Dealing – Terry Pluto

Terry Pluto has been Cleveland’s go to reporter for the Cleveland Indians for decades and he continues to write for the Plain Dealer today. To go with this, he has been one of the best historians for the team in book form including three books in particular that detail the years from 1960 through 2006. Of these (Curse of Rocky Colavito, Burying the Curse and Dealing) the most interesting to the modern fame may be the most recent, recapping the time that the Dolans owned the team, beginning in 2000 and ending in 2006 (2008 in the updated edition).

Pluto has had incredible timing (or luck) with these books as each one came out just before a period of great success by the Indians. He waited until April 1994 to publish Curse, then published Burying after the 1995 season. Likewise, Dealing was originally published after the 2006 season, one year before the Indians finished just one game away from the World Series.

While the time period from the mid-1990’s was more successful for the Tribe, the time afterward was more interesting for fans who actually care about the structuring of professional baseball team. As outlined in the first chapter of the updated edition, the 2005 team had none of the same starters as the 2002 team and there were more constant changes going back all the way to 2000. Given an absolutely terrible situation where their best players had expiring contracts and would cost many millions to retain and no minor league system to speak of, it was up to the Dolans and Mark Shapiro to completely redesign the Indians with a completely new strategy.

This all could be considered ancient history now as the process has already occurred again and there are no players left from even the 2009 starting line-up still with the team, but that actually makes it the perfect time to reevaluate the era. There are still active players of those discussed in the book, like C.C. Sabathia with the Yankees, Victor Martinez with the Tigers and Jhonny Peralta with the Cardinals. In particular, stories covered in depth in Dealing are the purchase of the team, the departures of Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome and Bartolo Colon as well as the addition of Roberto Alomar initially and the drafts and other acquisitions later on.

One of the greatest aspects of this book is that, unlike many current fans who blame the failures for the early 2000’s and even today on Shapiro and Chris Antonetti, it shows that the team was set up to fail by lack of foresight from General Manager John Hart and the Jacobs, who owned the team. Both built the team to win now in the mid-1990’s, signed players for extensions just long enough to contend through 2002 and depleted the minor league system in exchange for current veterans. Once things were about to fail, the Jacobs sold the team and Hart bailed, leaving others the responsibility of going down with the ship. While some have forgotten, it was the genius of Shapiro that brought the Indians back from the bottom of the barrel to return to contention in 2005, making the ALCS in 2007.

While those are the only years covered in this book, it is interesting to note that the Indians got back into contention in 2013, largely because Shapiro didn’t allow the team to dismantle itself, instead selling off important players (like C.C. Sabathia, Casey Blake and Cliff Lee) for parts in their final years, leading to the current stars of today (like Michael Brantley, Carlos Santana and Carlos Carrasco). If Shapiro and Dolan had been like Hart and Jacobs, the team would likely still be looking at being a favorite to finish in fifth instead of being ranked in the top five teams in all of baseball.

Dealing is a great book and would provide excellent perspective to those who would never read it and reinforce what they already knew to those that would. I recommend it to all who are Indians fans, especially those younger fans who didn’t live through the age (one through nine) one game at a time. Get it? Because Eric Wedge used to say that all the time.