The Cleveland Indians trading Francisco Lindor makes it a day to hate baseball: Doug Lesmerises
Indians #Indians
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Chris Antonetti was explaining how the Indians and Francisco Lindor both wanted it to work out.
“I genuinely felt there was a mutual intent and desire to find common ground and we spent countless hours (on it),” the Indians president of baseball of operations said Thursday of trading the franchise’s best player of the last 20 years.
As recently as spring training, Lindor and his agent met with Antonetti and owner Paul Dolan several times, through what Antonetti called “multiple efforts to find common ground.”
“We just weren’t able to do that. There’s no fault or no blame. Paul and the organization stretched as far as it could, and I think Francisco tried to stretch from what his expectations were to find that overlap,” Antonetti said. “We just weren’t able to do it, despite those best intentions.”
If they really tried, that just makes it worse.
In the NFL, superstars stay. In the NBA, superstars move. But both systems seem to serve their purpose. Organizations plan for it, fans know to deal with it and the sports thrive with the outcome. Sure, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Anthony Davis and others left smaller markets for bigger ones, but if Giannis Antekempokuo wants to stay in Milwaukee, the 35th-largest TV market in the country, he can. If Lindor wants to stay in Cleveland, the 19th-largest TV market in the country, he can’t. Or if he can, it’s more difficult.
This has happened to nearly every modern Indians great, from Manny Ramirez to Jim Thome, from CC Sabathia to Victor Martinez, and now it has happened again with two beloved stars in Lindor and Carlos Carrasco, traded Thursday to the New York Mets. Here, then not. Great, then, inevitably, gone.
On some level, the empathy for fans losing a departing sports hero only goes so far. It’s heartbreak, but heartbreak is a part of sports. Every generation tells a story of when a favorite player left, because favorite players so often leave. Trades are part of sports, capitalism is part of America, and free agency is part of a player’s right. So this is the outcome. When it’s your team adding the great player through trade or free agency, no one is concerned with the tears of the other fans forced to wave goodbye.
Player empowerment changed the NBA, but to hear Antonetti tell it on a Zoom call with reporters, this trade wasn’t that. Antonetti presented a world not where Lindor forced his way out of Cleveland, but a world where the system in baseball helped push player and franchise apart.
That’s not power to the player. James chose to leave Cleveland for Miami. In the NBA’s structure, James had options, just like he had options when he returned to Cleveland still in his prime. Lindor, in this system and with an ownership group not willing to cut profit margins and expand payroll in order to go the extra mile to keep a star, had to leave Cleveland. So Cleveland traded him first. We all knew it was coming, because it really was the only option.
That feels worse, which is what I told Antonetti.
“I can understand it and appreciate it,” he said. “But my responsibility is, I have to operate in reality and the reality is the system that we have. Our responsibility is to try to build the best team we can in the system. Just hoping it’ll be different isn’t going to help us be a championship team. Do I wish reality were different or that there were different conditions in place to give us a better chance at keeping a player like Francisco? Of course. But those aren’t the cards we were dealt.”
There aren’t any answers offered here today, and Antonetti didn’t have any either. The Dolans, as the owners, bear a fair share of responsibility. They can spend as much as they want. It’s not the concern of the fans if the Dolans have the money or not, and if people were going broke owning baseball teams, then the owners would be selling. But railing only against ownership can’t be the only reaction today.
The Boston Red Sox did the same thing in trading star Mookie Betts last offseason, but according to Forbes, the Red Sox are worth three times as much as the Indians, and the revenue for Boston in the most recent normal season, 2019, was $519 million while for the Indians it was $290 million. Both teams dumping stars is bad, but the Red Sox had more they could have done about it. Still, in Cleveland, wishing a miracle gazillionaire bought the team and created an unlimited payroll shouldn’t be the way a franchise has to compete at the highest level.
In this case, the “break the bank this one time for a special player” strategy is one I think a lot of people would have gotten behind for a 27-year-old shortstop who is the entire package at the plate, in the field and off the field. So why not that?
“Even in Francisco’s case, there isn’t any one player that a team can’t afford,” Antonetti said. “The question is: Can you sign a player and pay them at that rate in a market like ours and still build a championship team around him and have enough resources to do that? I think, again, the thing we’ll continue to prioritize, how do we build a World Series championship team? That’s what we’re seeking to do and do that we have to make thoughtful investments. How do we build the best team? Not just have the best individual players.”
That’s really the issue here. Because trading Lindor doesn’t preclude the Indians from winning. The front office has earned some faith with their past deals.
“A big part of the success we’ve had as an organization over the last decade or so is because we’ve been willing to make difficult choices to positions our team to be successful,” Antonetti said. “Hopefully this will be, as painful as it is right now, a trade that positions us to be successful moving forward.”
Antonetti talked about reinvesting the money saved here, but the 2021 payroll will still be tiny. There are still outfield holes that must be filled, but there also is still MVP candidate Jose Ramirez and Cy Young winner Shane Bieber and some upside guys like Franmil Reyes and Aaron Civale.
There’s also the realization that the Indians have made the playoffs four of the last five seasons, and Lindor and Carrasco were key parts of a team that went into the 10th inning of Game 7 of the World Series. Expressing only outrage at a franchise coming off a highly successful five-year run and heading toward some version of a rebuild leaves out some valid context.
But also … be sad, mad and frustrated. Because this sport, this ownership and this reality created a world where the Indians can still try to win, but the only way to try to win was to trade their best, most exciting player, and include a beloved borderline ace in the deal as well. Antonetti made it sound like signing Lindor would have left cardboard cutouts of actual players at five other spots on the diamond.
The choice, as they tell it, was winning or Lindor, not winning with Lindor.
“I can understand a lot of the sadness, the frustration, all of the emotions that go along with a trade like this,” Antonetti said. “I appreciate them and experience them myself. So I get it. I understand. But at the same time, there’s a transition in professional sport and professional athletes that at some point is inevitable. Our opportunity, our responsibility, is to build a championship team that our fans can embrace with players they can relate to that make a similar impact on the field and in the clubhouse and in the community. And we have a great group of guys here that remain and I’m excited to see what this group can grow into and continue to develop and maintain that run of success.”
Got it. But losing Lindor and Carrasco hurts. As a result, for a day or week or month or season, people who love this team might hate baseball.
Because baseball made it this way.
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