This past January, in the midst of the Romeo Crennel and Phil Savage firings, much was made of the difference between the Browns and the Cavs when it came to having a complete vision for what kind of team they wanted to be. The Cavs publicly and privately made it obvious that their identity was built around defense. If you wanted to get minutes, you had to play defense - the players knew this, the media, the fans - the reasons why were clear: that old cliche defense wins championships…except in this case you had two individuals, Danny Ferry and Mike Brown, who had won championships in San Antonio and could speak on that cliche with some authority.
The Browns…no one really knew. At first it seemed like the team would be structured around a big play offense, but that was really based around conjecture, not any sort of communique from the organization, and then Braylon Edwards started dropping passes, the fans started screaming for Brady Quinn, and the whole thing rapidly, dramatically collapsed.
Successfully operating any kind of organization or managing a career takes vision. I’m a writer, and I can’t be successful if I don’t understand what kinds of things I’m going to write. If I can’t grasp my strengths and weaknesses, the genres and characters I’m most interested in and most compelled to create, I’m dead - I don’t know where to begin, people who want to read what I write don’t know what to expect, it becomes possibility and information overload.
The same thing applies to assembling and building a team. You need a bottomline, something to always go back to when you’re trying to make a decision: we want Player X instead of Player Y because he does what our team does.
Lost in all of the talk about the Indians’ problems is how closely they resemble the Browns when it comes to vision. If they have one, I can’t see it, nor can I hear it being communicated to me through the media.
Another Moneyball reference - the A’s statistical analysis at that time revolved around the importance of on base percentage above pretty much every other offensive and defensive stat. The reasoning was simple - if your team has an OBP of 1.000 they score an infinite amount of runs and can’t be beaten. The goal then was to get an OBP as close to 1.000 as possible. As a result, the team concentrated on finding players with a high OBP.
The Indians, from what I can tell, have no focus other than, perhaps, striking out. Since 2005, they’ve been no better than third in the AL in strikeouts.
2005 (2nd), 2006 (1st), 2007 (3rd), 2008 (3rd), 2009 (1st)
Now strikeouts may not be the most important stat, but they certainly don’t help, and you’d be hard-pressed to make an argument about the Indians having more defining characteristic than how much they strikeout.
In doing a little research for this piece, I wanted to see if I could find anything that referred to Shapiro expressing a vision for the team. I stumbled upon this article from Cleveland Magazine in 2000:
“A few weeks earlier, John Hart had confided to Shapiro that he was thinking about stepping down as the Tribe’s general manager. Hart said he believed that Shapiro, his assistant GM, would be his natural successor. So Shapiro crafted a 100-page business plan outlining his vision for the organization to present to new owner Larry Dolan.
But before he did, Shapiro brought the plan along with him for a red-pen critique by his friend Tim Mueller. “It was one of the most impressive documents I’ve ever seen,” recalls Mueller, chief development officer for the city of Cleveland. “It boiled down to the basics of running a baseball team: hiring good solid people and treating them as peers, empowering them to make decisions, backing them up after they’ve made them and allowing them to shine.
“It was about creating an organization that lasts long after you’re gone.”
I didn’t go to business school. My roommate in college did. I don’t think that counts for much, but I do understand that simplicity is key. A complex message is harder to communicate, has more ins and outs to get lost in, and can become too verbose to latch onto and believe in. This is why slogans like “Yes we can!” work, or “everything is built on defense.” “Please sit down for a couple hours and read my 100 page business plan” does not.
Unfortunately, it may be that last statment - “It was about creating an organization that lasts long after you’re gone” - that haunts this franchise for years to come.
Even if the Dolans do the right thing and fire Mark Shapiro.
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