Moving Beyond : Indians Remember a Tragedy and Try to Forget a Season

For a few quiet moments Tuesday, a young, carefully built team bursting with promise stopped on a cool, cloudy Florida day to recall its somber past.

The Cleveland Indians lowered the flags to half staff at Chain O’Lakes Park, closed their clubhouse to outsiders, and observed a moment of silence in tribute to Steve Olin and Tim Crews, who died in a boating accident on Little Lake Nellie near here one year ago Tuesday.

But, once their spring training game against the Texas Rangers began, the Indians were determined not to dwell on sad memories.

“We just have to give the guys our best regards and go on with the day,” said reliever Derek Lilliquist, who was a close friend of Olin’s.

But the team couldn’t escape troubling news--Tuesday, relief pitcher Jerry DiPoto had a cancerous thyroid gland removed. “They’re going to give me an iodine pill to burn out the rest of the cancer,” DiPoto said. “In a couple of weeks, they’ll go back in to see if the cancer has spread anywhere.”

Still, with a farm system that is beginning to produce prospects, a front office that has plucked talent from other teams and fit it under tight salary restraints, and, most dramatic of all, with a new, state-of-the-art ballpark already triggering a ticket-selling boom, the Indians’ are ready to forget their history of failure.

And a year after losing Olin and Crews, they tried to move beyond the tragedy, too.

“The grief is still there, the sorrow is still there, and I don’t think it will ever leave,” Manager Mike Hargrove said at a news conference held in the same room where he and General Manager John Hart spoke to reporters a year ago.

“The old saying, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ is not correct. But you get to the point where enough is enough. And we need to get on with our business.”

Said Hart: “We’ve talked about it, and we will continue to talk about it. But we don’t want to make this the issue of what we’re doing this spring. We’ve had to move forward, and we have. We think we’re doing the right thing.”

Kevin Wickander, Olin’s closest friend, was traded last May. Bobby Ojeda, the only survivor of the boating accident, was released in the off-season. Hart said it was best for both the players and the team not to be reunited at Winter Haven, and the accompanying memories, again.

Said catcher Sandy Alomar: “It was something we all had to deal with . . . and everybody got over it. I know the anniversary is here. Those guys, in one way or the other, if they could talk to us, they would want us to let them go. Their families we really care about, and we’re not going to forget that.

“But it’s time to let those guys go.”

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As much as 1993 was a lost season because of the trauma of Olin and Crews’ deaths and the Indians’ 14-30 start, they believe their strong backstretch run, bringing them to a final record of 76-86, is only the beginning.

The Indians, who have transformed hope into failure so many times before, are overflowing with talent and expectation once again.

Last year, the Indians had assembled a batting order full of young stars--Carlos Baerga, Albert Belle, Sandy Alomar and Kenny Lofton, all of whom are 28 or younger and are potential most-valuable-player candidates--that provided one of the league’s best offenses.

But with perhaps the worst pitching staff in baseball, an exciting offense was not nearly enough.

“Personally, I went into (opening day) with a sense of loss,” Hart said last week from his seat behind home plate. “I lost two good friends. I also went into it, I guess, with a sense of foreboding for the club itself because of the pitching problems that we were facing.”

Now, with ace Charles Nagy healthy again and the acquisitions of Dennis Martinez, Chris Nabholz, Steve Farr and Jack Morris, the Indians believe their pitching staff is vastly upgraded.

Hart also settled an error-prone infield by acquiring Gold Glove shortstop Omar Vizquel from the Seattle Mariners and moved to protect Belle in the lineup by signing Eddie Murray to bat fifth as a designated hitter.

“These people in Cleveland, they’ve been waiting for a long time,” Baerga said, “and I think they have a chance to have it this year.”

This is a team that has finished no higher than fourth place in 26 years, that hasn’t finished first since 1954 and hasn’t been above .500 since 1986. This is a team that has lost 100 games three times in the past nine years.

Hart, who was hired to run the team in the middle of the 100-loss 1991 season, began the rebuilding process by locking up his young stars to contracts that eliminated arbitration years and ensured that the team would have a stable salary scale.

The stadium--built in downtown Cleveland’s new Gateway complex--only makes the potential for Indian success grander. Temporarily being called Indians Park, the Indians clearly believe the ballpark will energize the ticket-selling audience like Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Toronto’s SkyDome did in their first season.

The Indians, who have drawn more than 2 million fans only twice in their history, already have sold 1.89 million tickets.

“A lot of this season is going to be about our new ballpark,” Hart said. “As good as our team’s optimism and hope is, it’s going to be so special for the city and the north coast of Ohio to have a facility like this coming in.

“It’s taken us from the smallest-market club in all of a baseball to a club that’s more of a mid-sized market, we have some additional revenue streams. . . . I think it puts Cleveland where it should be. It’s an original American League city--the love affair has been re-established.”

Whatever the name, the 42,400-seat baseball-only park should be far superior for players and fans to the drafty, cavernous 62-year-old Cleveland Stadium, their old 80,000-seat home.

“It was just that the old atmosphere was very tough. It was cold, it was right next to the lake, and it’s so old,” said Alomar, who jokingly suggests that the right-field stands at the new park look as if they were tailor-made for switch-hitter Baerga’s left-handed home run swing.

It also could be ideal for rookie third baseman Jim Thome, a left-handed batter who hit 25 home runs in triple-A last season.

“This is the first time in the five years I’ve been here that people are showing respect for this ballclub,” said Alomar, who has watched his brother, Roberto, earn back-to-back World Series rings with the Toronto Blue Jays. “I just need to get one ring,” Sandy Alomar said.

Said Hart: “You look at the Indians, whether accurately or not, probably more accurate than not, it has been perceived as probably one of the poorer-run franchises in all of professional sports.

“I think the one thing that’s happened in the last four, five years, is that people have to look at this franchise now as one that is a factor. We’re stable. We’ve been very creative with our contracts, we’ve made good trades, we’ve got very good young players who are going to be here for a while, we’re moving to a new ballpark.

“You know, in the eyes of the baseball world, we’re a competitive franchise.”

Does the signing of Martinez, Murray, and Morris mean that Hart and Jacobs think 1994 is the year it all comes together?

“We don’t think it’s all about this year,” Hart said. “This isn’t the be-all, end-all. Obviously, with the new ballpark and everything, this is an important year for us. But I don’t think anybody’s picking us to win it.

“I do think we certainly have a chance to have a breakthrough year.”

Morris says he fully expects Cleveland to win the World Series in his first year with the team--as Toronto and Minnesota did.

“I really think they’re building the right kind of club,” Morris said last week. “Similar to the team that they put together in Minnesota in ‘91, a team that a lot of people are overlooking, somewhat of an underdog. But people who have played against them the last few years realize what they’ve been doing here.”

The Indians expect the day-to-day steadiness of Morris, Martinez and Murray to add a dose of stability to the younger players.

“We have young players and young guys are very excitable,” Alomar said. “And sometimes young guys get off track together. And I believe we had too many young guys, we needed some older guys to settle us down.”

The Indians’ transformation from confusion to contender seems to have happened so suddenly, but not if you have been there through the years of frustration.

Back when Hart was hired, the team was bad, short of money and unexciting. They had some good players, but no future.

“We treated it almost like an expansion team,” Hart said. “We recognized very early that we were not going to win with some of our established stars. We couldn’t afford them, either. And we traded them off, starting with Joe Carter--got Alomar and Baerga. Traded off (Tom) Candiotti, (Greg) Swindell, we went right on down the road.

“And after that, it’s very exciting to be in this position. We’d much rather be here than be with a club like we had in ’91 when we had no chance of winning and no dollars and we were trading people off. It was a disaster.”

Hargrove says he is comfortable with his team’s new role as a contender in the three-division American League.

“I’d rather have it that way than people cussing you because you’re bad,” Hargrove said. “I think the expectations, I think that’s warranted. This is an exciting club. When we take the field every night, we have every reason to believe we should win the game we’re playing that night. And I couldn’t say that last year at this time.”

A year ago, Hargrove says, his team limped into the season “emotionally drained.”

“We, as an organization, have moved beyond that,” Hargrove said. “That doesn’t mean we’ll ever forget Tim and Steve, but we just have a job to do.”