WINTER HAVEN, Fla. – There are certain annual rites of spring without which no year would be complete:
David Wells announcing he can't get to spring training on time because of "personal reasons."
Those regularly scheduled this-could-be-the-year stories on (pick one – or all) Ismael Valdes, Jamey Wright, Russ Davis, Bill Pulsipher, Paul Spoljaric and, of course, the Cubs.
And, finally, the most dependable spring rite of them all – the sound of 50 million baseball fans asking, in 50-million-part harmony, "Do the Cleveland Indians have enough pitching?"
|  | | Bartolo Colon finished with a 3.88 ERA last season, the fifth-best mark in the AL. |
Sound familiar? It sure does to the Indians.
"This is my fifth year here," says rehabbing right-hander Jaret Wright, wearily, as he sits at his locker, wrapped in an ice pack, at Chain O'Lakes Park. "And I know one thing: I don't get too many questions about our lineup."
"I've got the longest tenure of any general manager," says GM John Hart. "I've been here 11 years. So I've answered more pitching questions than any general manager in baseball."
"I've been hearing that one ever since we came to Jacobs Field," says banged-up veteran Charles Nagy. "And the only reason I didn't hear it before that was: no one cared."
But they care now, all right. They care because everybody knows, right here in the middle of February, that the Cleveland Indians are going to score their 900 runs and mash their 200 homers and run maybe the deepest lineup in baseball out there every night. Mark it down. Take it to Vegas.
What no one knows, though, is whether that will be enough to get them into the playoffs for the sixth time in seven years.
No, what will determine that is ... OK, everybody sing along now ... pitching.
Not that that makes the Indians much different than about two dozen other teams, you understand. It's just that every year about this time, the Indians seem to have, well, questions.
And this year, those questions go like this:
Will Wright – coming off surgery on a torn labrum – be healthy enough to open the season? (Answer: probably.)
Will Nagy – coming off elbow surgery – be healthy enough to rejoin the rotation? (Answer: possibly.)
Will Chuck Finley – coming off arthroscopic knee surgery just five weeks ago – be ready to go when the season starts? (Answer: almost certainly.)
Is Steve Karsay – after enjoying virtually all of his success in the bullpen – really going to be a starter this year? (Answer: depends on all of the above, but probably.)
And why the heck didn't they sign Mike Mussina, anyway? (Answer: long story.)
For the Cleveland Indians, it is always something, some different arrangement of a way-too-familiar tune. If we can all agree that it hasn't been offense that has kept them from winning a World Series by now, and we can all agree it hasn't been defense, then it must be the pitching. So ... here we go again.
"I don't know why people say we need pitching," says veteran 15-win machine Dave Burba. "What we need, if anything, is health."
Hmmm. Good point.
Health was a commodity the Indians had about as much of last year as playoff games. The record books will show they used 32 pitchers. That's exactly twice as many as the Giants (who used 16). It's also more than any team in history.
Except it's not an accurate number – because they actually ripped through more pitchers than that. They also brought in Scott Sanders to make an emergency start, in a game that was eventually rained out before it became official. After which Sanders was released. So he doesn't even count.
And at another point they called up reliever Jarrod Camp, kept him around a few hours without using him, then sent him back from whence he came. So he doesn't count, either.
The correct number of pitchers wearing their uniform, then, was 34. Which is amazing. And scary. And, mostly, ridiculous.
But somebody had to pitch. So in they came. And out they went.
Six of them pitched in three games or fewer.
Thirteen of them pitched in seven games or fewer.
Seventeen of them pitched in 11 games or fewer.
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For
the Cleveland Indians, it is always something,
some different arrangement of a way-too-familiar
tune. If we can all agree that it hasn't been
offense that has kept them from winning a World
Series by now, and we can all agree it hasn't been
defense, then it must be the
pitching. |
It got so nuts that not only did the fans need a scorecard, the other players needed a scorecard.
"Guys would come up from Triple-A, and I thought maybe they were there to rehab or something," Wright says. "Next thing I knew, they were out there in the bullpen. It was a weird feeling."
Somehow, though, despite all that chaos, the Indians still won three more games in the regular season (90) than that pitching-rich team from the Bronx that won the World Series.
They also, oh by the way, gave up 23 fewer runs than the team that ended their run of AL Central domination, the White Sox.
And when you peered beneath that rubble, you found a front three in the rotation – of Bartolo Colon, Finley and Burba – that went a combined 46-25. (Record of the Yankees' front three – of Roger Clemens, El Duque Hernandez and Andy Pettitte: 44-30.)
Now all three members of that front three are back for more. As is one of the deepest bullpens in the league (Bob Wickman, Paul Shuey, Ricardo Rincon, Steve Reed, Justin Speier, Willie Blair).
So it's not as if we're talking about the 1930 Phillies here.
Still, when the offseason began, the conventional wisdom was that the Indians would take the money they didn't use to sign Manny Ramirez, who seemed all but gone, and use it to sign a big-time starter.
Which would be a pseudonym for Mr. Michael C. Mussina.
"That was one of the options," Hart admits. "So did I talk to Arn Tellem (Mussina's agent)? You bet. But we knew 90-some million dollars was going to be the starting point, and it was going to be tough to backload. But I made an offer. I got in the game. It wasn't enough."
And what about all that talk that if all things were equal, Cleveland was where Mussina really wanted to be?
"That made it viable to a point," Hart says. "But when a guy is targeted by the Yankees, it's over. I mean that. It's over. We're not going to be able to outbid the New York Yankees. And we knew that."
But Hart also knew something else. He only had so many dollars to spend. Plus, he had Ramirez to replace or re-sign. He had David Segui to replace or re-sign. He had Sandy Alomar Jr. to replace or re-sign. He had Kenny Lofton to replace or re-sign.
And he already had five starters under contract – in Colon, Finley, Burba, Wright and Nagy, with Steve Woodard and Karsay also on the roster as starting options.
"So if I sign a Mussina, what do I do – write those guys off?" Hart muses. "Do I just eat those contracts? What do I do? I don't have enough jobs for all of them. That was part of my thinking."
And the other part was that, if he plowed $15 million a year into Mussina, and guaranteed it for six years, would he tie up too much of his budget in one pitcher? Would he tie up so much that, coming from a market that was never going to turn into Steinbrenner-ville, he wouldn't be able to piece together enough other pieces to win?
"At some point," Hart says, "you've got to fight the lonely battle. We don't have all the money in the world to spend. So those conditions just wouldn't allow us to get it done."
But once Mussina was gone, that left ... well, whom? Mike Hampton was never going to Cleveland. Steve Trachsel, Kevin Appier, Denny Neagle, Andy Ashby and Rick Reed were no different than the kind of pitchers he already had.
So John Hart punted. On all of them. Which was fine and sensible and all that.
Except it brought this team into another spring training with ...
Questions. Pitching questions. What else?
"You know what? We're OK," Hart says. "We're going to be good. And our pitching's going to be better. People might not think so. But we've got some good young kids coming (most prominently the hulking C.C. Sabathia and Cuban signee Danys Baez). Colon keeps getting better every year. We've got a solid bullpen. We might have a decision to make on Karsay (rotation or bullpen). But I like our staff. I like our arms."
The next six weeks will give them answers on Wright, who has yet to miss a throwing session, and Nagy, about whom the brass is less optimistic. But if they aren't ready, that leaves spots for Karsay and Woodard (who did, remarkably, beat Pedro Martinez and David Wells in huge starts down the stretch).
And if more arms start aching in mid-year, at least this time around, they'll have four legitimate prospects in Triple-A to draw from – in Sabathia, Baez, Tim Drew and Jake Westbrook.
So as another spring unfurls, do the Indians have enough pitching?
"That depends," Wright says. "It depends if you want to look on paper or if you can see the future."
Unfortunately, we're not Kreskin. So we can't see the future. Which means we're left to ask the questions. The same questions. In 50-million-part harmony.
Only the Indians themselves can provide the answers. In eight months.
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.
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