Sunday Sports Day: Indians and Browns Analysis

By MK

I haven’t written on sports in a while, but with the Tribe making a huge trade and Browns camp starting back up, I feel now is a good time to offer some thoughts. I definitely miss the banter with friends and fans back home. We also used to do a sports thing once a week, so maybe this will segue me into bringing that back, but don’t bet on that shit.

Either way, after the Ubaldo Jimenez trade, things got popping off with a lot of Tribe fans ecstatic about the trade. I am not specifically going to get into the psyche of a Cleveland fan, because at this point, let’s be honest, our fan base is not the most sane or rational one. For good reason, but I am going to take a more pragmatic approach as I examine this trade, but more so the philosophy I believe a team in our economic situation must adopt.

About the Tribe…

Overall, I applaud Antonetti for actually having the balls to make this move. You get an ace for at least two years as it should seem, while giving up your top two pitching prospects. Bold move. High risk, high reward stuff. But let’s move on to the practicalities of this trade.

Let me begin by saying this: pitching and defense wins you championships. Timely hitting is also a large part of that, but I believe the first two are the foundation for a championship ballclub. As I assess our ballclub, our pitching even without this trade is ahead of our offense. So…


To those drinking the Kool-Aid on the Ubaldo trade, please understand: we will eventually go down the same path with him that we did with Cliff Lee and Cookie Cookie Sabathia, and what did that yield? So far, a decent player in Michael Brantley and a few hits out of Matt LaPorta. We will see what Jason Kipnis is made of shortly. However, for the position we are in as an organization, a shitty one at that, it’s those top teir prospects we need to rely on, for depth and better long-term contract situations. I think most people really undervalue this concept for two main reasons.

First, in the last few seasons we have been in fire sale mode, so we have been acquiring prospects. Those prospects rarely jump straight to our Major League club meaning they are still in this development process. Second, our drafts had been so shitty for a number of years that our so-called top prospects had been over-hyped. Without developing an in-house prospects, but it seems of late, this had been turning around with prospects like Alex White and Drew Pomeranz.

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