Castro: Tribe hoping for huge return on EE investment

CLEVELAND — The term Indians team president Chris Antonetti used to describe the $60 million investment that the ownership made in Edwin Encarnacion was “leap of faith.” Perhaps, because this press conference was almost immediately followed by another — the one announcing that Billy Joel will be playing Progressive Field this summer — “A Matter of Trust” would have been more apt.

Anyway, you get the idea. In adding Encarnacion to an American League pennant-winning roster, the Indians are hoping for a level of fan engagement and are financially extending themselves in a way that hasn’t happened in decades. One night of Billy Joel throwing on a suit and banging on the piano keys is bound to put people in the seats. But the local nine has had a much more difficult time getting that kind of love night after night.

“We hope we can continue to build on the support and enthusiasm around the city during the postseason,” Antonetti said. “And we hope the support will continue with heightened attendance at the ballpark.”

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The barrier-breaking bottom line is that the Indians have done everything they can conceivably do to inject bodies into their ballpark.

Progressive Field is currently under renovations for the third consecutive offseason, the last phase of a dramatic and expensive reimagining of the facility that has accommodated the group-gathering and social-media-minded tastes of the times.

The front office built a contender on a budget and used resources from its fruitful farm system to land Andrew Miller, the midseason acquisition who put the team over the top and into the World Series for the first time in nearly two decades.

And now, with sound baseball logic but against all reasonable financial logic, the club has brought in one of baseball’s biggest bats to amplify the middle of the order.

You might have heard that the World Series run and the Encarnacion addition have ushered in an uptick in season-ticket sales. That is true. The Indians’ base was around 7,500 in 2016, and it is currently just shy of 11,000. In the first day after the Encarnacion news broke, the Indians sold roughly 500 season tickets. This would have qualified as a month’s worth of action in the not-too-distant past.

Of course, the upticks cover only a fraction of Encarnacion’s 2017 salary. And what this all points to is a conversation that has been had in these parts for a long time. We know the Indians are never going to challenge the 455-game sellout streak that began in the 1990s, when the …

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