As Indians owner Paul Dolan took questions from fans at a speaking event in Fairlawn, Ohio, last week, one quipped that he and the club had helped to give them all the best back-to-back summers in a long time.
Dolan joked that, well, that's why he's doing more of these events than in the past.
But it's also a snapshot of the Indians, who for the past year or so have not quite been acting like the Indians _ or at least, not acting like the team many fans expected them to be.
Last July, the Indians saw they had their dominoes lined up. For years, they had been progressively setting pieces up with aggressive, long-term contracts early within certain players' service time. The club took on the risk that these players weren't as established, but they were potentially getting bargains down the road. Players were trading some potential, future dollars for a large deal now and financial security.
With this group and their odds, the Indians have beaten the house.
Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, Michael Brantley, Jason Kipnis. Carlos Santana, Yan Gomes, Roberto Perez and, most recently, Jose Ramirez were all locked up to deals. Several are now under deals well below market value. Add in several controllable pieces such as Francisco Lindor, Danny Salazar and Cody Allen and the foundation was set.
Then the Indians broke some expectations. They traded four prospects for all-world reliever Andrew Miller _ the Indians trading prospects to the New York Yankees for the pricey star might still feel odd to fans here. And the club would have sent four more to Milwaukee had Jonathan Lucroy not vetoed the deal.
Then came their largest free-agent deal ever handed out in the form of a guaranteed $60 million to Edwin Encarnacion. Then Dolan signed off on $6.5 million for Boone Logan. Then roughly $4 million to bring in Jay Bruce.
That sequence of events has been repeatedly noted, but it's warranted as it goes against every instinct with which the Indians operated for so long. It started with the shipment of several prospects to New York, a move on the board that felt foreign. But, the tides had turned. Dolan says he rarely is involved in the moves the Indians make, which normally is the best attribute of an owner of a team.
"You don't want me gauging talent because they all look unhittable and they all look like they can hit it 500 feet," Dolan told Ray Horner at a 1590 WAK speaking event at St. George Fellowship Centre in Fairlawn this week. "So I rely very heavily on (president of baseball operations) Chris Antonetti and the people he puts into place. I only get involved in junctures like the Andrew Miller deal, where that was big in two ways. One, we were taking on significant salary and two, more importantly, we were trading away some of our best minor-league talent.
"That's not really in our DNA to do that type of thing, it's just the opposite. We were at a juncture in the franchise where we were poised to win. Then you switch, and you go for the talent and you surrender a little bit of your future to do that."
