For reasons that still defy any logic, baseball continues to dodge a salary cap as if it were another shattered maple bat. Maybe it doesn’t recognize that all of its markets are not equal or maybe it just doesn’t care, but clearly it prefers a tilted playing field. By essentially ignoring the economic disparities between its markets, baseball creates situations like that with Sabathia in which a team like Cleveland essentially feels forced to give away a player it nurtured and brought to the doorstep of greatness in order to remain a viable franchise years later.
That doesn’t mean that current management gets a free ride to throw up its arms in frustration, although that seems to work season after season in places like Kansas City and, until today, Milwaukee. Shapiro still has an obligation to see the obstacles as opportunities and improve the team in ways that may be as trivial as they are unnecessary for their rich uncles in other cities.
But Cleveland fans will never be able to use this trade to figure out whether Shapiro has met that charge. Instead, they’ll have to be content to judge the dozens of other relatively minor moves that have made this team one year only to break it the next.
There is no doubt that most Indians fans secretly hoped that the team would find a way to re-sign Sabathia, even as they accepted the reality long ago that it would not. It’s not just part of the grieving process but also a defense mechanism for avoiding the nasty reality that baseball has once again stacked the deck against a mid-market team like Cleveland.
Article comments
1 - alina
Grady won't be leaving anytime soon, The Cleveland Indians locked up their center field position into the next decade, agreeing Wednesday to a $23.45 million, six-year contract with Grady Sizemore. Martinez, the indians have him till 2010..so I look for other trades like garko possibly even though that would hurt but his contract was only a year...I guess we'll see.