Larry Stone / Baseball reporter
Mariners will soon go the Indians' way

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Once, not that long ago, teams strove to do it the "Indians' way." Cleveland's model for rising from the depths of incompetence to become a thriving baseball powerhouse — coinciding beautifully with its move into brand-new Jacobs Field — was the blueprint of the 1990s.

The Mariners are among those who mimicked Cleveland's success, transforming Seattle into a baseball hotbed that grew in intensity at Safeco Field, where the wins rolled and the turnstiles clicked.

But all good things come to an end, and now the Mariners, seemingly at the end of their cycle of success, are once again facing the prospect of doing it the Indians' way.

This time, however, it will be a torturous endeavor, fraught with potential missteps and marked by the likelihood of more suffering before the dividends are felt.

Look at Cleveland's record, and the precipitous attendance decline in a stadium that was at full capacity for six-plus seasons, to understand the ramifications — though the Mariners, if they execute their process adeptly, can make a much more rapid transition back to prosperity.

The Indians, back in 2002, made the excruciating, but courageous, decision to gut their team and start over, rather than try to fake their way through a season or two of misleading contention with an aging team in a weak division. They are now in their third season of rebuilding, still paying a heavy price but increasingly hopeful of imminent recovery.

"It's extremely painful," said Cleveland general manager Mark Shapiro. "You do what you're doing on the backdrop of recent success, instead of a gradual decay. It's a shock to the system. It takes a commitment from ownership, the strength of the organization to understand what it's doing and, most of all, consistency."

Shapiro, who took over as GM from the highly successful John Hart in '02, thinks it would be presumptuous to compare the current Mariners with the Cleveland team he inherited, or to comment on the rough road they might be facing.

But Shapiro was willing to discuss, in general terms, the painful rebuilding process that was put into motion in the winter after the 2001 season, when the Indians, mandated by new ownership to cut payroll, let Manny Ramirez leave via free agency and made the hugely unpopular decision to trade Roberto Alomar to the Mets.

To put some context into the Indians of 2002, recall that they had won the American League Central title in 2001 with 91 victories, and took the 116-win Mariners to five games in the best-of-five AL Division Series. It was Cleveland's sixth division title in seven years, a stretch that included two AL pennants and a record 455 consecutive sellouts. The Indians started off 11-1 in '02, and began to think they might survive after all. But when June 27 rolled around, and they stood mired in third place with a 36-41 record, seven games out of first, Shapiro decided it was time to stop delaying the inevitable. He traded his lame-duck ace, Bartolo Colon, to the Montreal Expos for a package of prospects that included outfielder Grady Sizemore, pitcher Cliff Lee and infielder Brandon Phillips.
 
"We had probably a good-enough club to still be .500 or maybe contend in our division," Shapiro said. "But one of the responsibilities of the general manager is to have one eye on the future. I couldn't go to ownership and chart a course back to a sustained championship team.

"It was very clear to me what that meant, because we had won so much here. The issue was either to wait until it became obvious to the fans, or pre-empt that and trade players while they were assets, and speed up the process of rebuilding."

The trade of Colon, who was facing free agency after the season, "was the defining trade for us," Shapiro said. Lee is one of the most promising lefties in the majors with a 5-0 record. Sizemore, from Everett's Cascade High School, is one of the top prospects in all of baseball and could be in center field by midseason. Phillips is still a highly regarded prospect.

By the end of the season, Cleveland had dumped virtually all of its marketable veterans except Omar Vizquel; in July it had fired manager Charlie Manuel. The cost was huge, however. The Indians went 74-88 in 2002, finishing 20-½ games behind the Twins. Last year, they lost 94 games, and they now stand fourth in the five-team AL Central. Payroll, which peaked at just over $90 million in 2001, is now at about $42 million. Attendance, which was at 3.4 million in 2000, was halved to 1.7 million last season.

And yet Shapiro is more convinced than ever the Indians took the right path. Some astute acquisitions and a series of good drafts has them, he believes, on the verge of contention. This winter, they might even be, for the first time since 2001, in the position to trade youth for veterans.

"It was a simple alternative," he said. "Either lose for five to seven years to get top-five picks in the draft and wait for the guys to get here, i.e., Oakland and Minnesota. Or artificially recreate those drafts with a series of trades that could replenish the upper levels of the system and cut the time frame in half, from eight to 10 years, to three to five. I still think we're on the back side of that."

Where would the Indians be had they hadn't chosen that course, if they had stubbornly plowed ahead with the team they had?

"I think we'd be with a similar record, but a lot bleaker future," he said.

Shapiro did allow himself one comment on the current Mariners' plight, an encouraging one that reflects the industry appraisal.

"We feel they have a lot of depth of quality young pitching at the big-league level and the minors," he said. "Those are the most expensive people to acquire. With that going for them, and some creativity, they could build quickly. I mean that sincerely. Nowadays, there are a lot of position players on the market. They might not be in the same situation as us."

In one important regard, however, the Mariners must adopt the Indians' way in this increasingly dark season: by making the agonizing, yet necessary, decision to break apart the core of a declining team that has served them so nobly in the past.

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com