The Indians’ season to this point has been highly disappointing. Despite being largely healthy and bringing back most of their key contributors from a pennant-winning team, the Tribe has struggled to rise above the pack this year, despite that “pack” being an exceedingly mediocre crop of AL Central teams.

This past week, though, seemed to be a turnaround, and Friday saw them at 39-32, firmly in control of the division and seemingly rounding into form as we near the halfway point of the season. If they could keep these trends going, remaining in first place seemed assured.

Of course, another great way to stay in first place is to not lose to the Twins, who have been hanging around at the top of the division all year despite having… how do I put this nicely… a noticeable lack of above-average baseball players. With Corey Kluber on the mound and behemoth Twins slugger Miguel Sano not in the lineup, the Indians had no excuse today.

Aaaand they lost anyway.

It’s hard to say what’s more frustrating as a fan: watching a clearly inferior team gain the lead and seeing it slowly slip away, or the clearly superior team that just can’t dig its way back into a game against a lesser foe. We’ve seen a lot of the latter with this year’s Indians.

On paper, there’s just no way the Indians should have lost a game in which the Twins nabbed only five hits while Corey Kluber struck out 13. But between the defensive miscues in the first inning and the offense’s inability to capitalize on opportunities, the game just got away from them. The result: a 4-2 loss that really felt like it could easily have gone the other way.

I don’t mean to sound too down on the Tribe right now–a win tomorrow could salvage the series a bit, and keep them in first place. But this series was a big opportunity for them to hammer home their status as the class of the division, and the way they’ve looked the last two weeks makes it especially frustrating to see them to revert to their early-season mediocrity at such an inopportune time.

 

 

1 Comment

  • David B. Wilkerson says:

    Perhaps most disturbingly, the “energy level” we’ve heard Kipnis and Francona discuss — the one that the team had suddenly discovered during the 7-1 road trip — seems to have disappeared once again.

    Their manager has not been a great help in recent days.

    On Friday night, he saw fit to choose the first game of a key series against their closest division rival to sit Jose Ramirez, the hottest hitter in baseball. He also batted the rookie Gonzalez second, where he was perfectly positioned to strike out twice with the bases loaded. Neither of these moves suggested that Tito saw any particular urgency in this series. He prefers to look to the long march of the season — something that undoubtedly rubs off on his players, who seem to turn that “energy level” off and on, and for whatever reason have the switch turned to “off” at home.

    Even during the Baltimore series, Tito demonstrated a maddening schizophrenia with regard to urgency. In the second game of the series, he saw no reason to have anybody ready to take over for “Home Run” Tomlin the third time through the Oriole batting order, despite the fact that he’d given up two solo HRs. When Machado hit a game-tying three-run jack, few could have been less surprised than Tomlin’s manager.

    Conversely, on Thursday night, in the ninth inning, he put in Andrew Miller with a four-run lead, after Miller had just worked two innings on Wednesday. This was the same Miller who had been “overworked” in the previous week or so, necessitating a switch in late-inning relief roles, and the same one who would’ve been unavailable had the Tribe had a late-game lead to protect on Friday night.

    I don’t know what Tito’s problem is this year, or what ails his team. If this team is still sputtering at the trade deadline, I’m not sure they should be very aggressive. I shudder at the thought of trading potentially important contributors like Francisco Mejia, Gonzalez, or Naquin for even a frontline starter like Chris Archer, if it merely meant limping home at 88-74 and bowing in the ALDS. I get that the club is in “win now” mode, with the signing of Encarnacion, and bigger crowds coming off their sixth AL pennant. But I don’t want the mediocrity of this season to fatally impact the next two or three.

    Maybe they can turn things around, even starting tomorrow. I’m not sure how realistic it is to think so.