While we have watched chilling, complex layers of wild card play-ins into the League Championship Series, with innings that like the Cubs ninth in San Francisco that ended the Giants season, the Dodger-Nationals seventh in the NLCS elimination game that took Washington out of the post-season to seventh in Chicago Saturday night that left the North Side delirious, general manager after general manager has found time in his day to ponder what they hope is not an institutional scandal breaching integral and moral boundaries.
“Major League Baseball is a small community consisting of 30 members, and trust is essential to it functioning,” said one National League general manager. “If someone believes he can subvert the rules and find a back-channel to win more games, then, as Rob Manfred warned the first time he spoke to general managers last November at their meetings, there has to be some sort of death sentence involved. Falsifying medical information is a death sentence breach of faith and the game that whoever should perpetrate it should pay.”
“But fortunately,” said an American League counterpart,”we don’t have to think about anything shady when we see the final four. And when the Indians and Blue Jays are playing, it’s like a family touch football game on Thanksgiving. It seems as if everyone who runs those teams are related, all from a family steeped in values.”
The Cleveland Indians family tree is remarkable. Its roots were plated by John Hart, and then Dan O’Dowd, and while Dick Jacobs and Paul Dolan have never had the demographics—especially after the Browns and Cavaliers came downtown—to bid against the Yankees and the Red Sox, the Tigers and the Blue Jays—Hart, O’Dowd, and when Dolan bought the team from Jacobs—Mark Shapiro sought to hire the brightest, the best and the ethical. The Indians knocked the Red Sox out, with Shapiro hires Mike Hazen and John Farrell the GM and manager. At the end of their season, they will lose Derek Falvey, who in the words of the uniform staff “is the real thing, the next Theo” to the Minnesota Twins as Chief Baseball Officer. David Stearns was one of them, and was Falvey’s roommate when they started as interns, and runs the Brewers.
Shapiro left Cleveland for Toronto last fall, and made his former farm director Ross Atkins (once Hazen’s intern roommate) the general manager, brought in Ben Cherington, who was hired by O’Dowd and worked under Shapiro, and inherited Tony LaCava, the mastermind behind the Bartolo Colon deal that brought Grady Sizemore, Cliff Lee and Brandon Phillips to Cleveland.
One now looks at the Indians and sees Shapiro’s successor Chris Antonetti now the president, Mike Chernoff the general manager, Matt Forman moving into Falvey’s position and Andrew Miller, who could do anything he wanted, in the business side as the Vice-President of Business Analytics.
To know them and with all the baseball family spread over the game, they are very bright on the baseball side, steeped in all that analytics encompass, completely understanding of the need for the Terry Francona staff and the baseball operations staff to be collaborative from the area scouts to the offices of Antonetti and Francona.
Look at Toronto. Alex Anthopoulos did a tremendous job making the bold moves to get the Jays into the post-season for the first time since Pat Gillick’s 1993 World Champion. He worked for J.P. Ricciardi when he brought in Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion. He convinced ownership to allow him to expend the young talent and dollars to bring in Russell Martin, Troy Tulowitski, Josh Donaldson, and R.A. Dickey.
And when Shapiro and Atkins arrived, they faced a window that will begin to close after this season, and for a small price kept Marco Estrada, signed J.A. Happ at what turned out to be a bargain price, found Joe Biagini in the Giants system and stole him in the Rule Five Draft, traded for Jason Grilli and Liriano. No $200M signings, but the best starting in the league.
The Indians needed power and a Jason Giambi-type leader; and found Mike Napoli for $7M. When their starting pitching seemed World Series ready, Chernoff and Antonetti made the single most impactful deadline deal, acquiring Andrew Miller for what Antonetti admits “was more than we thought we were willing to trade.” They bought Dan Otero from the Phillies during the winter, then got Coco Crisp for the stretch.
“We have to be careful how we operate,” says Antonetti, because the Indians can’t swallow a Carl Crawford/Josh Hamilton mistake. They’ve always been good at this. Cory Kluber is a Cy Young Award winner and key in these playoffs; they got him in a three way deal (expending Jake Westbrook) out of the Padres organization in 2010. They got Carlos Santana as a kid from Casey Blake. They got Carlos Carrasco when it was time to trade Cliff Lee. They got Asdrubal Cabrera for Eduardo Perez. They got Yan Gomes for Esmil Rogers. They got Mike Clevinger for Vinnie Pestano. They got Shin-Soo Choo for Ben Broussard. They got Trevor Bauer and Shaw for Choo.
So, considering from whence they came, it should be little surprise what Atkins and Shapiro paid for Happ.
You’re not going to hear of teams filing grievances with the Commissioner’s Office on charges of altered, incorrect, medical information. You’re not going to hear of them offering kickbacks to agents to get around the draft system and make it worth it for an agent to get a client to drop.
The Blue Jays led the American League in attendance and are owned by the media kingdom. Fine. The Indians are not.
But they’re all from the same cloth, and they’re very good at what they do. However far the Indians and Jays go, we owe them. Not only are they good, they are great entertainment, and who cares if Bautista flips his bat or Bauer sometimes seems as if he’s delivered by a drone, we’re watching Fransisco Lindor and Tulowitski, and every day we debate the ETA of Miller.
And nearly two weeks into the post-season, Miller has cast the broadest shadow, and he’s a guy who says “they don’t pay me to tell them when I want to pitch, they pay me to pitch.”