Second Rebuild a Rocky Road for Tribe

GOODYEAR, Ariz. -- The Cleveland Cavaliers have LeBron James.

Where's the King of baseball who will rescue the Cleveland Indians?

"There is no LeBron James in baseball," says Indians executive Mark Shapiro. "Maybe Albert Pujols."

James and the Cavs represent Cleveland's best hope in many years of giving the hard-luck city its first major sports title since Jim Brown powered Cleveland to the NFL title in 1964.

The Indians are the city's oldest sports franchise and compete with the Cavs for increasingly scarce fan dollars, but Shapiro says he would congratulate his friend Danny Ferry, the general manager of the Cavs, if King James were to end Cleveland's title drought.

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"This city needs a champion," he says.

Here in the Arizona desert west of Phoenix, the Indians are preparing for their 107th season. Nearby are housing tracts that used to be cotton fields. The cotton was processed at Goodyear plants in Akron, near where King James grew up. In better economic times, rubber, not a super-human basketball player, was king in northeast Ohio.

Indians players chat and swat baseballs under cloudless skies. Twinkling less than a mile away on the desert floor are several commercial airliners parked in an airplane graveyard.

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It's a surreal scene but one no odder than the visual of this Tribe team reaching the World Series, let alone ending the franchise's 61-year-old title drought that's the longest in the American League by far.

An apt logo for these Indians would be an orange construction barrel, hundreds of which dot Ohio's fractured highways and interstates. But although his pitching staff fills many Tribe fans with dread, Shapiro refuses to use the "R" word -- rebuilding.

Instead the Princeton man smiles inside his spartan office and talks of a youthful roster whose regulars include three 27-year-olds led by center fielder Grady Sizemore, a pair of a 24-year-olds who will patrol the middle infield and potentially two corner players who are under 26.

"The predominant demographic in our clubhouse is young," says Shapiro, who will work his ninth season as the club's general manager before handing off to longtime aide Chris Antonetti and assuming the president's job. "And if we're correct that it's young and talented, you know, we're going to be fine, and we're going to be an interesting, fun team to watch this year."

Improvement from 2009 is likely if only because the Tribe lost 97 games -- their worst mark since 1991.

The team's most pressing unknown is whether several starting pitchers can rebound from recent misfortune.

Starting from the top, Jake Westbrook, the nominal ace, is 21 months removed from reconstructive elbow surgery and carries a career ERA of 4.31; enigmatic No. 2 starter Fausto Carmona, who won 19 games three years ago , needs a confidence serum or better radar after amassing 140 walks and a 5.89 ERA across 246 innings in 2008-09; left-hander David Huff is attempting to improve on his rookie season that brought an 11-8 record but also a 5.61 ERA and only 65 strikeouts in 128.1 innings.

The offense should be respectable if overly left-handed, but if the Indians pitch like they did last year -- their 5.06 ERA was 13th among 16 in the league -- it'll be another tedious summer alongside Lake Erie. Attendance was about 1.7 million, half of what it was during Cleveland's Baseball Mardis Gras summers of the mid-to-late 1990s. Not even the city's Chamber of Commerce would forecast the Indians to create good times that rival the boom years of 1995-1999. There were five Central titles. Two AL pennants. A run of 455 sellouts.

Cash flowed into the franchise. Fans loved a spiffy new ballpark and watching the Tribe beat the stuffing out of opponents. Indians scouts had found more offensive talent on high school and college fields than clusters of franchises were getting -- future major-league thumpers such as Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle, Jim Thome, Brian Giles and Richie Sexson.

What's more, the Indians had enough money to buy pitchers and keep their emerging stars. Shapiro says the Indians of the late 1990s had as much spending power as the big-market Cubs and Dodgers do now.

All things considered, those days aren't coming back. Better to measure future Tribe efforts by the team's work over the past decade, when the ballpark effect wore off and the farm system lost steam. Several years were lean, yet Cleveland also won two division titles and nearly another one with 93 wins in 2005 -- a near-miss that bugs Shapiro more than even the team's Game 7 loss in the 1997 World Series. Nearly constant in the 2000s, though, were declines in attendance.

With the Cavs again drawing sellout crowds of over 20,000 despite the NBA's hefty ticket prices, it's not fair to pin all of the Indians' challenges on the region's economy. Just because a club is losing money, should ownership place a gun to management's head and order a roster deconstruction? How would this Indians team fare if if still had ace Cliff Lee and former All-Star catcher Victor Martinez, who, after being auctioned off by Shapiro and now play for the Mariners and Red Sox, under contracts that the Indians issued?

Shapiro did such a good job of rebuilding the Indians once, maybe ownership thinks he can do it again. Earlier this decade, he repeatedly boosted the talent through trades or low-profile moves. He got Lee and Sizemore as part of a one-sided blockbuster with the Expos, third baseman Casey Blake off the minor-league scrap heap, slugger Travis Hafner in a lopsided trade with the Rangers, shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera in a deft swap with the Mariners and reliever Rafael Betancourt in a trade with the Red Sox.



Abetting those efforts was a farm system that supplied pitching ace CC Sabathia, Martinez, slugging shortstop Jhonny Peralta, Carmona and reliever Rafael Perez.

Rebuild Two looks less promising. But several young players players acquired in Rebuild One also inspired groans when they sputtered after joining the organization.

This time around, Shapiro dealt Sabathia, Lee, Martinez and Blake for prospects.

Check back within a few years to see if the four hard-throwers that went to Cleveland -- Jason Knapp, Carlos Carrasco, Nick Hagadone and Justin Masterson -- evolve into frontline pitchers. A common thread is that Cleveland's trade partner each times was one of the sport's shrewder clubs: The Red Sox and Phillies.

"The predominant demographic in our clubhouse is young."
-- Indians GM Mark Shapiro So far, Indians fans have cause for skepticism. Sidetracked by shoulder surgery after coming over from the Phillies as part of the much-panned Lee deal, Knapp is due back in July and will be in Single-A. Another ex-Phil, Carrasco is vying for Cleveland's No. 5 starting job and won't get it if he again serves up meaty fastballs like he did last year in compiling an 0-4 record and 8.87 ERA in 22 1/3 major league innings. Two years removed from Tommy John surgery, the left-handed Hagadone needs to build innings in A-ball this year. Masterson, formerly of the Red Sox, will try to win a starting job. Obtained with Hagadone for the All-Star Martinez, the former reliever has a good sinker-slider mix and threw a four-hit, complete game against the White Sox last September.

Know that unless he drugs another GM, Shapiro, or, for that matter, any executive, is unlikely to match the trade in 2002 that, in addition to Sizemore and Lee, brought future All-Star second baseman Brandon Phillips from Montreal for pitcher Bartolo Colon. At the time, the Expos feared they would be contracted after the '02 season and gambled that Colon could put them over the top (he didn't). Their young GM, Omar Minaya, had a skeletal scouting staff and incomplete reports on his own minor-leaguers. The Indians, meantime, had several talent evaluators who had worked for the Expos.

Shapiro makes a broader point about the industry's trade dynamic, then and now. "Younger players have more value now," he says, which makes it tougher to get good returns when shopping veterans.

Shapiro's acquisition of Dodgers catching prospect Carlos Santana for Blake two years ago ranks as a good trade. Santana needs to sharpen his catching skills but throws lasers. The switch-hitter has a .395 on-base percentage in nearly 2,000 plate appearances. He hit 21 homers across three minor-league levels in 2008 and 23 more last year with Double-A Akron. The 22-year-old likely will open the season with Triple-A Columbus. Based on how spring training goes, his teammates could include Michael Brantley, who may end up being Cleveland's best part of the Sabathia trade. Brantley, 22, has a .387 career on-base percentage and stole 46 bases in 51 attempts last year in Triple-A.

Comparing the two rebuilding tasks -- but not using the "R" word -- Shapiro says the first "was a much more challenging, bigger task because we literally turned over an entire roster, and we had very little in the farm system when we did it.

"The difference is," he says, "now we've got Grady Sizemore,.we''ve got [right fielder] Shin-Soo Choo, we've got Fausto Carmona, we've got Travis Hafner, we've got Jake Westbrook, we've got [closer] Kerry Wood -- we've got some established major league players to bring these young guys [along].

"When we did it before, we did it en masse."