The View from Terry Pluto
Debriefing with the Sportswriter Extraordinaire on All-Star Break

Opinions are a dime a dozen. Everybody has bunches of them, and all too many who shouldn't, share them indiscriminately with the rest of the world. Informed opinions are more highly regarded. In that instance, mix in acute perception, along with formidable writing skills, and you have a writer worth reading.

Terry Pluto has an opinion about any number of things. You may agree, or disagree, but he's almost always right on the money, and worth reading. So when he said on June 27 that the Indians season was tanked, readers shook their heads, sadly agreeing that it must be so. Terry really wanted to be wrong, but unfortunately, it didn't much look like he was. The Indians won that day, with C.C. pitching. Then, the very next day, the Indians engaged in a ten-game losing streak as if to prove him right. Mid-stream, they traded their ace pitcher, C.C. Sabathia to Milwaukee. At least he's in the other league! And now the Tribe's starting to think about next year. Already. Too bad... It's gonna be a long summer!

"Mediocrity is expensive." So says the sportswriter extraordinaire, and he ought to know. He's seen enough of it. He writes at least four times a week for The Plain Dealer, after 20-some years of working for the Akron Beacon Journal. In addition to sports, he also writes about faith in an every-other-week column for his current daily, plus he's authored two books on the subject so far. Interesting combination, but very real to him.

When he was recruited for this position last year, “the faith column was a major factor,” he says, his blue eyes shining, matching the blue chambray work shirt he wears. “I’d been writing about faith—or the lack of it—for years in Akron, and I didn’t want to give it up.” Fortunately, he didn’t have to. There was nothing but plus signs all the way through the negotiations. He could continue doing what he’d been doing and loved doing, “but on a bigger stage” and wouldn’t even have to move. He and his wife, Roberta, still live in their same house in Akron.

Some years ago, there was a similar call from Newsday, on Long Island. They talked it over for half an hour, before he called back to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” He smiles, a quizzical look on his face. “Who’d want to live there? Pay $30. Just to park your car. There are traffic jams at three in the morning in New York—and we’d have had to move... No, we decided we didn’t want to go there.”

Not everyone craves the noise and the bright lights of the biggest city in the country. So, will LeBron James? Who knows? “Time will tell on that one, a lot can happen in two years,” adds Terry. “LeBron is basically a local kid, and he’s pretty well settled here, with his family and his homes and all. But still--? If he does leave, will time stop for the rest of us? I don’t see why we need to worry so much about that just at this moment.”

The implication is—there are entirely too many other things to worry about just now, we don’t have to go looking into next year, or even the year after that, to keep ourselves busy.

Certainly, to a sports-mad town like Cleveland, that’s all too true. The Gladiators started off big, faded a tad, then finished strong. After finishing at 2-14 in Las Vegas last year, they made it to their conference championship game on Saturday. Unfortunately, they couldn’t overcome the more experienced team. But, hey! There’s always next year. Right? The Browns start summer camp one week from today, with their first league game less than two months away. And who knows? The Indians could turn spoiler. They’ve done it before. There’s the Olympics in August, and several folks from our area will be in Beijing competing for our country, LeBron James among them. Of course, we can still fret about the rest of the Cavs, too. We don’t have to concentrate all our worries on LeBron.

Where to start?

Major league sports have changed drastically in the last 25 years or so. Look at baseball, for instance. In the days before 1980, many pitchers threw complete games. It was almost a badge of honor to finish what you started. Terry isn’t as old as I am, but he remembers those days, too, and offers this opinion. “Pitchers began receiving big contracts and when they got hurt, it looked bad for the team giving them the money. So they wanted to protect their arms. There was a strike in 1981, and Burt Blyleven pitched the first game for the Indians after the strike. He pitched 8 innings, and shortly thereafter, developed arm trouble. Was it because he’d been not playing for two months during the strike, or because he pitched 8 innings? More than ever, they began paying attention to pitch counts, trying to keep pitchers under 100-110 pitches. About this same time, exercise machines became a popular assist to physical fitness, and emphasis on certain parts of the body gained in usage. Are the two connected? But still–it doesn’t make all that much difference now. This is how the game is played these days. No one is willing to go backwards to the good old days.”

‘Tinker’ as a noun was the name of a great third baseman who moved to shortstop; it doesn’t work so well as a verb when applied to what happens with lineups these days. But then, the manager can only manage the players that he has. These are provided by the team’s General Manager. Terry adds, “Fans tend to pick the GM apart for a few bad trades, and ignore a basically good record. It’s the old what have you done for me lately thing. It’s become a ‘what kind of team do we want to have?’ All of our teams strive for good character and I think they’ve achieved that.”

Last season, with a limited budget, the Indians as a team outdid themselves, and Mark Shapiro won the Executive of the Year Award. All the pieces fit together like well-oiled machinery. This year, someone threw sand into the works, and little is going well. In Terry’s opinion, “Mark Shapiro does very well with his limited budget. Until this year when they reached the middle of the pack, the Indians had been in the lower 1/3 of the league. Like all such GMs, he has his ups and downs. Eric Wedge is a good, steady manager, but he’s not a miracle worker. Like every manager, he’s at the mercy of his players, especially his bullpen..” He pauses for a moment, then adds, his voice trailing off, “It’s strange how they’re so good in odd years . . .”

As to the Cavs, Terry thinks “Danny Ferry is really still in the proving stage, but has provided stability. (The Cavs have had numerous coaches and GMs during the last few years.) Mike Brown was hired first, but the two have done well since then. I don’t see an offensive coordinator being added anytime soon. If ever.”

Naturally, the subject of a new co-star being added came into the conversation. “No chance of Michael Redd. None. Maybe, though, there might be with Kirk Heinrich. I think maybe the thought was that Wally (Szczerbiak) might once again be the shooter he was in college, but that hasn’t happened yet. When Ferry made his huge trade last March, Mike Brown was forced to retool his team on the run. There was very little time to experiment: to see who played well with whom. It worked reasonably well, but might have worked better had it been done earlier in the season, so the guys had a chance to become better acquainted.”

Okay. So what about the Browns? “Phil Savage does have good people skills. He had to learn that he couldn’t fix everything all at once. Wisely, he stepped back and concentrated first on the offense. Now that’s working well, so he can look more at the defense. The players really like Romeo Crennel (the coach) and want to win for him.” Any thoughts about Brady Quinn? “I don’t know—we’ve not seen enough of him to know for sure.” As to how he thinks the Browns will do this year, “They could get to the playoffs, if they go 10-6. They have one of the toughest schedules in the league, and it’s possible that even 9-7 could win the division.”

Generally, he likes all three coaches. “They want the respect of their players, and have the right people skills to make that happen. And they all at least try to deflect attention from themselves to the players.”

So, why do some players (not necessarily any of ours) insist on excess millions in their contracts? Can they really benefit from this? Terry’s opinion: “All too many players fall prey to the ‘Because I Can’ or the ‘Don’t Blame Me – I Didn’t Do That’ syndrome. Too many teams seem to specialize in trading problems. When it comes to money, that speaks the loudest. If there’s 20 million on the table, and an agent gets 4% at a minimum of that, what player will be able to walk away from that – especially with his agent pushing him to sign for top dollar? It’s a game within a game.” As we talked before the Sabathia trade, Terry speculated that Sabathia’s agent would be looking for the biggest contract ever for a pitcher. “Last year’s big contracts are history now, this is this year. Will the agent get his name on everyone’s lips for having pulled off the ‘big one?’” We’ll have to wait and see about that one.

Terry has been a baseball fan all his life, and he’s always lived in this area. Looking back, he recalls “Gabe (Paul) of the Indians specialized, almost, in recruiting owners. That was so that he and Phil Seghi could continue running the team. There was little stability, and sometimes they dumped players to be able to pay the remaining ones. Talk about trading problems!” He laughed. “But Dick Jacobs was all business. Most of what he did was geared toward making a profit. A friend of mine told me to buy stock when Jacobs took the Indians public. I didn’t do it, but those who did made a 30% profit in less than 18 months. 30%!” He shakes his head, still incredulous, all these years later.

“Oh, it was a fun business with him, but it was still a business.” Then he adds another viewpoint. “It’s not all that easy—managing. It might be fun to manage a baseball team from 7 to 10 in an evening, but a manager really has to manage from 2 til about midnight. Those other hours might not be so enjoyable because you have to listen to the players’ problems and complaints… Unless they win all the time, of course.” And no team wins every game.

So, how does he juggle radio, TV, games, sports stories and columns plus books? And in contrast to most books by newspaper folk, his are not all just compilations of columns. A good many of them required special research into long ago seasons and records and players.

He sits back and thinks for a minute. “You hear folks talk about God-given ability. Basketball players need exceptional peripheral vision – literally to be able to see behind their heads! Most people lose that sense at a point about even with the eye socket. The really great players extend backwards beyond that. Hand size is another factor. A player whose fingers are an inch or so longer will have much better ball control than his shorter-fingered team-mate.”

“My God-given talent is to be able to write fast and clearly. I’ve always been able to do this,” he answers. “I’ve been called a left winger and a right winger—some people you can’t please. My books differ from the columns in that I try to take people behind closed doors in the books. To give them a look at management or ownership that they might not otherwise be able to see or know anything about. The Cleveland teams have all been very generous and very open with their people and all. Especially Dealing (about the Indians) and The Franchise (the Cavs and LeBron).”

He derives great personal joy from his faith column, and adds, “I get a lot of e-mails about the faith column, and nearly half of these people say they don’t go to church on a regular basis. But yet, they do have faith and it means something to them.”

One last thought from this much-lauded writer. “You hate to play a bad team early in the season because they haven’t figured out how bad they really are yet…and they may beat you.”

Terry Pluto will appear at the Parma Heights Public Library, 6206 Pearl Road from 7 - 8PM this Thursday, July 17. For more information, call 440-884-2313. And learn about Pluto's two books for Gray & Company at http://www.grayco.com.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Kelly Ferjutz artswriterATroadrunner.com

Photo by Phil Masturzo
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