Tonight the Cleveland Indians, a team which suddenly can apparently do no wrong, play host to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the first of a three-game series.

As any good Indians fan already knows, the Indians sit atop the AL Central, with a 1.5 game lead over the second-place Kansas City Royals. Winners of their last four games, the Tribe is 52-45 on the season. The Angels are 49-51, which, if they were also in the AL Central, would put them in third place, 4.5 games behind the Indians. But the Angels have the ill fortune of playing in the AL West, where the Houston Astros, who literally win two games for each one they lose, also play. So the Angels are in third place, but they are 17.5 games behind the Astros.

The Indians, of course, are hoping to repeat as AL Central champs, and have their sights set on returning to the World Series this fall. The Angels are competing for one of the two AL Wild Card slots; they are three games off the pace in that race. So while they haven’t got a hope in Hades of winning their division, the Angels have a decent chance to compete for the opportunity to play October baseball.

Mike Clevinger will pitch for the Indians tonight. Clevinger, a righty, has been very effective recently. In each of his last four starts, he has gone exactly six innings, and has given up three hits twice and two hits twice, while allowing no runs twice and only one run twice. There isn’t a manager in the game who wouldn’t be over the moon to see his #3 starter (for that is what Clevinger has become) give him that kind of effort. At 2.73, Clevinger’s ERA is ever so slightly better than that of ace Corey Kluber, at 2.74. Can Clevinger keep pitching as effectively as that for the rest of the season? Probably not. But he’s been looking awfully good lately. With 65 games left in the season, Clevinger, if he stays healthy, should get about 13 more starts in 2017. If he can pitch well enough so that the Indians win eight of those games, then he will have done his part to get the team into the postseason.

The Angels will start ten-year veteran Jesse Chavez, also a righty. Chavez’s 4.88 ERA for 2017 is only slightly higher than his career mark of 4.59. This is his first season with the Angels. In seven of Chavez’s previous seasons, he was used as a reliever. In the other two seasons when he was used as a starter (2014 and 2015, each with the Oakland A’s), he was more effective than he’s been this year, with ERAs of 3.45 and 4.18. Chavez gives up a lot of hits, 9.4 per nine innings, and a lot of home runs, too: 1.9 per nine innings.

On paper, or as pixels on a screen, this looks like a ballgame the Indians can expect to win. But baseball has a way of confounding expectations.

Here are tonight’s starting lineups:

1 Trackback or Pingback