Around the division: Indians

The Cleveland Indians fell apart almost completely at the end of the season — 7-25 in September/October — and ended the season at 65-97. This wasn't the worst record in baseball (Washington lost 103) or even the worst in the American League (Baltimore lost 98, and Kansas City also lost 97), but it certainly wasn't good.

So naturally the organization:

• is likely to make no significant player moves this offseason, and
• replaced manager Eric Wedge with Manny Acta, who had himself been fired by those 103-loss Nationals in mid season.

Naturally.

Actually, the first is more explicable than it sounds. Cleveland, by the time of its collapse, had already done a pretty through job of exchanging its "today" players for "tomorrow" players. "Today" players being the guys who are on the roster for purposes of immediate contention but don't figure to be long-term foundation pieces. Maybe, like Casey Blake, they're getting onto the wrong side of 30; maybe, like Victor Martinez, they're going to become too expensive for the payroll.

So the challenge for Acta isn't so much 2010 and 2011 as 2012. He has the task of developing Justin Masterson into a top-of-the-rotation starter, the assignment of figuring out which of Lou Marston and Carlos Santana is the catcher of the future, the mission of picking the right place for Matt LaPorta (left field? first base?).

Then there are the reclamation projects. Is there any hope for Fausto Carmona? (Not unless he finds command of the strike zone.) Will Travis Hafner ever return to his 2004-06 levels of production? (He's going to be 33 and he's hit 21 homers the last two years combined, so no.) What's with Jhonny Peralta? (He's a good hitter for a shortstop and a mediocre one for a third baseman, so if Cleveland's sold on Asdrubal Cabrera as its shortstop, Peralta isn't helping them.) Can Grady Sizemore bounce back? (Yes. And he will.)

In most of these cases, the point isn't having these players help Cleveland contend. It's establishing enough value to exchange them, too, for players who will someday help Cleveland contend. (Sizemore and maybe Carmona are the exceptions.)

Wedge got canned because the Indians, who came oh-so-close to beating the eventual World Series champs in 2007, never really contended in either 2008 or 2009. Now CC Sabathia is in New York (by way of Milwaukee), Cliff Lee is in Philly, Martinez is in Boston and Acta is in Cleveland, with far lower expectations.

Kansas City isn't going to contend this year because there's little evidence the front office knows what it's doing and why it's doing it. Cleveland isn't going to contend either, but there is a discernible plan.

Poll stuff

Just 17 votes in last week's poll on who in the AL Central looks right now to be the chief threat to the Twins. Maybe it was the holiday; more likely, it was just an uninteresting question.

Anyway: Nine (52 percent) picked the Chicago White Sox; six (35 percent) the Detroit Tigers; two (11 percent) Cleveland Indians; zero (0 percent) the Kansas City Royals.

I'll finish the "series" around the division Monday with Cleveland.

Meanwhile ... the Hall of Fame ballots have been announced. This is the year the Veterans Committee considers managers, executives and umps; players will be next year. So no chance for Tony Oliva or Jim Kaat this time around. The Veterans Committee lists are here.

And this week the BBWAA ballot was released. That list is here.

The new poll concerns only the six players and managers on the ballots with Twins connections. Which, if any, should go in?

Around the division: Tigers

This has been the winter of rumors for the Tigers.

During and immediately after the general manager meetings early this month, there was a definite Detroit emphasis to the rumor mill. Every day, a new player: First, pitcher Edwin Jackson (13-9. 3.62 in 214 innings) was said to be available. The next day, center fielder Curtis Granderson (30 homers in an otherwise disappointing stat line) was supposedly being shopped. Then a Miguel Cabrera to Boston rumor got started.

The national baseball media is running with this theme for an obvious reason. Detroit's attendance slid about 25 percent last season. The Michigan economy isn't getting better. The Tigers have one of the highest payrolls in MLB ($119 million-plus, according to ESPN.com).

Adding one and one and one together, the conventional wisdom is that the Tigers need to shed payroll. And since the likes of Dontrelle Willis, Jeremy Bonderman and Magglio Ordonez are essentially untradeable — too much money, not enough production — the only way to drastically cut payroll is to dump the usable veterans.

I doubt a fire sale is brewing, however. That doesn't appear to be Mike Ilitch's style. The Detroit pizza magnate (Little Caesar's) has shown a willingness to lose money on his sports teams to win.

The Tigers didn't win enough last season. But the real salary problem is in the likes of Willis ($10 million to go 1-4, 7.49) and Ordonez (9 home runs for his $19 million), not in the guys who can actually play.

The Tigers will shed some money this winter. They're unlikely, for example, to re-sign Placido Polanco, and disappointing mid-summer pickups Jarrod Washburn (above) and Aubrey Huff are definitely not returning.

Perhaps the Tigers will trade Jackson or Granderson — or even Cabrera. But if those guys are moved, it will be in a baseball move, not just moving a contract off the books.

Around the division: Royals

The temptation when contemplating Kansas City is to swipe Bill Terry's line before the 1934 season, when the Giants skipper retorted when asked about the Dodgers, "Is Brooklyn still in the league?"

But the Dodgers made Terry pay for his wisecrack at the end of the season, sweeping the Giants to help the Gas House Gang Cardinals win the pennant.

And, for that matter, the Royals last season helped the Twins win the divisional title by sweeping the Tigers in mid September.

I'll sum up the Royals thusly: They have Zack Grienke (above), Joakim Soria and Billy Butler — a true ace starter, a top-flight closer, and a legitimate middle-of-the-order bat. Beyond that, not much. David DeJesus is an OK left fielder, and Alberto Callaspo is a pretty good hitter for a second baseman, and a pretty poor fielder for a second baseman. And those are their next two best players.

Worse: They have a management team that says one thing and does another. They talk about improving the on-base percentage, and everybody they bring in swings wildly at everything.

The latest case in point is Tug Hulett, an infielder who'll turn 27 in February, a .194 hitter in 75 major league plate appearances. The Royals cut him loose this month; the Boston Red Sox picked him up.

Why did the Red Sox claim him? Because Hulett has a .394 lifetime on-base percentage in the minors.

At 27, Hulett isn't going to become a star. Two other organizations have disposed of him. There's got to be a reason for that.

But if a front office says it wants to improve its OBP, and it's carrying infielders along the lines of Willie Bloomquist (.308 OBP) and Luis Hernandez (.284) and Yuniesky Betancourt (.274), you'd think .394 would get their attention.

It didn't. It doesn't. And as long as Dayton Moore (general manager) and Trey Hillman (manager) continue to operate this way, there's no need to take the Royals seriously.

A Twins fan's thankful twelve

The Yankees won 103 games last year, which means they LOST 59 times. Joe Mauer hit .365, which means he made outs in 63.5 percent of his at-bats. You can always find something to gripe about, and I do so too often.

But today is Thanksgiving, and a day to be grateful for the good things we have. I could make a list trite and profound of such things in my life, but this is a baseball blog, so I'll stick to the diamond.

Twelve things for which this Twins fan gives thanks:

1. That I get to watch Joe Mauer play on a daily basis.
2. That everybody involved is making reassuring noises about Mauer's future in Minnesota.
3. For 28 years of knowing tonight's game won't be rained out.
4. For a future of fresh air and real grass.
5. For Denard Span's consistently professional at-bats.
6. For Michael Cuddyer's willingness to vacate his preferred position for the sake of the team.
7. For Ozzie Guillen, who drew the venom from the Twins-White Sox rivalry without losing the competitiveness.
8. For the energy and enthusiasm Carlos Gomez brought to the ball park every day the past two seasons.
9. That the Twins were able to exchange Go-Go's unopened tool box for a quality shortstop.
10. That the Twins' best player doesn't get stinkin' drunk during a crucial series.
11. That Justin Morneau and Pat Neshek sound good to go.
12. That spring training is just 87 days away.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Thanks for reading.

Around the division: White Sox

The White Sox so far this offseason have had a theme, and that theme is infielders.

They have:

• Traded two players handed infield jobs at the start of 2009 — Chris Getz (second base) and Josh Fields (third base) to Kansas City for veteran Mark Teahen. Teahen is to be their third baseman.
• Said Gordon Beckham, who dislodged Fields and emerged as one of the American League's better rookies, would play second base.
• Signed Omar Vizquel (photo above) to be a reserve infielder and mentor to incumbent shortstop Alexei Ramirez.

Taking them one at a time:

Off his track record with the Royals, Teahen is exactly the kind of guy Twins fans should want the White Sox to accumulate. He was not a particularly productive hitter for Kansas City, and he's not a sensational fielder either.

But ... I haven't given up on him as a hitter, and it may be he'll blossom. The White Sox' stadium is much more hitter friendly than the Kansas City park, and the Royals the past few years have shuttled Teahen from position to position.

Beckham sounded OK with moving to second base, although the general feeling is that he'd rather be the shortstop, the position he played as an amateur. And there's no shortage of people outside the Sox camp who think he should get that chance, Ramirez having had a rough season with the glove at short last year.

But even in his shortstop days, Beckham was viewed as a guy who would play his way off short sooner or later. "Alexei's better than Gordon at short," was GM Kenny Williams's six-word answer to the question of why not Beckham at short and Ramirez back at second, where he played in 2008.

Which is where Vizquel comes in, at least in theory. The 11-time Gold Glover spent last season playing a similar infield reserve role with the Texas Rangers — where part of his job was mentoring rookie shortstop Elvis Andrus.

It might be a good cop-bad cop routine for Ramirez, with manager Ozzie Guillen (himself no slouch of a shortstop glove) continuing to ride Ramirez hard and Vizquel patting him on the back.

More thoughts about Mauer, catchers and the MVP

It is an unofficial part of the BBWAA's voting process for the awards, at least the major ones — somebody who casts a vote that leaves the rest of the baseball world puzzled writes a piece explaining/defending the vote.

Let us hope that Kezio Konishi writes such a piece — and that it's readable by those of us who don't read Japanese.

Konishi writes for Kyodo News in Japan, and he covers the Mariners — or perhaps what he covers is Ichiro Suzuki. In the rotation system the BBWAA uses to determine who votes for the awards, he was one of the two votes allotted to the Seattle chapter — and he cast his vote for Miguel Cabrera.

Now, I said this Tuesday: I'm not upset that Mauer didn't win a unanimous vote. He missed all of April, and if someone insists that a full season of Derek Jeter or Mark Teixeira is worth more to his team than five months of Mauer, I won't agree but I'm not going to write the guy off as hopeless.

But Cabrera? His bulk power numbers aren't much better than Mauer's ( 34 HR MC, 28 JM; 103 RBI MC, 98 JM); there's a difference in defensive value between a quality catcher and an OK first baseman; and, of course, Mauer didn't get stone drunk with the division title on the line.

This was just a stupid vote.

Konishi, you got some 'splaning to do.

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Mauer is the sixth catcher to win an MVP award; it's the eighth to go to a catcher, Yogi Berra having won three of them.

The list: Mickey Cochrane, 1934; Berra in 1951, 1954 and 1955; Elston Howard in 1963; Thurman Munson in 1976; Ivan Rodriguez in 1999; and now Mauer.

Interesting list. Cochrane and Berra are in the Hall of Fame, of course; Rodriguez, still active, figures to join them. Those three are among the handful of players with a claim to the title of greatest catcher ever.

Howard and Munson aren't on that level. Howard might have been, but he was stuck behind Berra for about a third of his career — Howard's rookie season was Berra's third MVP year. He was the Yankees' first black player (Casey Stengel supposedly grumbled: "They finally get me one, and they get me the only one who can't run") and the first black to win the AL MVP Award.

I suspect that had Howard come up with another team, he'd be a Hall of Famer.

Munson is another matter. He died at age 32 — he was piloting a small plane in midseason 1979 and crashed — but, as Bill James has noted, his career was in a downhill spiral. He was having back problems — one of the banes of catchers — and his power had largely dried up. He'd have played longer had he lived — but the quality of that play was not going to be up to the standard he had set. And that quality wasn't truly as high as that of Berra, Cochrane, Rodriguez or Howard.

And now Mauer.

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Which raises the point that the Yankees' many dynasties have been largely built on great outfielders (Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, Jackson) and great catchers (Schang, Dickey, Berra, Howard, Munson, Posada).

A quick ranking of Yankees catchers:

1) Berra.

2) Bill Dickey. A .313 lifetime average, albeit in a hitting-rich era. Quietly platooned for years. Credited with teaching Berra to catch.

3) Jorge Posada. Never a great glove behind the dish and getting worse with age, but a quality switch-hitter. Should have gotten more MVP consideration in 2003; he finished third (behind Alex Rodriguez and Carlos Delgado).

4) Howard. Could rank ahead of Posada, but Jorge has had more good years and more playing time.

5) Wally Schang. Why this man isn't in Cooperstown in a befuddlement. Caught for the A's in the final years of the $100,000 infield dynasty; two pennants there. Traded to Boston for the last season of that dynasty; total of three pennants, two World Series wins. Traded to the Yankees for the start of the first Ruth dynasty; three more pennants and another World Series win — that's six and two. Moved on again to the Browns, who didn't win, and then back to the A's where he backed up Cochrane for another pennant and World Series title. All told, seven pennants, three World Series titles.

And a productive switch-hitter to boot with a lifetime OBP of .393.

6) Munson.

Pretty rich crop there, made all the more impressive by the fact that of the bunch only Schang spent a significant part of his career elsewhere.