Cleveland Indians: Tigers going all out (of money) to bring a title back to Detroit

At least one team is spending money like the Tigers in hopes of winning a championship. Unfortunately, it’s not the Cleveland Indians.

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Well, it’s not like we didn’t know this was coming.  It should have been obvious for several years now that if Mike Ilitch thought that putting a farm team on the moon would bring him closer to a World Series, the Toledo Mud Hens would relocate to the Sea of Tranquility, and he would figure out how to pay for it.

So the Tigers signed Justin Upton.  Six years, 132 million. We now know that Justin Verlander, Jordan Zimmerman, Miguel Cabrera, and Upton are likely to make more money between them this season that the entire Indians’ roster, and that there are three other players on Detroit’s roster that will make more money than anyone on the Indians.  While a lot of brainpower has been expended on analyzing how badly this could go wrong for the Tigers near the end of this decade when these guys are past their primes and the Tigers have an astronomical payroll and a last place team (wait, that already happened), a lot has also been written, possibly with not quite so much brainpower, about how this is unfair to teams like the Indians.

Yes, it sucks. And, yes, it would be nice if the ownership of the Indians had figured out a way to make billions selling bad pizza or if they owned a team in another sport with a hard salary cap so they could plow the excess revenues from that sport into their team.  But let’s get real:  if you are an Indians fan complaining about the spending of the Tigers and every other team who has outspent the Indians, let’s make sure we’re not being just a little bit hypocritical.

You know what I mean.  Chances are that most people reading this blog either live near Cleveland or, like me, were born there.  And if your favorite baseball team is the Indians, there’s a strong likelihood that, like me, your favorite pro basketball team is the NBA equivalent of the Tigers, the Cavaliers.

(We’ll pause a moment for the screams of outrage.  Are you done yet?)

How much difference is there between spending insane amounts of money to win a World Series while an 86-year-old owner is around to enjoy it and spending insane amounts of money to win an NBA title while a 31-year-old superstar is still in his prime?  How much more ridiculous is paying Justin Upton 132 million than paying Tristan Thompson 82 million?  Will Miguel Cabrera be anymore overpaid at the end of his contract–even if he weighs three hundred pounds–than Kevin Love at the end of his?  While the Tigers are paying Verlander several times more than his recent performance justifies, the Cavs are paying Anderson Varejao ten million dollars and he hasn’t played except in blowouts.  Both the Cavs and the Tigers are working within the rules that apply to them, and they have decided to spend what it takes to win, and to think about the consequences later.

Look, Mike Ilitch and Dan Gilbert have made the same decision, and they haven’t made it for entirely egotistical reasons.  Sure, both of them can hear the clock ticking, if for different reasons, but both have also realized that a winning team pays for itself.  The Tigers, despite the fact that Detroit is an economic train wreck, drew almost double what the Indians did last year, and the value of the Cavs as a franchise increased by hundreds of millions of dollars when LeBron James returned, and every home game has sold out, playing under the same economic conditions as the Indians.

Next: The cold reality of past winters in Cleveland

We don’t know if the Tigers will ever win a World Series or if the Cavs will ever win an NBA title.  We don’t even know if the Tigers will be better than the Indians this season.  Five years from now we may look at all this spending, in both cases, as a boondoggle of epic proportions, and both franchises may be so hamstrung from the choices they are making now that they are unable to field competitive teams for years.  But is history made more frequently by the bold and ballsy, or by the prudent and pragmatic?