Who’s running my team: The Cleveland Indians

One of a series of articles looking at the front office structure of each major league team. Today, we look at the Cleveland Indians.

Cleveland Indians

• Owner: Lawrence Dolan
• President of Baseball Operations: Chris Antonetti
• General Manager: Michael Chernoff

Dolan paid $323 million for the Indians in 2000, buying the team from long-time owner Dick Jacobs. An attorney with a law degree from Notre Dame, he operated his own law firm before obtaining a controlling interest in the Indians.

Since buying the team, Dolan, who is approaching his 89th birthday, has largely ceded ownership responsibilities to his son, Paul.

For most of his tenure, the Dolan approach has been a hands-off one, opting to trust the people he puts in charge of baseball operations. The Indians have only had four general managers and three presidents in that span, and Dolan didn’t fire any of them.

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John Hart, who Dolan inherited from Jacobs, left following the 2001 season to accept a better offer with the Texas Rangers. His successor, Mark Shapiro, ran the team first as GM and then as president until leaving for what he viewed as a better position with the Toronto Blue Jays. Antonetti succeeded him and Chernoff moved up when Antonetti became president.

Chernoff and Antonetti, then, are the team’s driving forces. Who are they?

Antonetti is a Georgetown grad who started with the Montreal Expos in 1998, moved over to the Cleveland Indians a year later, and stayed. When Shapiro occupied the newly created position of President, he picked Antonetti to succeed him.

Chernoff is a Princeton grad and an Indians lifer: he started as an intern and worked his way up, becoming GM when Antonetti was promoted following the 2015 season. So loyal has Chernoff been to the franchise that in 2014 he passed on the opportunity to even interview for the vacant San Diego Padres general managership, preferring to wait until that same window opened locally.

Forbes values the Indians franchise at $1.2 billion, a mid-range number for MLB, but three times the $391 million valuation of a decade earlier. The team’s $282 million in revenues have also risen, in that case from $170 million in 2010. That’s a 65 percent growth, 6.5 percent per season.

Like many teams, however, the growth in revenues is greatly outpaced by the growth in salaries. The Indians spent $129 million on players in 2019, more than twice the $60 million they spent in 2010.

At 45 percent of revenues, the $129 million payroll shows a conservative approach to talent acquisition. That’s underscored by the fact that the Indians actually reduced payroll since hitting $152 million in 2017.  That represented 56 percent of revenues in 2017, a figure that will get the front office’s attention.

On several recent occasions, of course, the Indians almost cashed in big. The team is enjoying a run of seven consecutive winning seasons, a string that was not interrupted by the 2019 payroll purge. Since 2010 they’ve won three division titles, played in four post-seasons, and came achingly close to winning the 2016 World Series.

Unfortunately, fan interest has lagged in numbers that are approaching critical mass. It wasn’t that long ago – 1996 through 2001 to be exact – that the Indians annually drew more than 3 million fans to Jacobs Field. They’ve only broken 2 million five times since then, and only once since 2009. Between 2016 and 2018, they averaged 96 victories and swept all three AL Central titles yet still averaged just 1.855 million people through the stadium gates. Attendance fell in 2017, again in 2018 and again in 2019.

Since the Cleveland Indians have one of the game’s highest ratios of revenue per fan — $84 – those lagging attendance figures during a successful on-field era constitute a major hit.

Their record illustrates that the problem hasn’t been the absence of a quality product. Generally, and with a few early exceptions, Antonetti and Chernoff have worked successfully to improve their product. Based on net short-term change in Wins Above Average, they have added about 1.5 games of talent to the roster annually. Set aside Antonetti’s first two seasons in charge – when he was mostly in tear-down mode – and that figure climbs to +3.6 games per season.

The challenge for Antonetti and Chernoff, then, is to ascertain what’s keeping fans away and get them to come back. Alternatively, if the attendance downturns are irreversible, they’ll need to explore other revenue streams – licensing, media, real estate – to make up the loss.

*This calculation is obtained by determining the net impact of all player transactions on team performance for the season(s) in question. Wins Above Average is a zero-based offshoot if Wins Above Replacement; thus, the final figure suggests the degree of positive or negative movement in the standings attributable to front office moves.