"Did you even have a plan?!"

Johnny Damon was just one of the Indians Front Office's
mistakes in personnel "upgrades" for this season.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

How did it come to this?

That's what I found myself thinking as I watched the Yankees beat the Indians 4-2 on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a Progressive Field full of the visiting team's fans.

How in the wide world of sports did the Indians go from a team on the brink of contention to one that's on the road to 90 losses?

You can say players have underperformed, and you'd be right. But the real problem was that this team was not built to win a World Series in the first place.

Before the Indians game Friday night, general maneger Chris Antonetti spoke to reporters and some of his comments speak volumes about the way the 2012 Indians were put together, along with how the front office thought the team could be able to contend.

"Our plan was to try to win as many games as we could," Antonetti said. "That was our focus, to try to maximize the resources we had to win as many games as we could. Obviously, it hasn’t been a successful year to date." 

Maximize the resources we had. What an interesting phrase. I don't want to read into it too much because these weren't planned, written, thought out remarks, but what other team would say "maximize the resources we had" in their plan to contend? The Rays, maybe? But when you talk about resources, that kind of sounds like a money problem—which would more than implicate the Dolans in this disaster. 

But, of course, that wasn't Antonetti's only curious remark. 

"We talked about this at the start of the season, in order for us to have the year we wanted to have, we needed a lot of things to go our way," he said. "We needed to stay healthy. We needed to have our best players perform. We needed to have our young players take the next step in their development. And we needed to get key contributions from some of the veteran guys we brought in to have bounce back years. And I think you can go through that list and a number of those things didn’t happen—certainly not at the level that we needed them to for us to be the team we wanted to be."

That's a laundry list of four variables that the Indians were depending on in order to contend. And sure, the Rays, A's, and Pirates might say the same about three of those four, but if you look at teams that contend year in and year out, they're not depending on young guys and washed up veterans to "bounce back."

That's not even mentioning the fact that the Indians went into the season featuring an all-lefty lineup, and an all-righty rotation. I've asked this question before, but when was the last time anyone saw a World Series winner without a right handed hitter? And that's not even taking into account the fact that fans have been clamoring for a big right handed bat since 2005.

But because Antonetti talked about players needing to stay healthy, one reporter asked what the GM would say to fans who think the Indians wasted $5 million on Grady Sizemore. 

"In retrospect, obviously that’s certainly true," Antonetti said. "We were hopeful that Grady would be able to rebound and play, and obviously that has not happened. So we knew there was a risk obviously when we signed him, and it didn’t work out."

No, Chris, it didn't work out. Neither did any of the other moves you made in the offseason—Casey Kotchman, Derek Lowe, Jose Lopez, Kevin Slowey, and Johnny Damon (who was signed in season, but you get the point). 

I think everyone would agree that the front office severely failed in putting together a roster that would seriously contend for the division. Even when things were going "well," the Indians were either winning 4-2 or getting blown out—which is why they've almost always had a negative run differential this season. The high water mark for this team was May 24, when they beat Justin Verlander and the Tigers to get to eight games over .500 at 26-18. 

Immediately after that, they got swept by the White Sox and lost a series to both the Royals and Twins. 

Now I'm on record as saying the Dolans need to send a message to the fans that mediocrity isn't good enough by firing Antonetti, but at some point they also have to look long and hard in the mirror and ask why are they even in this business if they're not making money and all they do is lose? It can't be fun to be the whipping boy of every fan and sports radio host in Cleveland. 

But whatever happens, the entire Indians organization needs to realize that whatever the "plan" was to contend this year failed miserably. And they'd all be wise to never try to implement a plan like that again. 

~MAS