never bothered to read Protocol 101. The same holds for MLB’s lawyers. From the time that the sample was collected until it was shipped (not tested, but shipped) was 44 hours or nearly two full days. The protocol in baseball is that once the sample is collected it is to be shipped immediately via FedEx to baseball’s testing lab in Montreal.

When Braun’s sample was collected, it was a Friday evening and supposedly after the local FedEx office had closed. So the collector let the sample sit in a container of Tupperware on his desk for almost two days, which reminds me never to accept an invitation to eat leftovers at that collector’s house.

You don’t need to know any more about the case than that to know that baseball should have just bit its lip and thrown out the sample and either re-tested Braun or lived to fight another day. No arbitrator was ever going to sign off on the results and the punishment that comes from them under that scenario. Again, it’s the fear of a false positive that mandates there be no screw up, no matter how small or insignificant in the testing process.

Anyone who has litigated a drug case, and I’ve done several of them, knows this to be the case. Yet baseball’s lawyers convinced baseball’s management that this fact didn’t matter and now they have a mess on their hands.

How did they get to this point? Because when you look at it holistically and not necessarily legally, you pretty much come to the conclusion that Braun had something illegal in his system. So you try to make it work because suspending the reigning MVP is a pretty big get.

In fairness to the collector, it wasn’t as if Braun peed directly into the Tupperware container. Braun peed into one of those brown bottles and handed it over. The collector immediately placed a seal over it, put that sealed bottle into a packet and sealed that packet as well and then put the packet into a FedEx box that he likewise sealed. To that point the protocol was followed and most of us know the routine. It’s just that with the FedEx office closed, the collector held onto it for 44 hours before sending it along. Once it arrived in Montreal, everything was completely in tact and sealed. There was no evidence that any of the seals had been tampered with or, by extension, that the sample was tainted.

That's pretty powerful stuff. But where major league baseball screwed up was in testing Braun at a time of day when the sample couldn’t be immediately shipped, though as Lester Munson, writing for ESPN, noted, Braun’s attorneys more or less debunked baseball’s claim that the FedEx office wasn’t open by highlighting several other FedEx offices nearby that were.

Because the sample sat in a sealed pouch for two days at the collector's house instead of in a lab, that raised more then enough doubt in the mind of the arbitrator on an issue that is fraught with doubts anyway. With the test discredited Braun’s suspension had to be overturned.

It's understandable how baseball got into this predicament. You combine a seemingly guilty looking player with a baseball hierarchy known more for missteps then efficient execution you end up with a recipe that yields a result pretty much in line with what they got. Yet if they had tested Braun a day earlier or maybe two days later, either of which would have been at a time when they could have found an open FedEx office, they could have nailed Braun and, in turn, looked serious about finally ridding the sport of drugs.

As it is, they look foolish instead. Maybe now Selig will understand that simply saying you have a world class drug testing program doesn’t make it so. As for ridding the sport of drugs, we’ll this is certainly a step backward. Unwittingly, by virtue of their own hubris, major league baseball has created the impression that they can’t be trusted. And that, really, is the sad legacy that Selig has written for the sport he claims to love.

Budget Fillers

There was a time in Cleveland when Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez and Omar Vizquel formed the heart of a team that gave Indians fans their most significant reason to cheer in decades. They were great players growing into the prime of their careers that several times put the Indians on the precipice of a World Series title that now seems further away then ever.

But players like Thome, Ramirez and Vizquel were never going to spend their careers in Cleveland. We can bitch about the reasons why but the truth is that the identity of a particular player and a particular team is as outdated as the reserve clause.

One of the byproducts of the system that Marvin Miller sold first to the players and eventually to the owners was a revolving door concept of player movement. You take two greedy parties—players and owners—whose economic interests naturally clash and eventually you end up a league full of players who, if there's any length to their careers, each probably average having played with 4 to 5 different teams by the time those careers are over.

If the Indians didn’t create the concept of “small market team” then they were at least at the forefront of the concept. When baseball’s runaway financial structure, driven by the kinds of dollars teams were willing to throw at players like Thome and Ramirez in particular, became too dizzying of a ride for less heeled owners around the league, teams either had to find a better way to make use of the money they had or become, well, the Kansas City Royals.

So for the Indians, like their West Coast cousins, the Oakland As, it was easy to say goodbye to players they never intended to keep and replace them with someone who might vaguely replicate their production at 1/10^th of the price.

As a result, every off season in Cleveland is filled not with splashy free agent signingsbut a smattering of goodbyes followed by acquisitions like Casey Kotchman, Kevin Slowey and Cristian Guzman. Even Derek Lowe fits the profile. It’s the only way that the Indians can think of to keep a budget within reason while still turning a profit for their owners.

But it’s a myth that only teams like Cleveland and Oakland do these sorts of things. The Indians and As may do more of this kind of barrel scraping then others, but there isn’t a team in the major leagues that isn’t in the market for an aging veteran pitcher with a history of success and coming off of arm surgery. Heck, Bartolo Colon was a big part of the Yankees’rotation last season.

That’s why it’s fascinating to watch when players like Thome, Ramirez and Vizquel, players who were such a big part of local fans’ dreams, face their comeuppance. No longer are they prizes to whom teams are still willing to throw indiscriminate money toward but instead they are, in effect, some other team’s Kotchman, Slowey or Guzman.

When the Oakland As signed Ramirez earlier this week, it more than drove home the point. Ramirez is mostly a discredited two time violator of baseball’s drug policy. He could be signed on the cheap because he grew fat and remained stupid and he has a 50-game suspension that still must be served.

But the other reason the As would take a chance on Ramirez is for the same reason that aging baby boomers will still buy tickets to a Paul McCartney concert. McCartney may be 70 years old but his voice is still good enough to make you remember when it was coming out of a 25 year old body.

So it is with Ramirez. He could get as big as Prince Fielder but as long as the sweet batting stroke remains in tact, and As general manager Billy Beane assures us it is, then there is very little to be lost except maybe a half million dollars if Ramirez is a complete bust. As cheap as teams can be, they still think little of giving away $500,000 to a player who could credibly occupy a final roster spot.

Still there is a certain pathetic underpinning to it all, isn’t there? Assuming Ramirez’s lack of self-discipline extended to matters financial, the assumption is that Ramirez signed because he needs the money. He never came across as someone who loved the game given his abject indifference toward its formalities for so many years. It's the sad epilogue really to the far headier days when he and his agent dangled the disingenuous notion of his re-signing with Cleveland under a “hometown discount” before maxing out with the Boston Red Sox.

Take away the two drug violations and Thome’s story closely parallels Ramirez’s. He left Cleveland in much the same way, with his agent trying to portray Indians’ management as the bad guys for not paying him his “value” even as he chased the maximum cash that any other team was willing to pay him knowing full well it wouldn't be Cleveland.

Thome had great years with the Phillies and became a very solid 1 percenter in the process. But age and weight and injuries caught up with Thome and for the last several years he’s been a hobbled mercenary looking for a few bucks and a way to extend his career. He’s now on his fourth team since 2006.

It, too, seems just a tad pathetic. And yet there is something gratifying by the way Thome, like Ramirez, has had to humble himself to those he exploited now that he's just another spare part, a plug hole in some team’s budget, as he clings to baseball even after making well in excess of $100 million during his career.

Then there’s Vizquel. He didn’t get there in the same way as Ramirez or Thome but he’s there all the same. Never the splashy free agent that either Ramirez or Thome was it could well be argued that his value as a baseball player was at least as high as either of them.

Vizquel didn’t leave Cleveland because he was chasing free agent dollars. He left because general manager Mark Shapiro kicked him, his 37 year old body and his relatively modest $6 million a year salary to the curb in favor of a potentially promising Jhonny Peralta who worked much more cheaply. Since then Vizquel went on to start for the San Francisco Giants for years but now finds himself as a 45 year old trying to keep a million dollar salary coming in. As long as he can still field the ball on occasion and doesn’t make waves, he’s the perfect plug hole in some team’s budget as well.

That Vizquel still clings to baseball as a bit player is a sad end to a glorious career. There's no reason not to take the money that some team wants to throw your way but it really is rather sad that in the pursuit of another dollar a player of his stature is willing to tarnish an otherwise glorious career.

In retrospect, it all seems rather ludicrous to have gotten so excited about trying to retain at least Ramirez and Thome, even as I still question Shapiro’s decision to jettison Vizquel when he did. Even if they all had remained in Cleveland and had put up exactly the same numbers as they did for their new teams, there is no certainty that the Indians would have won a World Series.

But even more to the point is simply that they more then prove that as much as major league baseball markets its superstars, the only real way to remain committed as a fan is to love the game more. Players come and go quickly, particularly these days, and their self interests will always break your hearts. But the game itself still endures and is the reason to watch. It’s the only way to be a fan in Cleveland and, frankly, every other city with a major or minor league team.

Lingering Items--Oncoming Bus Edition

One of the abiding questions for beleaguered Cleveland sports fans is whether or not LeBron James and Art Modell really belong in the same conversation. It's easy to equate the two sports pariahs because the similarities can be striking in the oddest ways.

From the classless and graceless exits to the sorry state in which they left their local fans it's quite natural to want to bury each up to his neck in his own private chamber  in Cleveland sports hell, drip honey on their foreheads and watch as rodents and fire ants pick them clean.

You'll never witness me asking anyone to forgive LeBron James for the shiv he stuck in this town's collective backs. But if presented with the Hobson's choice of pulling one or the other from in front of a RTA bus driven by a meth-addicted escaped felon, I'm pulling LeBron away every time.  Sorry, Artie.

And this was before LeBron's recent bout of maturity in the form of acknowledging that his noisy withdrawal from the local sports scene was a mistake. I don't begrudge any athlete chasing whatever dream comes his way. For James, the money was going to be there wherever he decided to play. Like any generational athlete what drives him is the elusive goal of immortality. In sports that's always been defined by championships.

What chafes about James is that ultimately he is not who we thought he was. We convinced ourselves he was Michael Jordan on limited evidence that came in the form of an ability to do things with a basketball that most of us can never fathom. When he left, we imagined with it all the championships he'd take with him. 

But the sad truth when it comes to James is that he's never going to be who he thinks he is.  He's not a king and he's certainly not Jordan. He's an overgrown kid who just happens to be really good at his sport. If or when that championship comes his way, he'll never own it like Jordan or Kobe. He'll have earned it on someone else's back.

Saying all this isn't supposed to serve as criticism, which is why James gets a pass when the only choice is to save the lesser of two evils. James is not a leader but instead one of the most talented followers in history. His inability to convince his superstar friends to play in Cleveland instead of Miami (although I blanche at the notion of Chris Bosh as a superstar) is all the proof you need of that.  His playoff collapses are just the icing on the cake.

In that context James chasing his dreams where the real alpha dogs take them makes sense even if it hurts. James reached the conclusion long before the rest of us that there was no reason to build a team around him. He works far better when it's built around someone else.

So James throwing the locals a bone by suggesting he could see himself playing in Cleveland somewhere down the road is pretty much the same thing Jim Thome said on his way out of town the first time, too. It was the kind of empty statement that athletes say to get to the next question.

Besides I don't expect it to ever come to pass anyway unless James ends up like Thome, a mercenary playing out the string of on a great career but unable to call it quits. But even then I still doubt it, at least if Dan Gilbert still owns the team. He strikes me as the kind of guy that James is not--driven to success and motivated by slights.  And that’s a good thing.

***

James doesn't exactly warrant a pass even as his situation at least has a thread of schoolboy logic to it. Modell, on the other hand, is a far different cat. In simple terms, he ran a franchise into the ground through the kind of stupidity the Lerner family can only dream about and then uprooted it for the sole purpose of trying to preserve it for the benefit of his idiot son.

There has been a lot of revisionist history afoot when it comes to Modell, mostly led by Modell directly or through those he has paid to be his dishonest messengers. Modell was always quick to try to blame a city he thought was more preoccupied with the Indians as the driving force to what he has claimed was an inevitability. 

But nothing about Modell moving the Browns was the least bit inevitable. Owning a NFL franchise is the same as owning a license to print money. You can be Dan Snyder stupid and still keep each of your loved ones in Gulfstreams. The only thing you can't be is Art Modell stupid and before you dismiss this as merely snark, remember that despite the ludicrous stimulus package that the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland gave Modell he still went through it like a brokenhearted teenage goes through Mars bars and had to sell the team anyway.

Modell could have sold the team to a hundred different buyers without ever sending Browns fans afloat. If he didn't like his deal with the city there were dozens of others who would have found a way to make it work in Cleveland. He moved the team because he was selfish and amoral. He could not have cared less about the psychological or financial impact that selfishness had on the thousands that helped finance a lifestyle that he didn't deserve.

Modell was a business owner who bled the city and its patrons for as long as he could and then skipped town to do it again somewhere else. James on the other hand was and always will be just a really good player. His leaving was felt because he’s an otherworldly talent and he was classless in his exit but the scale is just not the same and never will be.

***

Putting James and Modell in their proper historical context makes me tend to appreciate the entry level ineptitude of Randy Lerner a little more both for what it is and what it isn't.

 

The Browns have been awful under the Lerner family ownership. To that there can be no doubt. But at least we have the ability to scream from the rooftops about it. We've seen the alternative in Cleveland and as between an incompetently run franchise and none at all, there really is no choice.

No matter how poorly Randy Lerner has run the franchise, no matter how frustrating his impetuousness has been, there's virtually no likelihood that he abandons the city.  The one thing he has that trumps all is money and while even that can be fleeting, there's no chance he squanders a NFL team like Modell did.

That's really quite good news actually, probably the best of all news. The team is on solid financial footing.  Under Modell it was always a shaky existence.

The problem now is the abject inability to build off that solid base. Lerner's best qualities as an owner are his passion and his willingness to write a check. Unfortunately those are his only qualities as well. This team is still light years away from being a top tier outfit and so much of that starts with Lerner's poor stewardship.

Still, as much as Lerner frustrates me, he also makes me glad that he was willing to take over when his father passed away. While this town and this team could always do much better, we know firsthand it could be much worse.  And that's always something I try to remember each time the Pittsburgh Steelers treat us take our temperatures rectally twice each year.

***

 

With NFL draft speculation in full swing now, this week’s question to ponder:  Are the Browns’ needs at quarterback so vast as compared to the rest of its needs that it’s worth trading two number one picks for Robert Griffin III?