Tribe calendar stark reminder of days gone by
- Brett Hiner: A Work in Progress
- February 14, 2021
- 981
For as long as I can remember, every holiday season I have been gifted with a wall calendar for my classroom and/or breezeway. The calendar theme changes from year to year, typically based on some of my longtime favorites that I refuse to accept might have left our pop-culture consciousness. From “Batman” to “Game of Thrones,” from “Seinfeld” to “Peaky Blinders,” many trendy staples have graced an observable wall to help me keep track of the monthly passage of time.
The one constant over the years, however, has been the Cleveland Indians team calendar.
For those who might not have received this Tribe calendar, right off the bat we flip to January and see Francisco Lindor, the recently traded once-in-a-generation short shop whom ownership felt, in a year’s time, would command a monstrous contract, which he deserves, so they traded him to the Mets. By expert accounts, it will go down as the worst trade in the team’s 120-year-old history.
But, no worries, there is always February to pull fans out of the 31-day reminder that ownership, whose default line of “we are a small market team,” uses that as an excuse for a group too cheap to pay a player who could have become the greatest Indian of all time.
Oh, wait, February is Carlos Santana. Now here is a case of maybe the greatest trade the Tribe has ever made, sending an aging Casey Blake to the Dodgers in 2008 for the prospect Santana. Carlos hit over 200 home runs for the Tribe and had one of the keenest eyes at the plate, always finishing in the top five in walks while donning an Indians uniform. This offseason the front office did not see fit to offer Carlos a contract, so he signed a two-year deal with the lowly Royals for $8.75 million a year, chump change for someone with Santana’s numbers.
Thankfully, with the calendar flip to March, spring is in the air, and as the old saying goes, hope springs eternal. Crap. March is Brad Hand. He signed a $10.5 million deal with the Nationals, $6.5 million of which will be deferred over a three-year period. Hmmm. That sounds pretty team-friendly to me, a concept for which the Tribe always preaches and asks. While his fastball velocity may have been down 1 or 2 mph, in the shortened 2020 season, Hand led the league in saves (16) and held a closer worthy ERA of 2.05.
Ah, April, the month of the official start of the baseball season, and we finally land on a player who is still with the team (forget those first 90 days of 2021 staring at players who now wear other uniforms). April brings us Roberto “Bebo” Perez, who has turned into, maybe, the best defensive catcher in all of baseball and a master at calling games with the Tribe’s strength: its pitching rotation.
A rotation that no longer includes Mike Clevinger, who is the May calendar representative. How Clevinger even ended up on the calendar, having been traded in August 2020, must speak to how early the calendar goes into production. Maybe it is sandwiched in between the printings of their German Pastries and Cuddly Goldendoodle calendars.
By now I think you get my point. By December 2021 we will have spent six months looking at ex-Tribe players, one month looking at the greatest manager in baseball (but how many teams have so few stars they resort to putting their manager on the calendar?), two months looking at players, who aside of living next door to them, no one else would recognize, leaving us with Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, MVP candidate Jose Ramirez and potential 40-plus homer a year DH/outfielder Franmil Reyes (and that is if ownership does nothing to move them prior to opening day).
Naturally, the easy answer to this is “stop whining” and “buy a different calendar,” and I completely agree, but the calendar is really just a metaphor of everything wrong with Tribe ownership: the minute an identity begins to form similar to the teams in the 1990s, the Dolan pocketbook tightens up like a car ride through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Team owner Paul Dolan, who Forbes claims net worth is $4.6 billion, was quoted, two years ago, as saying, referring to Frankie, “enjoy him (while he is here).” The writing was on the wall as it has always been since the Dolans purchased the team in 2000, and the team’s scouts must think they have the worst job in baseball, consistently sending great players to Cleveland, only to see them flock to greener pastures where owners care more about their fans than their bottom line.
They have occasionally spent some money, most notably after the 2007 and 2016 campaigns, but now, four years removed from a World Series berth, they have the lowest payroll in all of baseball and only two players remain from that World Series roster.
Amidst the misery of COVID-19, a name/mascot change, a revitalized football team in a football town and failing to maintain any superstar worthy of building a team around, I fear, even if we are able, no one will want to watch a ballgame at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario, except every fifth day when Bieber pitches. And this time the fault for the abysmal attendance will lie directly with ownership, whose message to the fans is clear: Enjoy the calendar as a reminder of days gone by, rather than any hopeful look at the days to come.