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Wait 'Til Next Decade: A Cleveland Indians Post-Mortem |
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Wednesday, 24 October 2007 |
 For those who came in late or don't follow baseball (in which case you may just decide to scroll down to the next post), the Indians came within one game of reaching the World Series this year... and then lost three straight, setting a new record for striking out in an AL championship series.
This matches nicely with the Cleveland Browns getting to within one game of the Super Bowl... and then losing spectacularly in the very last seconds. Twice. Or Ohio State getting to the national championship game in both football and basketball last year... and then getting killed. Or the Cleveland Cavaliers getting to the NBA Finals for the first time, then losing four straight while setting a record for the fewest points scored in a modern NBA Finals series.
I say this with no small admiration for the diehards back home: if you can handle being an Ohio sports fan, you can handle damn near anything.
Or you'd think. Lately, I have to take serious issue with a lot of crap I've seen that is making want to stop cheering for Cleveland teams entirely. For one, this, first and foremost:
As noted here earlier, this idiot racist garbage shames the entire city. Has to stop.
There's also lot of bleating about curses and dumb horrible luck being to blame for the Indians not winning a championship. Rubbish. Lots of teams in every sport you can name go decade after decade without winning titles: in American baseball alone, I can think of the Cubs, the White Sox, the Red Sox themselves going 88 years until '04 (almost 50% longer than the Indians' current drought), the Phillies (1883-1990, over 50% longer than the Indians' drought), and even the SF Giants, who beat the Indians in '54 and haven't won since, either. There are dozens and dozens in other sports. There's only one champ, kids. Everybody else goes home. Failure is always the most common result in all sports everywhere, just like in life itself. Make your peace with that and learn to be happy. All this poor, poor me crap is pathetic. Find a way to have fun while losing or just stop watching.
I'm still getting emails from people bringing up a bad umpire call when Kenny Lofton was wrongly called out at second in the deciding game. Umm... hello? The Red Sox won that game by nine runs, and outscored the Indians 51-32 for the series, a 60% advantage. That's not one bad break, bad luck, or a screw-up by a third base coach. Good lord.
It seems not to have occurred to many fans that maybe the Indians lost because they're just not all that damn good yet. Late in that same game, third base coach Joel Skinner made a conservative tactical choice, holding Lofton when he might have scored, giving the Indians men on first and third with one out. On the very next pitch, Casey Blake, who was often quite awful throughout the playoffs, leapt to the rescue of a struggling pitcher by swinging at the very first pitch and serving up a ground ball double play. Inning over.
That's not Joel Skinner's fault. It's Casey Blake's. The real problem: the Indians lost because they still have several everyday players who simply aren't very good. Championship teams rarely feature that. And it's the front office's fault for not keeping a vastly superior third baseman in the system. (More on that in two paragraphs.)
Blake finished the postseason with an OPS of .668 -- a full 100 points below mere major league average. Lofton, despite a strong start in the playoffs, batted .174 (4-23) in the last six games, finishing the postseason with, yes, below-average total offensive stats, including an on-base percentage ten points below the league average. This from a guy whose strength is allegedly getting on base.
And then people wonder why the team can't win a title. Jeebus.
Incidentally, the Indians recently had a terrific 3B prospect, a guy they could have dearly used instead of Blake: Kevin Kouzmanoff, the guy who hit a grand slam in his first major league at bat. Unfortunately, the front office traded him for Josh Barfield, who wouldn't even be in the majors right now without his father's last name. (You may have glimpsed Barfield briefly in the playoffs, appearing once as a late-inning pinch runner.) Kouzmanoff is now a 25-year-old starting 3B in San Diego, where he went .853 OPS for the second half. There's a good chance he'll be a .290 30 HR 100 RBI guy for years to come, even in the hitter's nightmare known as Petco Park. Instead, the Indians stuck with Casey Blake, an aging veteran with no upside beyond what we saw this year, and they paid for it.
They'll keep paying for it, too. There really isn't a 3B prospect anywhere in the organization ready to step in. Wes Hodges, maybe, in a year or two. (Don't talk to me about Andy Marte.) If they had a hot SS prospect, they could move Peralta to third, but the farm system doesn't seem ready for that approach, either. So, it's either a pricey free agent (not damn likely), or a crappy one (slightly more likely), or Blake it will be for the foreseeable future.
I've also heard a lot of wonder about why C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona, the Indians' two young pitching aces, suddenly couldn't find home plate. It's no mystery: look at number of innings they pitched. Counting the playoffs, Sabathia threw 250 innings this year, a workload that has historically ended a lot of young guys' careers. Carmona was only slightly less overworked, and at age 23, throwing 200+ innings creates a serious fatigue and injury hazard in the coming years.
If Carmona's arm pops next year -- and he's at heightened risk now, thanks to Indians management -- it almost seems like he ought to be able to file an OSHA claim. The Indians have badly mismanaged their best young pitching prospect, and if they get away with it again (as they have thus far with Sabathia, now 27) it's through luck and little else.
If you want to see good player management, just look across the baselines at the Red Sox dugout. I'm no Red Sox fan, but I appreciate competence. How many teams would bat a slow, chubby guy like Youkilis second? Only the ones that understand that on-base is the most important stat and that steals are surprisingly meaningless. And that's shockingly few teams, despite clear historical evidence. Youkilis, as everyone saw, was key -- and the Red Sox management deserves a lot of credit.
Speaking of the Red Sox: not only are they clearly superior to Colorado in almost every facet of the game (save fielding, where the Rockies' rookie SS Troy Tulowitzky is so excellent that by himself he provides a clear team-stat advantage), the Red Sox also have home field advantage and massively more playoff experience. Upsets do happen, but looking at the numbers a couple of weeks ago, I picked the Red Sox over the Rockies in the World Series before the playoffs began, and I'm sticking with it.
Bottom line: if you look it up, the Sox's run margin was 103 better than the Indians' run margin on the season. That's 2/3 of a run per game better, comparable to the Indians' margin of superiority over Oakland or Minnesota this year. That's how the Indians really stacked up. In almost every measurable aspect of the game, the Red Sox were a better team, and will be until the Indians get a real 3B and LF, figure out what the hell is wrong with Hafner (I almost wonder if his eyes may be going, just slightly enough to affect his reaction to pitches -- there's nothing else that I can find to explain his steep season-long drop in production), and rustle up a closer with an ERA that resembles ERAs usually found in the major leagues. Until then, the Indians are just pretenders, and so is anyone pretending otherwise.
I don't know why this isn't obvious to everyone alive in Cleveland. It should be. But no, let's blame luck, third-base coaches in nine-run games, voodoo curses, and offensive mascots.
(Then again, blame the offensive mascot all you want.)
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