Cleveland - "Rethinking the Game Plan"

Buried in Joe Sheehan's chat from BP was a reference to a Plain Dealer series about the Indian's "Game Plan".

I dug up the URL and read 1/2 of it last night and am getting to the other 1/2 today. It is an excellent series and I highly recommend it.

It's quite the remarkable series from the standpoint of the Indians' openess to talk about how they run their business and for the way they do it. It would serve well as a sequel to "Moneyball".

I can only hope the Reds have something approaching this for a plan to go forward.

http://www.cleveland.com/gameplan/

Thanks for the link, Roy. I got through the first article and my initial take is it all sounds nice from a theoretical standpoint. Any MBA would be proud. But of course the jury is still out. They at least had the guts when they dealt Colon to admit that folks would not understand and try to calm their disappointment. I was one who wondered what in the world was going on up there, and wrote it off as Cleveland returning to the form I grew up knowing, able to screw up a one car junkyard. But then when I see the bandwagon filling up with "#1 Minor League System" claims, I've been following to see if they can pull it off. My opinion, is that some parts of the plan are good changes, like the scouting/coaching working together instead of playing the blame game, but the substance will be the same--the biggest spenders will be the contenders. When has it not been that way?

The most impressive thing is that Shapiro has a plan. I wonder if the Reds' "2003 Plan" was ever put down on paper? Perhaps that's why it fell through.

Humorous part where Shapiro likened traditional draft days to Bluto and the Delta House fraternity in "Animal House" as they sat and weeded out prospective fraternity candidates.

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Originally posted by traderumor
-the biggest spenders will be the contenders. When has it not been that way?

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It's never really been the biggest spenders, it's always been the SMARTEST spenders.

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Raisor originally posted:
It's never really been the biggest spenders, it's always been the SMARTEST spenders.

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A perfect illustration which proves your statement appears in one of the articles:

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Back in 2000, when the Indians were preparing for negotiations with then-Indians slugger Manny Ramirez, Antonetti examined championship teams’ player salaries. He found that no World Series champion between 1985 and 2000 allocated more than 15 percent of its payroll to a single player. In addition, he determined the higher percentage of payroll a team spent on one player, the lower its winning percentage.

For example, teams that spent 17.5 to 20 percent of their payroll on one player won 47 percent of the time. Teams that spent 7.5 percent or lower on one player won 53 percent of the time.

Antonetti concluded there was a significant decline in a team’s chances to make and advance through the postseason if it allocated more than 15 percent of its payroll to a single player. On average, his analysis found, successful teams spent a little more than 12 percent on their highest paid player.

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Pretty compelling, huh?

Fascinating articles. I wish I could believe the Reds had a similarly well thought out plan. The Reds seem to be an ad hoc organization.