Tuesday, July 8, 2008

OBR News-o-rama

OBR News-o-rama

Why Does Cleveland Tolerate the Dolans?

Posted: 07 Jul 2008 07:29 PM CDT

Let's get this straight, right off the bat: I love the Cleveland Indians. I always have, even though our relationship has been distant in recent years.

In high school, I could recite the name of every pitcher the Indians had on their staff since the early 70s, when I started following the team. While in grad school, I spent nearly every Tuesday night at the Out-R-Inn off of High Street, watching some surprisingly decent teams of the early-mid 80s play on Channel 43 (games started at 7:30, the drinking started around 7).

I thought dealing Blue Moon Odom for Roric Harrison was a steal. I remember Greg Swindell's huge strikeout game, in '86, I believe. I remember the old Stadium selling out thanks to a gas station promotion and Don Schulze pitching one of the best games of his career. I remember Angelo LoGrande, Luis Medina, and Joe Charboneau. To me, Len Barker's perfect game is as clear as yesterday.

When the team went to the World Series in 1995, it might have been the greatest experience in my life as a fan, exceeding even the Buckeyes resurgence under Jim Tressel and their national championship.

After all, it was newspaper headlines from the Indians 1995 division clinching game, featuring a brightly smiling Kenny Lofton, which were preserved in picture frames in my rec room. I kept scrapbooks of every newspaper article I could find during that 1995 run.

My wife and I took my infant daughter to a game to sit in the bleachers a few months after she was born in 1989. They gave her a free t-shirt which served as her night-gown for many nights as a toddler. The memory is as clear as day, like many of that team which was so special to me.

And this is why it is so hard for me to watch the Dolan family destroy the franchise.

They're stumbling along now, living off the legacy created by Phil Seghi, and then Dick Jacobs and John Hart. Respectability was extended somewhat as Mark Shapiro madly pulled rabbits out of an increasingly tattered hat, delaying the team's gradual decay back to its 1970 era decrepitude.

I know a lot of hard-core Indians fans. Today, I know they're into the details of Matt LaPorta's ability to mash the ball, looking forward to Beau Mills might achieve, and generally missing the forest for the trees.

Take a step back, soar out to 10,000 feet, and see what Dolan is doing to this franchise.

Hall of Famers, Cy Young award winners, all gone. The team's shift into perpetual rebuilding mode has been slow to arrive, thanks to Shapiro's canny dealing, but it's arriving now.

So, Sabathia was sold off to the Brewers as a rental. This should surprise no one. In the past year, the name of the park has been sold off to an insurance company. Why should a pitcher developed over the course of a decade be any different from the ballpark our taxes bought the Dolans?

Bit by bit, the Indians are fading away, as the team's ownership pulls out its empty pockets and blames the fans for not filling the seats.

On the upside, maybe those weekend days where we could say, at noon, "let's go to a game", and have our pick of seats will soon return.

I can hear the owner's defenders mustering the arguments already: "Sabathia was going to test the open market", "At least they got something of value for him", "They didn't have the money", etc, etc.

Please, please. Just stop it. You don't have to make excuses for Larry and Paul Dolan. It's not your job – they have a PR firm, an in-house cable TV channel, and the complacent Cleveland media to do that for them.

At it's simplest, owning an MLB or NFL franchise isn't a business. Businesses can't dictate what their competitors do by imperial fiat, as both leagues have done with respect to internet coverage of the team. That's not what a business does.

Anyone who purchases a mid-market MLB team as a "business" is either either hopelessly stupid or completely deranged.

As far as I know Larry Dolan was neither.

That's because owning an MLB franchise is an obscenely rich person's hobby. Nothing more, nothing less.

If the Dolans don't understand that, maybe they should get out before they wreck things any further.

When Larry Dolan bought the franchise, he knew professional baseball was broken. He knew how it worked. As an owner, you have three basic choices because of the sport's economics:

1. Say "to hell with budgeting". Overspend what you make to give your mid-market fans and supporters a competitive team, because you know bigger markets will have bigger budgets.

2. Fight to change the system and re-establish competitive and financial sanity to baseball.

3. Accept second or third-tier status in Major League Baseball by developing prospects that eventually go to large-market teams.

It's not complicated. That's it. Those are the choices.

Obviously, Dolan won't overspend, so he must be actively working to fix the system.

So, what has Larry Dolan done to fix the broken MLB?

(Crickets chirping)

No, really, what has done?

(Chirp, chirp)

Nope, the Dolan family is firmly behind option number three.

The Dolan family is perfectly fine hiding behind the somewhat hilarious notion that they need to run the Tribe like a "business", dealing out mediocrity with an occasional glimpse of the promised land should the minor leagues system crank out a few decent prospects that coalesce in a good club before the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets and others come to claim what's theirs. 

And the media lets them. There's total silence.

I think it's a combination of co-opted media, others in the media not doing their job, and Cleveland's "self-confidence" issue that leads us to believe that franchise owners are doing us a favor by charging us to look at their product.

Why does anyone defend it?

Since Dolan leapt at the chance to buy the Tribe from Dick Jacobs, the team has lost two likely Hall-of-Famers in Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez.

Today, they traded away a 28-year-old Cy Young Award winner whose ascendance was neither a fluke nor likely to vanish in the near future.

Forget being rewarded for your constant support by getting to see a Hall-of-Fame career from rookie season to retirement. The combination of Larry Dolan's desire to stroke his ego with franchise ownership, while tightly clinching his pocketbook won't permit it.

The sort of thing is something that they've gotten used to in New York, where the pattern established by Charles Dolan first became visible.

1. Purchase of a team by older Dolan

2. Hand-off to a younger Dolan (nepotism is always a winning business strategy).

3. Bring broadcast rights in-house to a uncritical media arm that reports to you.

4. Like it.

5. Or lump it.

The Dolan family turned the Knicks into a national joke, and the New York media isn't exactly letting them sleep soundly about it.

So why doesn't the Cleveland media sound the alarm? Why are they so quiescent? Are they so cowed or co-opted that they can't point to the team's ownership as being the source of an obvious slow slide into irrelevance?

Sure, I'm guessing SportsTimeOhio isn't going to break into their thrilling re-broadcast of minor league women's field hockey games to blast their boss. WTAM isn't quite as co-opted, but I don't expect anything but excuse-making from them.

But how about the Plain Dealer, Akron Beacon-Journal, Canton Repository, WKNR, and other supposedly independent and objective Cleveland media entities?

Why so quiet?

It's time to demand more. It's time to ask for explanations rather than assist in making excuses.

Today proved it.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)