Barry McBride · Why Does Cleveland Tolerate the Dolans?

July 9th, 2008

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.

This blog originally appeared on The Muni Lot.

Category: Cleveland

7 Responses to “Why Does Cleveland Tolerate the Dolans?”

  1. Audient Says:
    July 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am

    Agreed on all points. I hadn’t thought about the Knicks comparison, but that’s an excellent observation.

    For what it is worth — whoever was on the air on WTAM on Sunday evening was critical of the situation, and the point was made: why do we accept the excuse that this is a mid-market team? And he was lamenting all those in the media who would be focusing on evaluating the incoming players instead of the examining the woeful situation with management and ownership — but he didn’t point it as starkly and precisely as you did here.

    As for me, I quit going to games for the most part after the Colon trade. I used to go to several games a season, but that’s stopped. To me, it is simple: I won’t pay for a seat if the ownership won’t pay to put the talent on the field. So, until there is a salary cap or ownership that will pay what it takes to get the job done, I can’t be invested in this team.

    Call me a fair-weather fan, if you want. But here is what I am not: a sucker.

  2. phil lane Says:
    July 9th, 2008 at 3:17 pm

    I’m a Cleveland Sports Fan By Default, meaning I realize that major league sports have a quasi-religious significance to my fellow Clevelanders and I deeply respect that. It is part of the character of a great city. When the teams are winning, this is a helluva town to be in. The thrill you guys get from the crack of a bat on Opening Day I get when I see the car haulers show up at Burke or smell racing fuel wafting over the Shoreway during Indy car practice on my way to work. Nonetheless, this is the best commentary I’ve read on the Indians, team sports and Cleveland corporitis. Well said, man.

  3. Ben Keeler Says:
    July 9th, 2008 at 9:28 pm

    You can dislike Dolan all you want, but one owner isnt going to be able to change the MLB system.

  4. Peter Says:
    July 10th, 2008 at 3:34 am

    i don’t disagree with any of what this commentary (or subsequent comments ) say. bottom line is that the dolans treat the team like a business, examining margins and such, for better and worse… which is leads me to this: if the team is in the same straits come may of next year, they’ll fire wedge and bring back hargrove while they sort out what prospects to chase after next. i’m guessing he’ll figure hargrove will put at least 18K butts in seats per outing until they can sort out what level of “rebuilding” to engage in.

  5. Rick Bohan Says:
    July 10th, 2008 at 12:11 pm

    This post is why BFD bloggers ought to stick to what they know best…and it ain’t sports. The author berates the Dolans, which I don’t have a problem with. But it’s the usual ranting that comes with a bad record. There’s nothing above that wasn’t just as true last year…but we didn’t see this post last year, did we? Are anything like it. And that’s because this same team won more games than anyone in the majors, other than Boston. Same players, almost to the man. So how come the Dolans were so smart last year, but so dumb this year. With the same players.

    The other problem with this rant is that it doesn’t give one example as to who the Dolans should have gotten but didn’t because they were so cheap. Other than, of course, Manny and Jim. Here’s a news flash: they’ve been gone a long time. Eight years later is a bit late to complain about not giving Manny the money he wanted. So…who should they have gotten last year but didn’t because the Dolans were too cheap to bid on them?

    Go ahead, I’m waiting.

    That’s what I thought. You don’t know. Because, really, there wasn’t anybody.

    For that matter, let’s go back through the years and see who the Dolans should have bid on. And while we’re looking, let’s ask a San Francisco how paying top dollar and then some for a name pitcher (Barry Zito) has worked out for them.

    Meantime, Dolans have stepped up to the plate to make sure a Jake Westbrook and Travis Hafner have long term contracts here (or should they have been able to foresee the problems those players have had?)as well as players like Grady Sizemore.

    Listen, I know the Tribe sucks right now. But is it Dolan’s fault that Carmona, Martinez and Hafner are hurt? Is it Dolan’s fault that JoBo gets 46 saves last year and stinks this year? Is it Dolan’s fault Betancourt stinks this year? Is it Dolan’s fault that Garko stinks this year? Is it Dolans fault that Gutierrez stinks this year? Is it Dolan’s fault…well, you get my drift.

    The bottom line is this: posts like the one above ring hollow when the team stinks. We’re all angry. But we should direct that anger where it belongs: athletes who make millions of dollars but don’t perform.

  6. carl Says:
    July 10th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    I agree.

    There are two things I’d like to point out.
    1. This is the second time the Dolans have pulled this move. In 2002, the mantra was “we couldn’t get to the promised land becuase we had old pitching and too much hitting, so we’re going to rebuild the franchise around solid starting pitching. End of July Bartolo Colon traded to Montreal. Granted, Shapiro pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat on that deal. Colon got fat(ter) and broke down, and the three prospects in the deal turned out well (for the most part). However, that deal was a once in a lifetime-stars-alligned kind of trade. The Expos were owned by MLB and its owners and were looking to gut the franchise for its eventual move. No way that deal gets done any other time.

    Fast forward 5 years, You have a HOME-GROWN Cy Young winner, who is up for free agency after the upcoming season. The Dolans have always said “We’ll spend the money when the time is right”. What do they do? Offer him a deal nobody in their right mind would take becuase it was so grossly undervalued. Fine. I can respect that the team decided to go all out and try to win a title in CC’s las season, then let the free agency chips fall where they may.

    But the lip service didn’t stop there. After the Boston series, though the starting pitching wasn’t what it should have been, the team said “we’re one bat away”. That’s not something I disagree with. But there was no move made! It was no secret that Cincinnait was shopping Josh Hamilton for some young pitching. It was no secret that the indians were loaded with young starting pitching both at the major league level and in the farm system. Why wasn’t Adam Miller (who has yet to make his debut), or Laffey, or Sowers, or hell after last season (and thank God he wasn’t) Cliff Lee packaged in a deal with say Jhonny Peralta to try and get hamilton?

    Texas sent their best pitching prospect, and Hamilton just cannot seem to be stopped this year. At least he’d have been the anchor of the offense, rather than the Oft-Injured (and probably HGH’ed up) Travis Hafner?

    And if you’re “willing to spend the money when the time is right” then spend the money and sign CC after the season. The Cleveland Indians are still suffering from Wayne Garland Syndrome. CC isn’t a 1 season wonder to waste a ridiculous 10 year contract on. He’s got more than 100 MLB victories (all in a tribe uni by the way). So if he breaks down in 3 years, and cant live out a 5 or 6 year deal so be it…you tried. But don’t be afraid of free agency.

    I am a die-hard tribe fan, and have been since my dad and I were buying General Admission seats and sitting behind home plate to watch Rich Yett throw meatballs, and Cory Snyder strike out at Municipal stadium. But I will never under stand the Dolans.

    Lightening (almost) never strikes twice.

  7. Ed Morrison Says:
    July 11th, 2008 at 1:23 am

    For me, I very much enjoy the commentary from some BFD readers who are passionate about the Indians. I’ll never forget the day I met Mike Garcia in 1959. Thanks to BFD readers for taking the time to comment.