MIDWEST MISERY By Adam Hirschfeld

Earlier this year, I penned a little diatribe about three Cleveland Indians for whom free agency was looming: Jake Westbrook, Travis Hafner, and C.C. Sabathia.

Westbrook had just been given a contract extension at $11 million per season despite the fact that his career statistics most accurately mirror those of some other .500 pitcher with a 4.00 ERA. I was mortified.

I was mortified because I knew that the Indians, with likely enough money to sign, at best, only two of their three stars, had chosen the worst of the three. I was equally terrified that their next move would be to extend Hafner.

Yours truly is the proverbial “Voice Crying in the Wilderness” on Hafner’s new four-year, $57 million extension. The homering whores at The Plain Dealer were practically drying off Mark Shapiro’s rear end for re-upping his designated hitter, last seen hovering around .260 and on pace to hit fewer home runs and drive in less runs than his last full healthy season.

How you can sign a DH and an average pitcher knowing full well that you’re kissing goodbye one of the best left-handed pitchers in the game just as he’s figuring out how to pitch and act like an ace? Does anyone think keeping Westbrook is going to bring a bevy of fans through the turnstiles? Has anyone that doesn’t share a gene pool with Westbrook ever paid just to see him pitch? Did anyone ever find that home run Tadito Iguchi hit off Westbrook in the penultimate game of the failed 2005 season?

Hafner at least hits towering home runs and has a cool nickname. Oh, and he also has an arthritic left shoulder that prevents him from playing the field on a consistent basis. That shoulder worries me. Arthritis is one of those wonderful medical conditions that doesn’t kill you, but it doesn’t go away and it most certainly doesn’t get better with age.

I’m not saying shoulder problems are the reason for Hafner’s subpar 2007 season. But, Hafner strikes me as having a high probability of being at the starting point for the decline of his career. Remember how quickly Carlos Baerga went from All-Star to also-ran?

Baerga, as we all found out, had a few problems that go along with raising your hand to your mouth when a beverage of approximately 16 ounces containing barley and yeast is gripped in said hand. It would be libelous for me to imply (which I am not) that Travis Hafner has any such problem, nor the flip side of the coin, which would be to suggest (which I am not) that he as ever ingested anything even as strong as a Powerbar to increase his strength or performance.

A 31-year old with a degenerative condition that doesn’t play against a reasonable percentage of left-handed pitchers and rides the bench in an even larger percentage of National League ballparks cannot, regardless of offensive prowess, be re-signed prior to your All-Star starting pitcher. It’s poor asset management. If the Indians were a mutual fund, you’d sell your shares.

Some in the Indians organization feel that the Hafner extension will make re-signing with the Indians sound like a better idea to Sabathia. I’d like this column to get picked up by espn.com as long as we’re all dreaming.  I don’t know what motivates C.C. Sabathia. He seems by all impressions to be a grounded and intelligent person who happens to have nasty fastball/slider combination. Nearly every other pitcher in baseball has gone where the years and the dollars are the largest. To expect anything different of Sabathia, regardless of who the Indians put behind him, is as naïve as it is plain stupid.

And don’t tell me the Indians had to negotiate from a position of weakness from the minute the San Francisco Giants inked Barry Zito to one of the ten worst contracts in the history of baseball. Zito’s failures should discourage any general manager from ever giving anyone $126 million over any period of time. As George Carlin once said (or, in a cleaner, reasonable recanting of what Carlin said): “A lot of people are really stupid. Does that mean we need to adopt all of their ideas?” Shapiro need not approach negotiations with his ace from the position that $126 million is a starting point.

Hafner and Westbrook, for who and what they are, will probably be just as overpaid as Zito on an annual basis, albeit for less total money and over a shorter period of time. $90 million for a .500 pitcher and a DH who isn’t doing a whole lot of the “H” is a less prudent investment than giving the same money to Sabathia over five years.

Sabathia is one of the game’s ace pitchers (in spite of a couple of subpar starts, in each of which he did pitch into the 7^th inning). He’s been on the cusp of this role since his 2001 rookie campaign and is fulfilling his promise. He hates giving up the ball, leads the American League in wins, and has a pretty nice K/BB ratio.

An ace like that is hard to find. The game’s other aces who are not clearly on the downside of their careers (Clemens, Schilling, Pedro Martinez, and Randy Johnson) are as follows: Jake Peavy, Roy Halladay, Johan Santana, Roy Oswalt. That’s it. Everyone else is too inconsistent (Dontrelle Willis), too injured (Brad Penny, Chris Carpenter,), or too unproven (Justin Verlander, Dan Haren, Tim Lincecum, and Felix Hernandez) to merit the designation. Sabathia and Santana are the only lefties on the list.

You cannot put yourself in a position to let one of the game’s ten best pitchers walk away in his prime. I have written on more than one occasion that what made Pedro special wasn’t his performance the days he pitched. It was the way his team would play the other four days knowing that they were going to win on the fifth. When one game can be the difference between the playoffs and October golf, the belief that your team is impervious to a prolonged losing streak is incalculably important.

Although when the time comes for Sabathia to seek his fortune elsewhere, that belief may become a lot more calculable for Shapiro. We’ll see how much it’s worth.

Comments? Adamh164@yahoo.com