I have decided to start a weekly column giving a recap of some of the important going-ons on the local sport scene. Here are some of the things that we learned this week in regards to Cleveland sports.

• Cleveland Cavaliers player Delonte West gave a new meaning to being a shooting guard.
• Terrelle Pryor can sure produce against a MAC team. Unfortunately for Ohio State, the Buckeyes do not play in the MAC. It is apparent watching the highly acclaimed sophomore that he has some major areas to work on. First and foremost is his footwork. Maybe the good news is that he will probably be smart enough to stick around for four years with Jim Tressel. If he leaves next year, he won't get drafted very high unless he wants to play in the NFL as a wide receiver.
• Brady Quinn looks like Tarzan, throws like Jane.
• The Cleveland Indians have packed it up this season. If you haven't looked in awhile, the team is on a 7 game skid. Don't worry Tribe fans, you only have to deal with Eric Wedge grinding it out for about two more weeks until he adds to the growing list of Ohio's unemployed.

All thirty Major League Baseball teams today announced their 2010 schedules. The Cleveland Indians unveiled their schedule today, and will open the 2010 season on the road against the Chicago White Sox on Monday April 5th on a six-game road trip that will also take them to Detroit before heading home to Progressive Field.

The Tribe's home opener will be on Monday, April 12 against the Texas Rangers. Their six game homestand will also include games against the Chicago White Sox.

Boston and New York will each make one trip of four games each to Cleveland. This year, they've done things right and these gaves will occur during the warmer summer months. The Red Sox will be in town for a four game series June 7 through 10, and the Yankees will be here for four games from July 26 through 29.

Taking the notoriously unpredictable Cleveland weather into consideration, the Indians will have just 7 home games in April. There will be 16 home games in May, 13 in June, 14 in July, 17 in August, and 14 in September.

The Cleveland Indians currently sit as the 27th ranked team in Major League Baseball attendance (not counting the spring seagulls). While I am pleased the fans have noticeably decided to voice their displeasure with the team by staying away, I can't help but wonder how in the world they will ever get most of the fans back.

It's widely accepted that the glory days of the 455 straight sellouts will never happen again. That was simply a perfect storm of a new ballpark, a winning team, players with large personalities, and a city turning to a baseball team after losing it's most beloved sports franchise to Baltimore.

It is very realistic to set a goal of 30,000 per game attendance. The Minnesota Twins, who play in a terrible park and cater to a similarly sized market, have drawn close to 29,000 per game this season despite spending most of it with a sub .500 record. Being at 30,000 (which equates to 2.4 million +) would put the Indians in the top half of the league in attendance and make them the money the poor Dolans so desperately need.

I sort of don’t pay much attention to the Plain Dealer sports pages. But it’s hard not to read them since there’s so little else to read in the paper. So last week I caught Bill Livingston’s spanking of pitcher Cliff Lee.

Sports gets a lot of free publicity and eats up a lot of resources sorely needed elsewhere.

Livingston’ last week brought some reality to the sports pages when he chastised Lee, traded recently to Philadelphia, for Lee’s comments about Cleveland fans. Lee blamed fans for not attending more games. He said, “That’s why the team didn’t make money, because the fans weren’t there, supporting the team.”

Livingston wrote, “It is hard to believe anyone could make such a clueless, almost callous, statement.”

He pointed out that those working fans were encountering a deep recession here.

“Do you suppose Lee felt bad for the Cleveland fans who have lost their jobs? Does that matter? Or is Lee’s self-absorption too all-encompassing to permit a glance at the world outside the white lines,” Livingston wrote. Tough stuff.

But major league ballplayers are so well treated in our society that it’s hard for them to empathize with ordinary people. Everything is too easy for them. And sports reporters are prime enablers.

I have been really bored with the Cleveland sports scene lately. Granted, the NFL season has yet to start up and the Cavs are still two months away, but I have been bored to tears recently.

There are no interesting rumors going around town about the Browns. Talk Radio shows are filled with the great Quinn/Anderson debate of 2009 which is so bland I often drift off behind the wheel of my car. Mangini's Mystery Machine is even racking up a lot of mileage lately as he does not discuss injuries and often gives uninformative answers. To entertain myself, I often wonder if he's doing this to throw off the scent of various Pittsburgh Steelers representatives that surely must be following each of his words with bated breath to get any type of edge on the Browns. Besides, as we've seen over the past ten years, the reason the Steelers have owned the Browns has been their ability to keep secrets, and that the discrepancies in talent take a back seat to an aura of mystery.

The Cleveland Indians have announced that they will give Michael Brantley and Carlos Carrasco a taste of the big league level. The team added the two prospects to the roster today and also recalled 28 year old relief pitcher José Veras.

Carrasco will get the start for the Tribe in his debut today in the big leagues as the starting pitcher. The right hander is 6' 3 215 pounds and was one of the key components to the Cliff Lee trade. Since coming over to the Tribe, the 22 year old went 5-1 with an ERA of 3.19 while only allowing 31 hits in over 42 innings of work.

Another player to keep an eye tonight will be Michael Brantley. If the name sounds familar you probably are thinking of his father Mickey Brantley who played with the Seattle Mariners in the late 1980s. The younger Brantley is 22 years old and was one of the key pieces in the CC Sabathia deal. Brantley may be the leadoff hitter of the future for the Tribe and will start his career wearing Chief Wahoo hitting 9th tonight.

The Tribe takes the field at 7:05 against the Detroit Tigers. You can catch the action on SportsTimeOhio.

The cash for clunkers deal has come to an end but the Philadelphia Phillies appeared to take advantage of a Cleveland Indians exchange program entitled Cy Young Winners for Clunkers. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported today that the centerpiece in the Cliff Lee trade will undergo an MRI. Paul Hoynes writes:

Jason Knapp, after being activated following the trade, made four starts for Class A Lake County. He allowed seven earned runs in 11-2/3 innings with 12 strikeouts and eight walks, but his shoulder still hurt.

"We're concerned," said Ross Atkins, Indians director of player development. "The shoulder has continued to bother him. We'll see what the MRI says."

Even more disturbing for Tribe fans is the fact that Knapp, who has a million dollar arm when healthy, was on the disabled list when the Indians obtained him a month ago.

In the middle of June of 1984 the Cleveland Indians traded Rick Sutcliffe to the Chicago Cubs. The change of scenery did the big right-hander a world of good as he led the Cubs to the postseason that season going 16-1 and took home the National League Cy Young Award as a reward for his stellar work on the mound. Could another midseason trade by the Tribe turn out the same way two-and-a-half decades later? While Cliff Lee won't have nearly as much time to work with as Sutcliffe did in the 2009 campaign, if he keeps pitching the way he has in his first five starts he may warrant a look adding an NL Cy Young Award to his AL Award last season.

Lee has gone 5-0 with a microscopic ERA of 0.68 in his 5 starts for the Philadelphia Phillies since the trade last month. Lee has struck out a batter per inning and has only allowed 24 hits in 40 innings of work. Lee looks to be pitching as well as he did in last seasons' Cy Young season when he won 19 of his first 21 decisions, so his track record shows that he can go on spurts of nearly flawless work.

We've seen enough of Andy Marte. How long will the Indians prolong this agonizing audition? Please, get him out of the lineup.

The Indians released him once already. In spring training they "designated him for assignment." When no other team picked him up, the Indians re-signed him and sent him to Columbus. But this bad penny wound up with the varsity again and has been in the daily lineup for over a month contributing nothing.

Marte is only 26 but he has been in pro ball for nine years. He signed with Atlanta in 2001 when he was 17 years old in the Dominican Republic. The Braves nursed him along in their farm system for five years until they saw the light. They traded him to Boston in December, 2005, but Marte never even put on a Red Sox uniform. A month later the Red Sox peddled him to Cleveland in the Coco Crisp deal. The Indians also got Kelly Shoppach and Randy Newsom but Marte was the key guy, the player the Indians coveted, the third baseman of the future.

Marte has been in the Indians' organization for four years now and it is obvious that his future is no longer ahead of him. It's behind him.

When we started this website in 2006, one of our main goals was to incorporate video into a lot of the stories that we were writing. I actually warned readers to "be on the lookout for Cleveland Leader cameras" but didn't follow through on my initial goal.

Late last year we got back on track with a pilot test run of a webisode of a sports show that we were going to call The Cleveland Leader Sports Round Table. We enjoyed making the little web television program and look forward to bringing back often throughout the year to discuss all things Cleveland sports with our viewers. Our plans also include branching out to live website television sometime in the near future.

Yesterday, we took the Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds in Berea to shoot The Sports Round Table. Among the things we discussed were the Cleveland Browns, Indians, Cavaliers, and upcoming Ohio State Buckeyes football season. We would love your feedback on this new venture for the Cleveland Leader and hope you find our discussions entertaining and enjoyable.