Yesterday, ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick wrote a column in which he made out offseason report cards for every team in the AL Central. The Indians placed last in Crasnick’s list, with a ‘D’ grade. His reasoning was simple: Chris Antonetti made no moves other than signing Austin Kearns—not exactly an impact contract—whereas every other team in the division made at least one banner-headline trade or signing.
These grades are the sports journalism equivalent of white bread—completely empty calories that satisfy hunger for only the minimum possible time period.
And yet, I can’t even be upset about them because I am one of the hordes of people who is demanding to be fed at staggering pace.
Let me explain.
With rare exceptions, writers making grandiose statements about the future of entire teams based on current moves (or lack thereof) are all but useless. Yes, occasionally, someone like Peter King will correctly predict the Super Bowl match-up in the pre-season, but for every one of those hits there is a colossal collection of misses.
For another quick home-town example, consider that Mel Kiper Jr did a column a few weeks ago in which he regraded every NFL team’s 2010 draft. In that column, most teams’ choices ended up looking considerably better or much worse to Kiper after the rookies in question actually played a full season than they did when they’d just put on a hat with their new team’s logo. (The Browns, for instance, were raised from a C to a B+.)
This shouldn’t be surprising, with hindsight being 20/20 and all that. Almost inevitably, the writers who compile these columns will admit that they’re barely ever right. (King, to his credit, has repeatedly made the point that his correct Super Bowl prediction was possibly a once-in-a-career anomaly.) In many cases the preseason picks become recurring sources of good-natured ridicule among writers’ colleagues and fans.
All of this begs the question: Why do they write these columns in the first place?
Easy: because there’s demand for information, and the writers have to fill space.
When tasked with writing about sports in a dead zone like the MLB offseason, you’re forced to manufacture stories. Aside from minor deals like Vlad Guerrero signing with the Orioles last week, the “breaking news” portion of MLB offseason activity is over. Spring training hasn’t started yet. And it’ll take til at least July before anyone really has any idea which teams are legitimately good and which aren’t.
As Mike noted yesterday, this is true of a certain period in all sports. Right now is almost indisputably the worst segment of the sports calendar year. The only major league working is the NBA, and they haven’t even entered into the stretch playoff run yet. (Not that it will make much of a difference if you’re a Cavs fan.)
This entire situation is made worse by the fact that there’s a high probability that both the NFL and NBA will go through lock-outs in 2011. If that happens, we’re all going to be seeing speculative sports journalism taken to a whole new level between now and 2012.
I don’t begrudge any writers this—it’s the machine that we as sports fans/consumers have created. Every day we log onto various sites demanding new information to help us whittle away time. The writers need to say SOMETHING, so they create predictions, then re-evaluate those predictions mid-season, then re-re-evaluate them at the end of the season. If they don’t, websites go dead, TV shows go dark, and people lose jobs. It’s self-preservation, really.
In fact, this post itself is a perfect example. What the hell is going on in the world of Cleveland sports that REALLY needs to be discussed right now? Not much, as far as I can tell. And based on his comments from yesterday, Mike agrees with me. So for the purpose of creating a post, I dug out an article about the Tribe just so I could spend time writing about how useless the article was because, in theory, there are people who are going to come to this website at some point today looking for content. Ironic, right?
It will be an interesting experiment to see if there’s actually a lower quantity of sports news out there if a double-lock-out happens. My guess is that there won’t be. There’s too much demand for information, at least from the major providers, for them to just allow the cycle to lapse. So my guess is we’re all going to have to get used to the idea that a greater and greater quantity of the stories available to readers will be based on rumors and predictions rather than actual facts or performance. And I as a writer am going to have to get used to the idea that the same will be true of the “stories” I generate.
In short, Jerry Crasnick, I ain’t mad at you. We’re all playing the same game.
Growing up, I heard the phrase “fair weather fan” a lot. It was always used in a derogatory manner.
A fair weather fan was a person who only rooted for a team when they were winning. He wasn’t loyal. He didn’t stick with an organization through thick and thin. Maybe this person didn’t even have a team that he would describe consistently as his favorite. When the Browns were good, he rooted for the Browns. But when the Browns were terrible, maybe he rooted for the Cowboys.
In other words, he mainly rooted for the Cowboys.
Instilled in me then was the belief that good fans watched every game, checked every box score, cheered for all four quarters or all nine innings, no matter the team’s win-loss record or its in-game deficit.
How do I feel about this now?
Well, frankly, I feel that these ideas are pretty much bogus.
While I understand that sports teams often become symbols for entire cities, sports - in their purest form - are merely entertainment. They are supposed to be fun to watch. Sporting events are meant to be enjoyed.
Why then should any of us willingly sit in front of a TV or enter an arena or stadium to knowingly be bored, frustrated, or depressed?
We shouldn’t. It makes no sense.
You might imagine why I’m raising this point now. On Tuesday, I sat through all 48 minutes of the Cavs game against the 76ers. For 48 minutes, I wished I was doing something else. Although the Cavs ended up winning, the basketball wasn’t interesting or beautiful to watch. Anderson Varejao continued to prove to me that he is the best all-around basketball player in Cleveland, but other than that, I felt empty.
On the contrary, during Sunday’s Browns game against the Jets, I was absolutely riveted. Ask Tim. Ask Dad. I never feel that way. Football is my least favorite sport of the three majors. A lot of testosterone in between those two white lines. Yet, on Sunday I found myself becoming a football fan, caring more about the Browns, as well as the nature of the game itself, with each successive snap.
Should I feel bad about this?
No, I don’t think I should. To me, the analogy is simple. One game was a slow, uninviting movie about two people talking in a room. The outcome of their conversation was irrelevant. The other game was a suspense-filled action film, with high (or at least higher) stakes and well-executed drama. Who wouldn’t turn the first movie off? Who wouldn’t pay to go to the theater to see the second flick?
Really, the logic is fairly obvious.
I’m not sure why we have attached some kind of badge of honor to following a bad or boring team. If Tim and I were to write an entirely uninteresting movie, no one would feel obliged to go see it (except maybe our mom and dad). Why should we criticize fans for walking away from their favorite teams if said teams are producing uninvolving semi-competitive theater?
I don’t think we should, especially when we consider how many other entertainment options are available, or simply how many other opportunities life presents. In fact, I think we should actually commend the die hard fan who doesn’t bother to watch the 2010-11 Cavaliers play the New Jersey Nets and instead sits down and has a cup of coffee with his parents. Maybe he reads a book. Maybe he goes for a walk and thinks about his future … I don’t know … but there’s nothing dishonorable about turning off or avoiding bad entertainment.
Those of you who aren’t totally bored by Indians coverage at this point in the season / summer know that I’ve written about how the team’s pitchers don’t strike anybody out. In fact, they are currently (prior to Monday’s game against the White Sox) last in the American League in strikeouts with 731. In comparison, Tampa Bay leads the AL with 966 K’s, which is a pretty remarkable difference.
I’ve consistently viewed the Indians’ inability to strikeout opposing batters as a severe weakness for the team moving forward. Strikeouts are important if you don’t want to give up runs. So is avoiding the long ball - which the Indians’ pitchers are actually pretty good at (currently tied for 2nd in the AL with 116) - and preventing base on balls (which the Indians suck at, as they’re worst in the AL with 482 BB). However, listening to incoming GM Chris Antonetti the other day, I started to wonder if maybe the Indians are thinking about strikeouts a little differently.
In his small press conference with reporters, which was posted on the Cleveland.com website, Antonetti spoke about the team’s defense and its need to successfully field ground balls. This, of course, should be obvious to all of us, but what Antonetti added - and what manager Manny Acta confirmed implied in recent comments about Jeanmar Gomez “pitching to contact” - is that the Indians are aware of the fact that their pitchers can’t strike anybody out, and that they’re actually okay with that.
This truck me as particularly interesting because it suggested that Shapiro and Antonetti’s strategy on pitchers has been somewhat unique.
What I suspect the Indians are thinking is this: since strikeout pitchers are now universally deemed the most valuable, they also cost the most money. The always cost conscious Indians then have chosen to look in a different direction, somewhere they hope they can find undervalued assets and try to exploit market inefficiencies. Instead of concentrating on strikeout pitchers, they’ve focused on ground ball pitchers. You saw this all over the opening day starting rotation, with Fausto Carmona, Jake Westbrook, and Justin Masterson. Theoretically, these pitchers won’t strikeout as many hitters, but they will keep the ball in the ballpark, where - again theoretically - a skilled infield will be able to convert all of those batted balls into outs.
Now I’d be shocked if Antonetti, Shapiro, or Acta would disagree with me that pitchers with high strikeout ratios are unattractive. They’ve gone after these types of pitchers in the draft with Alex White and Drew Pomeranz after all - and spent a lot of money, relatively speaking, on them (Pomeranz was paid a bigger bonus than any other player selected this year).
What this tells me is that the Indians would tell me that they’d love to sign more strikeout-heavy pitchers, but that they’re too expensive, except when there’s considerable risk involved (e.g. the draft). Even then that risk is lower than it would be if the Indians were to commit a truckload of money to Cliff Lee this offseason. At the same time, in other avenues - i.e. trades and free agent signings - the Indians are looking to exploit the system by acquiring ground ball pitchers, who are less costly and can hypothetically be quite effective so long as they throw strikes, don’t give up home runs, and have a good infield behind them (let’s also not forget the value of the double play ball).
I think this strategy is actually pretty intelligent given the resources the GM’s have been supplied with and is at least one reason to try to think positively about the team’s future.
Of course, it all goes to shit if the infield doesn’t get better (third base I see you) and the pitchers can’t throw the ball over the plate.
For any sports econ nerds out there, this has been a big week. The always-popular sports blog Deadspin got their paws on a mountain of leaked financial data from the Tampa Bay Rays, Pittsburgh Pirates, Texas Rangers, LA Angels, Florida Marlins, and Seattle Mariners. In a Wikileaks-like move, they posted those documents online to give everyone a detailed look behind the curtain of baseball finance.
What do the statements prove? In short, that baseball is a lot more profitable than the league and the owners would like the public to believe—even for clubs that are losing a lot of baseball games and in turn, a lot of gate receipts.
If you’d like a window into how this is happening, I happen to have scoured the internet to find an excellent resource written exactly 1 year ago on this same topic. For a more detailed, wonkish breakout of the situation, I also highly recommend the ongoing series by The Biz of Baseball (starting here).
I’m not going to spend a ton of time sussing out the various financial realities because both Deadspin and The Biz of Baseball—along with numerous articles by the hometown papers of each franchise, which you can find links to in both of the above—do a much better job.
What I want to focus on instead is this question: now that we can be pretty sure that the Dolans are indeed turning a healthy profit on a losing team, should we really give a damn?
I say that we can be almost certain because of the documents leaked on the Pirates. Pittsburgh’s MLB franchise is of course a crap team in a similar-sized market with similar demographics which also has made the decision in recent years to consistently trade away their best and highest paid/arbitration-eligible players for prospects and cash savings. Any of this sound familiar?
In 2007, the Pirates finished in last place with a record of 68-94…and according to the leaked documents, they scored a net income of $15M. In 2008, they defended their last place title by going 67-95…and earned a net income of $14M in the process.
In light of all this, it’s foolish to believe that the Tribe lost somewhere between $12-16MM this past season, as Larry Dolan famously claimed. In fact, it seems probable that their own profits were similar to those of the Pirates’ ownership group.
Again, though, the question is whether or not this really matters.
First off, no one should ever assume that anyone important or rich enough to be worthy of an interview is publicly telling the truth about anything. So if these financial realities somehow make you feel betrayed by the Dolans’ cries of poverty, that’s really your own fault for being gullible. As I’ve said before, running a pro sports franchise is a business, not a charity. If the owners were actually getting killed financially, they’d sell the team. Period. The fact that it’s so difficult to buy a franchise in any sport tells you basically everything you need to know about their profitability.
I imagine that most Indians’ fans wouldn’t react negatively based on moral principle, though. If anything, the most popular gripe seems to be that if ownership is printing money off the poor performance of the team, they owe it to the fans to be pumping that money back into the roster to try to improve it—specifically in regard to re-signing their best players and chasing free agents.
The problem with this viewpoint is that it’s not a smart way to operate a mid-market MLB team. Profitable as the club may be, Cleveland is never going to be in the same league as the Yankees, Red Sox, and Phillies. They can’t succeed on the same business model that those chipped-up major-market east coast teams do.
Consider this: if we assume that the Indians netted $29MM in 2007-8 like the Pirates did, all but $8.5MM of that would’ve gone to pay Kerry Wood for his services in 2008-9. Or, another way of looking at it: the Yankees signed CC Sabathia for 6 years at $140MM, or an average of $23,333,333 per. Was he enough to make the Indians competitive in 2008? Uh, no. At that rate, it’s impossible to argue that he would’ve been anything other than a catastrophe for the team, considering that his contract would’ve put them $17.5MM in the red had all other factors remained the same. And considering that one great pitcher can’t pull an entire team into contention if the rest of the roster is deficient, that seems like a solid assumption to make.
As we’ve argued again and again in the past year, the Tribe needs to spend intelligently, not profusely. Throwing a bunch of money at the problem is far from a solution (see also: Browns, Cleveland, 2008-9). Instead, the only way for them to compete is to stock the farm system with low-priced developmental talent. So if the organization wants to spend money to make the team better, they should pump it into the scouting department. Assuming they get the right types of people to join up, the Dolans’ per-dollar return on that investment is going to be far greater than any they can make on the free agent market.
If you want proof of this, just look at one of the other teams involved in the MLB financial leaks: Tampa Bay. The Rays netted a cool $11MM in 2007 en route to a pathetic 66-96 record. This seeming failure was the final year of the exact same strategy I’m suggesting for the Indians. The following season, the Rays won 97 games and made the World Series. After falling back to Earth a bit in 2009, they are now in 1st place in the AL East and look like they’re poised to compete for years to come.
Did it suck to be a Tampa fan while they slowly built that roster of young players in the several seasons leading up to 2007? I’m sure. Did ownership likely endure the same kinds of pitchfork-and-torches threats from the public as Cleveland ownership has been subject to since 2008? Probably. But instead of caving to fan pressure and doing something stupid, Tampa stuck to the business model that had made their in-state buddies the Florida Marlins two-time World Series champs. Now their fans are thanking them for it.
So it is with the Indians. If we avoid the knee-jerk reaction that it’s offensive and evil for the owners to make a significant profit off of a bottom-feeding team, it becomes clear that the Dolans and the front office—again, assuming the comparisons I’m drawing are accurate—are doing the right thing. So don’t be fooled by the financials alone. If the team is being bolstered in the savviest ways rather than just the most expensive, what’s perceived as the Dolans’ greed can, in fact, be good for us all.
However, if they blow this, I promise I’ll be first in line at the hardware store for the pitchfork and torch sale.
I realize the title of this post sounds like a sequence in an old Western. Don’t blame me for that. Blame the ownership of the Cleveland Indians, a team that I should really start referring to by another name due to the inherent backwardness of its current nickname.
Please send suggestions.
Having said that, I was struck by a quote I saw from Manny “Apocalypse Now” Acta after yesterday’s loss to the Detroit Tigers (that nickname, by the way, sounds incredibly apropos given the season we’ve all witnessed so far). When asked about the Indians committing 2 errors, Acta said, “We’ve had fielding concerns all season.” The team now leads the American League with 93 errors on the year.
As a mid market franchise that spends like a small market franchise, the Indians cannot afford to have poor defense. Great defense, as everyone knows, makes your pitchers better. It is also, I would imagine, far cheaper to acquire than great offense, in part because it’s still somewhat difficult to measure statistically.
Furthermore, the Indians pitchers, as everyone also knows, have not been great this year. In fact, they are last in the AL in strikeouts. The poor fielding is all the more troubling then because a bunch of balls are in play: the Indians lead the AL in Chances (Put Outs + Assists + Errors).
Surprisingly, Indians’ pitchers are tied for third best in the AL when it comes to giving up home runs (only 110 so far). So if the team had better fielding, the quality of their pitching would be greatly improved.
Just how bad is the Tribe’s defense when it comes to other statistical measures besides errors? Obviously, the number of errors committed isn’t a perfect way to look at a team’s defense because it only accounts for those balls that fielders were able to reach. If a team has fielders with lousy range, they may have less errors because they get to less balls. Or if a team has fielders with great range, they might have more errors because they get to less balls. Finally, if a team has fielders with poor range and still a ton of fielders, well, then they’re basically fucked.
Now, advanced defensive metrics in baseball are a labyrinth that I have spiraled helplessly into while in the process of writing this post. For example, I fell down the stairs while contemplating Rdrs/yr or BIS, the number of runs above or below average a fielder is worth per 1200 innings. I walked into a wall while thinking about Rtot/yr or Total Zone, the number of runs above or below average a fielder is worth based on the number of plays made. But if you’re willing to look at some of these advanced defensive metrics, the Indians actual ratings are a mixed bag.
They are second in the AL in Rdrs/yr with 7 (Oakland is first with 9). They are sixth in the AL in Total Zone.
Most telling, perhaps, the Indians are third to last in Defensive Efficiency which is a measure of the percentage of in-play balls that are converted into outs. In other words, the Indians rate low in getting players out who hit the ball … not good when your pitchers are terrible at striking hitters out.
Individually speaking, there are a few bright spots:
Shin Soo Choo is first in Total Zone Runs or the number of runs above or below average a player is worth based on the number of plays he makes. In other words, Choo saves runs by getting to and making a lot of plays better than anyone else in the American League.
Lou Marson is 2nd in the AL in caught stealing percentage. Carlos Santana is tied for 4th.
Matt LaPorta leads the entire AL in Range Factor/9Inn as a 1B.
Asdrubal Cabrera is second in the AL in Range Factor/9Inn as a SS.
Okay, that’s enough. I’ve reached the point where my head might explode - if it hasn’t already - and I’m sure you’re in the same boat. So what’s the takeaway?
A couple things, I think. One, if I’m interpreting Total Zone properly, strong range and performance at the end of that range isn’t saving anyone a whole lot of runs. Secondly, the Indians aren’t getting guys out who hit the ball, which is probably a product of poor pitching and making errors. Really, defense isn’t the issue, in my opinion. What the Indians truly need is pitchers who can strike hitters out. When they get that, the defense will be good enough.
If, of course, the offense can score any runs. Right now, they sure as hell can’t (11th in the AL).
