The Cleveland Sporty Page

[Bigsmc]

They didn't go down without a fight.

If you can't hit the ball, hit the pitcher. Scary vid.


http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=15242909

[clyde]

That was pretty scary..and that pitcher's pretty good,too.

[clyde]

Tribe win 'um...stop 'um 3 game loser again.














doo dah!!!!

[horseofcourse]

High fives all around!

[clyde]

That last one was for DahlaBaby.

[horseofcourse]

What’s amazing about seeing these guys at the top of the lineup (along with Choo and Santana…assuming Acta restores him TO the top of the lineup), is where they came from as Brantley was merely the PTBNL in the CC deal and – I don’t know if you’ve heard this at all recently – Asdrubal came to Cleveland for ½ of a season of Eduardo Perez. While it’s odd to see the national media finally catch on to this idea that the Indians have committed grand larceny in some of the “minor” deals they pulled off from 2006 to 2009, it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to read about.

As much as the national media is now finding out about how Asdrubal and The BLC were netted for Benuardo, making these trades work isn’t as easy as the Indians have made it look just isn’t the norm. In a piece that my friend Al Ciammiachella pointed out my eyes to, the Pirates cleared the decks just as completely since 2008 and as this B-Pro piece shows, they just don’t have much of anything to show for it. As Al wrote to me, “sure they didn’t quite have a Victor or a Lee to deal, but they’ve gotten nothing out of the Jason Bay or Nate McLouth deals, while the Indians turned Austin Kearns, Ben Broussard and Eduardo Perez into more than the Pirates got for their entire team, to say nothing of the Blake/Vic/Lee deals.”

Think about that again and, though I realize that you know where these guys came from (though AC has a nice, clean synopsis), it does go back to those decisions made by the organization back in the summer of 2006 (Cabrera, Choo), 2008 (Santana, Brantley, LaPorta…or is it MaTola), and 2009 (Masterson, Carrasco, and C. Perez, most notably for now) when the Indians were obviously not going anywhere in their division, as they decided not to continue down the path of “what might be” with the group of players that they held in those particular years.

Rather, they ripped the band-aid (“one motion…RIGHT OFF”) and to watch these trades reveal themselves as prescient is a sight to behold and it’s not something that’s lost on the Indians. To wit, as Mark Shapiro told Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News, “Periods like this are an affirmation of why you go through those tough times…We know and accept the reality of building teams in a market like this. It’s about making tough decisions that are never popular and are challenging emotionally to both us and our fans. But when you win again with players you believe in, it is extremely gratifying.”

(your latest episode of "Building America's Team" !)

[horseofcourse]

To watch the current team and to know the pain that came pouring upon Indians fans’ (particularly in that fateful week in July of 2009) is to gain some measure of respect for the Front Office realizing what needed to be done and to go about doing it. Granted the compelling reasons to make some of those trades were self-inflicted (Mike Aubrey, Jerry Sowers, Crazy Eyes Crowe, Beau Mills…you want me to keep going), but in those mid-season moves, they unquestionably have had more hits than misses and as much as the questions were flying back then (and here’s another piece from yours truly attempting to rationalize what seemed irrational back then) as to what the organization was even doing or what direction they were headed, the Indians asked themselves the hard questions, realized that there were hard answers, and didn’t shy away from what that meant.

As Chris Antonetti told Joe LeMire of SI (who was apparently on the Indians’ beat this week) in a piece that references the mysterious DiamondView system, which is the Indians’ data analysis tool for which they own
proprietary rights, the seismic shift that occurred back in July of 2009 was prompted by some logical thought, which isn’t always the most prevalent line of thinking in professional sports as Antonetti relays the situation thusly:
We started by asking the question, what’s our quickest way back to competitiveness?
We realized that we could have let a lot of those guys complete their contracts, become free agents and get draft picks back for them. We felt that it would be in our best interest to try and expedite that by getting guys who were further along in the development process.

This is all old news in these parts I know, but the Indians found themselves in a hole (self-imposed for the most part because of their drafting) back in 2009 and punted on the 2009 and 2010 seasons when they moved Lee and Vic, slamming the window shut themselves in late July of 2009. The idea was that they could vault themselves back into contention quickly with talented players at similar developmental stages, under club control for similar stretches of time, which could mature and congeal into a winning ballclub, much as the 2004/2005 had done.

At the end of last year, few would have predicted that the group of assembled talent would do much more than continue separate itself into the categories of wheat and chaff as the team would continue to take steps toward contention. Now, just two months into the 2011 season, it’s easy to see how the Indians’ Front Office set the table for this to all happen. Sure, some of it may have already been in place from previous moves (Cabrera and Choo most notably), but the Indians spun their straw into gold with moves that flew under the radar for years, adding pieces and parts that all lined up for this 2011 season to occur.

Now, with the Indians firmly in control in their division, it will be up to the Indians to remain seated at the head of the table so their fans can continue to feast in their success…