That's Just The Way It Is, Baby

Looks like a few of my recent twenty questions were answered over the last couple of weeks, eh?

Despite a few misgivings I had with the idea going into last weekend (all of them to do with the present state of the team), my brother and I took in a Tribe game this past Thursday, and it was a corker: the Cleveland Indians held the slap-hitting Minnesota Twins to 1 run while managing to score just 2 of their own. This was the kind of tense match up where every pitch and every runner could be the difference in the game (the best kind there is, really), and we had a great time.

Normally this narrow margin of victory does not hold up over nine innings in such a hellish parody of expectations as this season has been, yet the Tribe somehow prevailed. As rickety as it looked at times, Fausto Carmona's second major league start since being sent all the way down to Arizona ball two months ago was better overall than I could have expected, though he's still walking far too many batters for my liking. The difference now is that Carmona doesn't seem to rattle as easily as he did before, and he now appears to have reacquired the ability to limit damage when base runners are in scoring position (Minnesota's only run for the game was scored on a wild pitch) without throwing an extra dozen pitches in order to do so. Carmona may not be the invincible, unhittable phenom he was in 2007 anymore, but this is absolutely an improvement on his early season form.

The bigger story here is that the team that we watched last Thursday afternoon was not quite the same club we saw barely two weeks before. First baseman Ryan Garko, pitcher Carl Pavano, outfielder Ben Francisco, relief pitcher Rafael Betancourt, pitcher Cliff Lee, and catcher Victor Martinez (arguably the heart and soul of the team, and in many peoples eyes the true face of the Cleveland Indians) are gone now, mostly traded away for desperately needed pitching prospects after the Indians front office was forced once again to look towards the future in realization that the present just ain't gonna fly. While the pace of retooling may have slowed since the hectic end of July, the surprise recent move of Pavano (ironically, to the Twins) signals that we're not quite through with moving assets around just yet. It definitely wouldn't surprise me to see other players such as Kelly Shoppach, Jhonny Peralta and Jamey Carroll dealt in the off-season, if not before.

I have no desire to see Eric Wedge at the helm of this team at the start of the next season and I have serious misgivings with various aspects/levels/tenets of General Manager Mark Shapiro's organization, yet I do not believe that these moves were made lightly and with any malicious or lunk-headed intention. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the last two weeks on a personal level is the apparent belief by many fans that I talk to at work that Shapiro, Wedge and team owner Larry Dolan are simply "being cheap" and refusing to put a decent team on the field for whatever nefarious conspiracy-minded reason sounds good at the time.

Incredibly, local columnists, talk show hosts and sports desk anchors feed into this simplistic ignorance of reality rather than actually try to explain why these trades had to happen. I'm not sure of the reasons behind this decision to pander to the mob: it's not like this is discussing neurosurgery and you don't need a master's degree in business to figure out that most of major league baseball is being held in a financial headlock by the 5 teams at the upper end of the financial pyramid. These teams are able to use their vast resources to cherry pick their future starters from the remaining 25 clubs, all of whom are forced to rely on smarts, guile, timing and not a little bit of luck to put together what they hope are contending teams on a comparatively shoestring budget (and hoping to God they don't have to write off the inevitable busts, which is nowhere near as easy for a small-to-mid-market team as it is for Boston, Chicago or New York).

It is this frustration with the misdirected vitriol of the fans that has spurred me to write about the current economic state of major league baseball in the hope of at least instilling some basic understanding of why "it is what it is" (as the players are so fond of saying). It's okay to be mad: hell, I'm furious over losing Martinez (the closest thing to a hero I've had over the last few years) for lack of anywhere to put him and being stuck with 3 more seasons of Travis Hafner instead, but fans need to be focusing their anger at the system instead of the people doing the best they can to work within its boundaries.

Fans are at least partially correct on the "spend the money and win" angle: with only a few exceptions, the teams with the most dosh to spend are the ones who usually wind up in the postseason. These teams may not always win it all, sure (just ask the New York Yankees, who in of the rare instances of poetic justice in modern life, have spent over a billion dollars since their last World Series title and still have no follow-ups to show for it), but they can certainly get most of the way there before letting the dice fall where they may.

The top 10 pro baseball teams by 2009 payroll, preceded by payroll amount in millions, and followed by their current standings (sourced from ESPN):

1. 201.5 New York Yankees (#1 AL East)
2. 135.8 New York Mets (#4 NL East. Ow.)
3. 135.0 Chicago Cubs (#2 NL Central)
4. 122.7 Boston Red Sox (#2 AL East. 6 games behind NY)
5. 115.1 Detroit Tigers (#1 AL Central)
6. 113.7 Los Angeles Angels (#1 AL West)
7. 113.0 Philadelphia Phillies (#1 NL East)
8. 103.0 Houston Astros (#3 NL Central. Whoops.)
9. 100.5 Los Angeles Dodgers (#1 NL West)
10. 98.9 Seattle Mariners (#3 AL West)

The only team at the top of its division that is not listed above is the NL Central St. Louis Cardinals, who are 13th on the list with 88.5 million (that said, the Cubs trail them by only 2 games). The Cleveland Indians, for the sake of noting, are 15th on the list with a 2009 payroll of 81.6 million, which only further underlines just how badly they have underperformed this year.

Many fair-weather Indians fans have been screaming themselves hoarse over the last 2 weeks, proclaiming that they are "through" with the team and that they "never going to another game again" and sundry other expressions of disgust, blaming the Dolans (and/or Shapiro and Wedge) for the sinking attendance numbers at Progressive Field games this year. Apparently, many of these fans have failed to notice that the Indians have ranked near the bottom of the league in attendance totals for some time now, averaging only 22,500 people per game this year in a stadium that can seat twice that amount. Even during the magical 2007 season, the Tribe's first playoff berth in six years, attendance only really surged over the last two months of the regular season campaign, when it was clear that the Tribe were post-season contenders. Even considering that the team made it to within one game of the World Series, 2007's year-end attendance rating was still 9th in the American League with about 28,500 per game (the ranking was the same last year, though the per-game figure was closer to 27,000). While these numbers are, incidentally, improvements over the rebuilding years of 2003 and 2004, it can be safely extrapolated that even with a contending squad on the field, the glory years of 455 consecutive sold-out games are long gone, not to mention the once-surging local economy that powered that impressive statistic.

Attendance and merchandise sales are vital parts of any club's revenue stream, but the real separator over the last decade has been cable television networks, and the cold demographic realities of advertising and subscription revenue is what truly weeds out the men (New York, Boston and Los Angeles) from the boys (everyone else). Ever since the Atlanta Braves started pulling in big money from revenues generated by team owner Ted Turner's cable station WTBS in the early 1980s followed by ESPN's acquisition of broadcast rights at the dawn of the 1990s, the transition of baseball away from broadcast stations has gathered speed to the point now where one can hardly ever see a baseball game outside of cable television. While the popularity of the sport may have waned over the years, a lot of people still watch baseball games at home (or at the bar) rather than attend the games in person (certainly a lot of disgruntled Indians fans do this, judging by their posts to various discussion forums), and if baseball owners were to get a cut of the fees people gladly put up for cable/satellite TV packages, it stands to reason that there is an awful lot of money to be made.

Eventually, many cities with big league sports teams launched their own regional sports networks (a kind of homer mini-ESPN, in effect), and the combined revenues/subscriber fees from those networks could then be used to fund operations, pay salaries, obtain free agents, et cetera. With at least 162 games played by each team annually, most of them lasting three hours in duration, baseball quickly became the dominant sport (read: "cash cow") of the RSNs. For many smaller teams, these networks offer at least some measure of financial competition with the mega markets ... but when you're comparing the audience cume of, say, Tampa Bay with that of the New York City metropolitan area, "some" is nowhere near enough.

Just how unequal is this distribution of newfound wealth? According to Forbes magazine:

"For the 2008 season the Yankees received $80 million in rights fees from YES (note: the team's RSN, launched in 2002), more than double the local cable revenue of every team but the Angels and the New York Mets, who earned $52 million through its RSN, SportsNet New York. In fact, it was more than the entire media revenue (both national and local) of all but six teams: the Mets, Atlanta Braves, Dodgers, Cubs, Angels and Red Sox."

Another revelation from the same article: Cleveland's own haul from their SportsTime Ohio isn't listed among the Top 10 in baseball (even the Washington Nationals make more from their RSN, for Christ's sake!).

Things were bad enough with disparity ten years ago, now they seem to be getting completely out of hand. Without some form of revenue sharing or (only slightly more realistically) a salary cap, it's difficult at best to imagine how these financial imbalances will ever keep from hobbling five out of every six teams in baseball to the benefit of the remaining sixth.

What has to happen in order to force a change towards a level playing field? A strike? Who, exactly, is going to strike over this? Certainly not the players, whose union would gladly shut down the game instead over any agreement that might drive the ludicrous salaries of the game's biggest names down rather than up. While I'd love to imagine long-suffering baseball fans across the heartland states finally realizing they've been ranting at the wrong people for the reasons why their middle-market team hands over all of the best players to the coastal organizations, what would they actually do about it? Unsubscribe en masse from cable television? Cease going to ballgames? Oh wait, they already did that. Uhhh, large demonstrations outside of said ballparks in an attempt to reach those who are still going and teach them the error of their ways? Sure, yeah, but come on man there's a Cavs game on tonight ...

So, that leaves it up to the owners. Well, some of the owners, anyway. I don't see Theo Epstein or the Steinbrenner Brothers ever assenting to an agreement that would theoretically erase their biggest advantage over the rest of the league. So, would the owners of the bottom dozen teams come together and bar their teams from playing until a fairer system can be hammered out, in effect holding the entire season hostage? I suppose this stunt has some element of plausibility, but also seems extremely unlikely. So much for the owners. Barring some kind of sea-change of incalculable magnitude from within or outside the sport (or a major redrawing and redistribution of the current luxury tax system as it affects the sport's payroll), the playing field looks to remain tilted for the foreseeable future. Insert pithy "ain't that life" remark here.

Bah. All of this is a bunch of crap that proves nothing, the fans reply. The Dolan's need to step aside and sell the team to someone who is not afraid to spend some money so that we can compete with the big guys.

OK, first off, what billionaire is going to be the prospective buyer of an overvalued baseball team (Dolan bought the Indians from the late Dick Jacobs at a quite-frankly ridiculous price) that has just announced that it will be losing sixteen million dollars this year? Who is supposed to buy this team and then just toss a hundred million dollars into the wind and see what happens, even though the club doesn't draw consistently (even when performing well), and hasn't since the end of the last century? Anyone? Anyone?

Even if the most fevered dreams of Dolan haters came true and Cleveland Cavaliers majority owner Dan Gilbert decided to add a baseball team to his portfolio, what reasons does anyone have to believe that Gilbert intends to spend money willy-nilly when the economic realities of major league baseball have very little in common with those of professional basketball? This is what it all comes down to, people: like it or not, owning a baseball team is a business proposition and the owners (and shareholders, if applicable) intend to profit from their venture, and you don't profit by spending freely when there is no hope for a return on your investment. Therefore, unless the underlying money is there (and it is not here for reasons I detailed above), literally no one outside of the Red Sox, Mets or Yankees can afford to pay C.C. Sabathia 23 million dollars a year for six years or drop fifty million dollars into the toilet just for the right to take a look at Daisuke Matsuzaka's pitching (nevermind actually signing him). Hell, the Yankees pay 5 players on their squad a total of 106 million dollars a year (this is more than the total payrolls of 22 other clubs). So. Anyone out there know of any prospective owners who feel like matching that out of their own pocket (since it sure isn't coming from anywhere else)?

Oh, before we move on, there is one last little fact that gets lost in all of the back and forth: the Dolan's actually spent 3 million more on payroll this year than they did in 2008, and nearly twenty million more this year than in 2007 (this despite the relatively low upswing in attendance in 2007 and subsequent drop in 2008). So much for being "cheap" ...

While the loss of so many familiar (and trusted) faces is crushing for those who regularly follow the Tribe, it's also an exciting time as the Indians roster is presently overrun with kids now jockeying for position on the Opening Day roster for the 2010 season. Among these new faces: catcher Wyatt Toregas is getting an extended look while Shoppach is given some time off (ostensibly to regather his swing), super-utility man Chris Gimenez will play at odd spots around the diamond (as well as behind the plate when the need arises), Andy Marte will man first base, and Trevor Crowe will patrol left field while occasionally spotting Grady Sizemore (whom I suppose has now become the undisputed face of the Indians) in center. These new names may not have the effortless grace and presence of seasoned veterans, but they play with heart, they've greatly improved the team's speed on the base paths, and they all have something to prove.

While the full impact of all the recent trades may not be known in most cases for a few years yet, there have been a couple of optimistic portents visible at the major league level thus far. First and foremost, the performance of Justin Masterson in two appearances has already made some people feel a little bit better about the Martinez trade. Masterson, acquired from the Boston Red Sox bullpen, made a great first impression in relief and then again in an abbreviated start as he is gradually stretched into the Indians' starting rotation. Also showing considerable promise is fireballing reliever Chris Perez, who was acquired last month in the Mark DeRosa trade and is just now being summoned into games in high-leverage situations.

So, the Indians' 2009 season continues to play itself out in a relentless march to Boston in the first week of October. Perhaps the Indians will continue their expected post-All Star Break winning tear and finish the season with a .500 record as they did in 2008 (hey, how about we move the break into May next year so these guys can at least have a fighting chance of contending by early August?). Maybe there will be some good news concerning the rocky rehabilitation of Jake Westbrook and the continuing, evolving Rorschach Test that is Travis Hafner. Maybe Eric Wedge will (finally) be let go in the off-season in lieu of someone like Red Sox pitching coach (and ex-Indian) John Farrell. While we won't be looking forward to October once again, we still have at least some reason to keep listening or watching, as frustrating as this year has been.

Finally, I'd like to offer a few words for a couple of dearly departed Indians. From a pure fan standpoint, the final week of July was the worst time to be an Indians fan since possibly the end of the 2007 ALCS, if not Game 7 of the 97 World Series. Sarah wasn't happy to see Betancourt, Garko or Pavano go, but the terms of their departures were at least understandable on a gut level. The loss of Lee was a significant blow to our morale as we have lost one of the best pitchers in all of baseball, and with Jake Westbrook's future presently in a state of stomach-churning doubt, the Indians pitching staff now seems particularly rudderless for the first time in 3 or 4 years. Cliff may not have been the most personable, affable player on the team from a PR standpoint, but he was a model of staggering consistency and focus and he will be sorely missed.

At least Lee was shipped over to the National League, where I can cheer him on to beat C.C. Sabathia in the World Series this year (assuming, of course, that the Yankees can power their hefty lefty past the ALCS). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Victor Martinez being traded to the Red Sox (the Red Sox! Jesus!), the final announcement of which was almost too much for me to bear. I could ramble on here for a long while about how much Martinez meant to the Tribe, to the fans, and to Cleveland itself, but there are others (such as Jay, Andrew and Ryan over at Let'sgotribe) who did an incredible job of delving into the enormity of this loss from all angles, so I'll link you to their work instead. Believe me, these guys express far more eloquently what I cannot at this time without sounding like a big ol' sissy.

P.S.: My personal attendance record is now 17-11 (.608). Yeah, that's right. I bring victory, bitches. Someone clue the front office in and land me some season tickets. I'll do my part.