Lead In The Pipes

Look, you guys know the score. I live in Cleveland, and have for just about a year now. Prior to that, I spent my entire life — save for eight agonizing semesters at the University of Richmond, VA — in the same tiny New England town. Being here during a Sox/Indians series is pretty brutal.

And thankfully, we won. Yeah, you guys had a little bit of a meltdown, but really, it wasn’t even that bad — for a few games, you guys were the ones getting those stupid little bloop hits, and then for a few games we got them, and then all of a sudden the wheels came off and you started running into each other in left field. Believe it or not, we’re sympathetic; we do have sort of a history with losing in these situations, you know.

And as a victorious fan, of course, yes, I’ve been trolling on Indians’ sites. No, I haven’t been posting anything, and no, I’m not one of the many idiot bandwagon fans I’m sure you’re rapidly becoming familiar with. I may not be that old, but I grew up with Jody Reed and Frank Viola, and worse than heartbreak — seemingly endless mediocrity. So I understand the pain, and I’m not going to get in the way and rub it in.

However, in my travels, I’ve come across two major planks in the “2007 Cleveland Indians Self-Pity Platform” that are incredibly flawed. I hate getting in the way of mourning fans and all, but a playoff defeat is no reason to go all wobbly with the basic tenets of logic. These simply have to be addressed.

1. “The Indians are actually better; we lost because Sabbathia and Carmona were inexplicably bad and kept walking guys. This same situation would never happen again.”

Stop right there. In your Indians-centric universe, you’ve made the fairly common error of assuming that when your successful pitchers pitch badly, it’s because of your pitchers. I know what you’re thinking — Carmona is the real deal; he destroyed the Yankees, who have the “best lineup in baseball”; he just stunk it up against the Red Sox.

Here’s your mistake; besides large payrolls, the Red Sox and Yankees have very, very little in common. The Yankees are built on home runs and Mariano Rivera; the Red Sox are built on defense, taking a lot of pitches, and starting pitching, in that order. If one of those plans sounds better than the other, well, there’s a reason Boston’s management reeks of champagne while the Yankees brass are playing extended games of “Truth or Dare” in a Tampa office building. The point is, C.C. and Carmona; particularly the latter, match up well against the Yankees. They match up horribly against Boston. The Red Sox don’t just lay off bad pitches; they lay off pitches in general, and they’ll foul things off forever if need be. In C.C.’s case, when it takes you 17 pitches to strike out Youkilis, yes, you struck him out, but you’re not making it to the 7th inning. In Carmona’s case, you don’t even get that far, because you don’t throw strikes consistently enough.

The Red Sox are a unique team; their patience makes them very good at running up pitch counts, getting walks, and putting the ball in play, but it makes them susceptible to even average pitchers who pound the zone, get ahead, and have one decent out pitch; enter Jake Westbrook and Paul Byrd, who by any other account should have been devoured by a deep, ALCS quality lineup, but who both pitched exceedingly well, and came away with wins (almost two, in Westbrook’s case, as he was again excellent for large chunks of Game 7).

You know who almost cost us the 2004 ALCS? Jon Lieber. Jon Lieber!!! But he just kept pounding the zone, over and over again, killing us with 0-2 counts. It’s maddening and weird, but it’s Boston’s strategy, and you have to address it. Either you guys knew about it, and C.C. and Carmona were incapable of adjusting, or you didn’t do your homework and assumed we were exactly like the Yankees, and you got burned. It happened to the Cardinals in the ‘04 World Series, too. Jeff Suppan never knew what hit him, or in his case, DIDN’T hit him, and patiently earned walks and wild pitches.

2. “The Red Sox are the Yankees; they bought this stupid team with their giant checkbook and they represent the death of the farm-system, smart acquistion baseball represented by the Indians. I hate ESPN.”

This is partially right, and partially wrong; but conceptually it’s wrong because it assumes that there is only one approach to building a team when you have access to deep financial resources; the Yankees way. This is an understandable mistake, because the Yankees are the premier big-money team in baseball; but let’s not make the discrepencies any bigger than they are. There are eight $100 million dollar payroll teams in baseball, and another seven over $85 million. All of these teams have unique approaches to building teams. They aren’t best described simply as “0.6 Yankees”, “0.7 Yankees”, etc.

Here’s another way to look at it. If the Indians had $100 million, what would they do to make their team better? How would they go about it? Considering they are an intelligently run team, here’s what I would suspect.

1. Sign your best young players to long term deals so they don’t get away
2. Invest heavily in scouting
3. Don’t hesitate to take flyers on mid-ranged free agents who might not work out
4. Take a few big shots at guys you really think are worth it
5. Use the rest of the cash to expand your baseball industry as much as possible, so  that you generate even MORE revenue.

Basically, you lock up Martinez, Garko, Sizemore, C.C., Carmona, maybe Bettencourt, and Cabrera. You pick up Byrd’s option (because you can, and you know he’s decent), you don’t sweat Hafner’s new deal, and you know what? You go out and get the best right fielder you can find; a total stud. That way, it doesn’t all rest on Hafner in the middle of the lineup next year. Oh yeah, get a real closer, too. You know, the 2008 equivalent of 2004 Keith Foulke.

Sounds good, right? Sure it does — on paper. Here’s the harsh reality of big-market baseball; when you actually HAVE that money, and spend it, you’re absolutely bound to make mistakes. And unlike elaborate message-board plans, you can’t just delete them when you look stupid 6 months later; you’re stuck with these contracts for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS. I don’t even know if most Red Sox fans know who Matt Clement is anymore, let alone that he’s on the team and making nine and half million dollars a year to be there. And that makes your payroll go up. Extra cash just functions as bullets in your General Manager’s gun, and it’s surprisingly hard to predict whether he’ll end up shooting himself in the face or not.

For instance, if you’re the Yankees, and you lose sight of your institutional goals of player/philosophy development, this kind of thing — the spending, and the trading prospects for big names with giant contracts – eventually catches up with you. That’s what happens when you simply go out and get the best available player regardless of circumstance, position, or need — you get five DHs, most of whom are injured, and who combined cost you about $60 million. That’d buy a lot of Jonathan Papelbons.

If you’re the Red Sox, however — the modern Sox, not the infuriating team of the early-mid 1990’s — the biggest advantage of a large payroll isn’t that you simply accumulate whatever talent you want (which not even the Yankees have been able to sustain), it’s that you have the flexibility to absorb a few mistakes.

Are the Red Sox pushing this theory to the limit? Possibly. Still, the biggest mistakes of the last few seasons look — at first glance — to be Clement, Lugo, Drew, and Renteria. Clearly, with two big ones (Lugo and Drew) made this season, the team needs to back off the throttle a little bit before they make any more giant deals (unless they’ve found new revenue to support it; you can only sell so many pink hats to so many Emerson girls). But they’ve never really sacrificed their farm system during this era, other than dealing their best prospect for Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell — which seems worth it right now – so they have plenty of cheap, young players to plug in.

All this being said, did we “buy” our title?

Here’s the Red Sox starting lineup from Game Seven, and how each player was acquired.

C - Jason Varitek (trade)
1B - Kevin Youkilis (farm)
2B - Dustin Pedroia (farm)
SS - Julio Lugo (FA)
3B - Mike Lowell (trade)
LF - Manny Ramirez (FA)
CF - Jacoby Ellsbury (farm)
RF - J.D. Drew (FA)
DH - David Ortiz (waivers)

And here’s our rotation.

SP - Josh Beckett (trade)
SP - Curt Schilling (trade)
SP - Daisuke Matzuzaka (FA)
SP - Tim Wakefield (trade)
SP - John Lester/Clay Buchholtz (farm, farm)

Plus, our closer is home-grown, and our setup guy makes 1.25 million a year.

So… if you acquire or develop good young players, and they improve, and you pay them so that they stay with the team, does that mean you “bought” your title? More importantly, would you name Dice-K, Manny, Lugo, and Drew the keys to Boston’s success?

Here’s the way I see it. If you believe that Boston’s ability to absorb mistakes (ahem… Renteria) that would cripple teams in the lower half of the revenue bracket has increased their ability to be competitive, I would whole-heartedly agree. But then again, that Red Sox fans pay exhorbitant ticket, parking, and food prices, and in the vast majority of cases, can’t go to games even if they could afford to, because most games are sold out months in advance. I know none of this is the case at Jacobs — because I go there all the time. Insanely devoted (not devoted — insanely devoted) fans give the team more financial flexibility, and naturally they go ballistic when it’s used to sign J.D. Drew for 15 years.

So that’s one argument I’m at least willing to have with you, Cleveland fans. But, if you see this as a situation where the Red Sox simply went out and bought the best available player at each position by out-bidding smaller teams, you’re not just wrong, you’re delusional. It might make you feel better to think that your team is exiting the playoffs on some kind of mythical, principled, moral high ground, but the fact remains that you were undone by the likes of Pedroia, Youkilis, and Papelbon just as much as you were at the hands of Julio Lugo and Dice-K. If you don’t want to accept that, don’t expect to be given a seat at the rational, grown-up baseball discussion table.

I’m glad we settled that.

Now, could I interest you in a well compensated right fielder with some minor motivational issues? I hear he’s pretty clutch in the playoffs, and we’re considering just about any offer.

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