Two days later, an editorial in the hometown paper says that if the owner doesn't want to spend the money, he ought to sell the team. ''The future today," the editorial continues, ''is bleaker than at any time in the past 16 years."
Is this a sneak preview of what awaits Larry Lucchino and the Red Sox if they trade Manny Ramírez? It's easy to see why you might think so, but everything you just read already happened. In Cleveland.
Just days before the trading deadline in 2002, Mark Shapiro, who took over for John Hart after Hart resigned the previous winter, shocked the baseball world by trading ace Bartolo Colon, who was just 29 at the time, for first baseman Lee Stevens and three minor leaguers. Indians fans were in an uproar, and after setting a record with 455 consecutive sellouts, they stayed away from Jacobs Field in droves. The team, which had begun the season 11-1, finished just 74-88, then lost 94 games the next season. The owner, Larry Dolan, was Public Enemy No. 1.
But something happened to the Indians on the road to oblivion. Stevens made just a cameo appearance, but of those three minor leaguers, two of them, pitcher Cliff Lee and outfielder Grady Sizemore, blossomed into stars, and the third, Brandon Phillips, who was the most touted of the three, might still make a meaningful contribution.
The general manager, Shapiro, made a series of other shrewd trades, bringing in more impressive young talent, and the Indians, who finished just under .500 (80-82) in 2004, emerged as one of baseball's best teams this past season, winning 93 games and falling just short of the playoffs. ESPN.com already has ranked the Indians No. 1 going into the 2006 season.
The only negative for the Indians? The fans, who truly felt betrayed as they watched the Indians stripped, either by trade or free agency, of such stars as Colon, Ramírez, Robbie Alomar, Jim Thome, and Omar Vizquel, have been slow to come back. The Indians drew just over 2 million fans this past season, a far cry from the days when they played in an empty Municipal Stadium but still better in 2005 than only the Royals and Devil Rays.
