Where did I say they have players in the minors better than ours? Didn’t say that. What I said was that their guys – over all – are further along in their maturation process.

But whatever. Here’s the deal fwembt: I’m sayin’ that the Royals will finish ahead of us next year. If you think I’m wrong, hang onto this post. You can beat me over the head with it next October. Believe me, if I’m right I’ll let you know.

Why both of course, it’s not either/or, silly. Did you watch the Indians play at all last year? What did you think of their August and September performance? Now did you watch any of the Royals games? Pretty bad, huh? But no as bad as us.

On the list above exactly who on that list is ready to help us next year? Brantley – saw him last year, pretty lame. Carrasco? Meh, possibly, but more likely 2011. Rondon? Dunno, maybe. In short, it’s gonna take a miracle – like Santana turning into V. Martinez next spring, and that probably isn’t enough – for the team I saw in September to catch up with the Royals.

Last year about this time I heard a plethora of stuff about how the Twins weren’t a competitive team. And probably in any other division in baseball this would be true. But even in the AL Central, the Tribes in for a rough year next year.

Hey, you sited them as being comparable to the Indians, not me. That is a horrid franchise that would love a 2005 or 2007 type season.

Look, there’s little question at this point that the Indians front office is a little too good at believing that they’re a little too good. Where you lose me is the idea that having a long-term strategy is a bad thing. Or talking about it.

Having a real long-term strategy is precisely what separates the Indians from the perennial mediocrities. Are the Orioles now their equal, have they climbed out of a dozen years of mediocrity to have a well run club? Perhaps.

Do they deserve the benefit of the doubt on that? Hell no they don’t. Not as long as the buck stops with Angelos. They haven’t done anything yet, and their owner has a long track record of being a destructive force.

Put the shoe on the other foot: if I were to make a negative assertion in such grand terms, you’d be right to challenge me. I’m not trying to fight you, I’m just questioning you.

The We Suck conversation is depressing and more than a little boring. It’s like 90% of the online conversation about the Indians, only with slightly less Dolan is Cheap! blather.

Yes, there’s some truth in assuming the default outcome will be failure. But if that’s the overall tenor of the discussion, there are about a million things I’d rather do than join in the woefest. Once you’ve said that the team sucks, that the front office is incapable of building a winner, that it’s the dark ages all over again, what more is there to say?

If you can’t be at least a little bit optimistic as a baseball fan in November, what’s the point?

What happens if Cabrera regresses? Essentially the same thing as happened with Peralta regressing, except that it’s more tolerable because of the glove. If the glove regresses, too? Then it’s just as aggravating.

If he disappears altogether? We’re looking at trying to develop Rivero into Peralta 2.0 and/or trying to make a big-leaguer out of Jason Donald. These are far from sure things but still better than nothing.

No, we don’t have both an emerging All-Star and a scorching hot prospect at any position.

Again, what is the point of exploring this scenario? There are 40 things that can go wrong between now and 2012, and Cabrera is pretty damned far down that list.

I’m not saying it’s a bummer, although it is that, too. I’m saying it’s a fruitless topic to explore purely in terms of substance. Any player could go downhill at any time. Why focus on one of the least likely to do so?

It’s me. You’re taking it well though.

I think there was criticism of Shapiro before Jay’s piece, you just may not have noticed it.

Correlation is not causation. That particular post was well timed — deliberately timed in fact — to coincide with the utter and irretrievable loss of the season. Frustrations with the club’s failures, and with tolerance of Wedge’s idiosyncrasies in particular, were growing to a crescendo. You were going to see a huge wave of criticism regardless of whether I made a big post about it or not.

As I’ve noted before, how do you critique a club that evidently does so many things right? It isn’t easy, and I spent a lot of time on it. I will note that (to my knowledge), no significant mainstream or sabermetric outlet has even attempted a serious critique of the Shapiro front office. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here, because ultimately I didn’t come up with many answers. But I think my two or three big critique posts gave voice to a lot of frustration that was already out there, maybe helped people to verbalize the problems.

Popular dogma on the site was that Shapiro, whatever his faults, was nonetheless one of the best in the business. The evidence supported that supposition — a couple of very good teams built with tiny payrolls, enormous accolades from his peers in the industry, a few conspicuously cagey moves made. To argue that he just plain sucked was simply not supported by the evidence.

If the dogma changed, it was because the evidence changed. Flukes started looking like ongoing, systemic problems. Quotes came out that we hadn’t heard before. Carmona became a casualty of apparently feeble coaching. Ryan Garko became an outfielder. One more astoundingly bad bullpen emerged. And we lost, and lost, and lost.

These events were far more significant in shaping popular sentiment at LGT than anything I wrote.

I don’t have to. I look at the consistent response of the populace and then judge the actor to be a reasonable human being. If that reasonable human being consistently exerts the same stimulus and consistently gets the same result, that person is using the stimulus to bring about the result

The point is the contract, you’re right. The point is that always saying that the move being made is the wrong one will make you correct the majority of the time. Trumpeting that as proof of your ability and persisting in that same action is what is infantile.

I disagree with the characterization of Chuck as a troll when the Hafner deal was signed. I thought he was wrong, and I still do. I didn’t think he was a troll.

My point at the time was that it was a substantially below-market deal. He eventually conceded that, then forgot that he conceded it, had to be convinced a few more times, etc. But he always contended that even if it was below-market, we still shouldn’t have done it.

I feel like you’re trying to give him credit based on the idea that we used to think he was a troll. He was not a troll.

One man’s unsupported (knee jerk) pessimism is another man’s way of life. I agree that pessimism—even when it’s indicated—can have a deleterious effect on civility. And I see your motivation in booting off naysayers and nattering nabobs of negativism. But I think a certain portion of otherwise intelligent people here can be viewed as pollyannish. Perhaps it is a function of age, and not having been through the dire history Chuck and others have, but some of that cohort has seen only an Indians team that can be believed in.

I guess that’s a common concern about pessimism: where does it leave us? I think it’s intriguing. What happens if the Indians get worse, and not better? How could it be arrested? The Indians must have some sort of doomsday plan. If the team gets worse, as Chuck has pointed out in his reveries about the 1978 Tribe, you change your parameters and root for something other than victory.

i don’t want to speak for odradek here because he’s doing a hell of a job for himself.

but my feeling: if you accept his premise (that modeling the future is a lot more difficult than many posters on here conceive it to be), and you acknowledge that 2002-2009 has generally been a period of failure (with a few brilliant successes sprinkled throughout), then it becomes a lot easier to understand the heavy doses of skepticism with which i treat any assertion that this organization can or will build a winner.

which, back to the original point: those of us with the “knee-jerk, unfounded” pessimism are tired of being told that we bear the burden of proof when we say our piece. it just doesn’t make sense, i guess, from a historical standpoint or from a logical standpoint. i guess if i had to sum it up in one sentence: i hate always working against the assumption that things are going well.