Back after an intriguing May 30th start, I wondered if the talented enigma that is Trevor Bauer had found a road map to another level.

Entering that start — by the end of which he’d struck out a career-best 14 against the Oakland A’s — Bauer had an MLB-worst 6.30 ERA. He’d frustrated many in Cleveland with his unconventional training techniques and analytical approach. I documented earlier this year for The Athletic how Bauer is perhaps one of the more misunderstood and interesting players in the game.

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Sunday night, the Indians pushed their winning streak to 18 games. The next-longest active winning streak in baseball is five. Since this all began, the Indians, of course, have gone 18-0, and the next-best record in the American League has been 9-7. The goal is to win the World Series, and the Indians will be disappointed if they again come up short, but at a certain point, this will just become their legacy. Somebody wins the World Series every year. The Indians have one of the longest winning streaks that baseball’s ever seen. Doing something like this is more improbable, and it’s a reflection of how well the Indians have been built, from top to bottom.

A truth about baseball is that a winning team is never as good as it looks when it’s winning, and a losing team is never as bad as it looks when it’s losing. The Indians feel like they’re bulletproof, mostly because they’ve been bulletproof for about three weeks. Their odds of winning everything haven’t meaningfully changed. It’s useful to keep the Dodgers in mind. The change in perception has been abrupt, even though it’s more or less the same active roster. Invulnerability isn’t forever, as demonstrated by the reality that everything dies.

The Indians aren’t unbeatable. The chances are still that they won’t win it all. Upon eventual reflection, the team shouldn’t be judged only by how it performed when it didn’t lose a game. One should attempt to consider the whole of the picture. Let’s do that right now. Let’s talk about the Indians’ pitching.

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This is Mike Hattery’s second piece as part of his September residency at FanGraphs. Hattery writes for the Cleveland-based site Waiting for Next Year. He can also be found on Twitter. Read the work of all our residents here.

Certain players in baseball become symbols, willingly or not, for the seismic conceptual shifts of which they’re a part. Jeremy Brown and Scott Hatteberg, for example, remain emblematic of Oakland’s attempts earlier this century — the sort of attempts documented in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball — to exploit inefficiencies in the game. Ben Zobrist, meanwhile, continues to represent the ability of Tampa Bay’s front office to identify valuable, if overlooked, talent. More recently, Daniel Murphy and Josh Donaldson have become the public face of the air-ball revolution. 

For some who follow the minor leagues, catcher Eric Haase in the Cleveland system has achieved a similar level of notoriety. Despite lacking the name recognition of either Murphy or Donaldson, Haase has nevertheless transformed himself in much the same way as those two, elevating the ball more often and reaping the benefits.

Haase’s 2017 season has shifted expectations about his career. Merely a fringe prospect entering the season, he’s now regarded, at the very least, as a future major-league backup who’ll punish opposing pitchers with power from time to time. As FanGraphs’ own Eric Longenhagen noted in an edition of his Daily Prospect Notes last month:

Some scouts question his mobility and he has fringe arm strength, but Haase receives pretty well and has plus, all-fields raw power. While strikeout prone and unlikely to develop even an average hit tool, Haase’s combination of power and position make him a solid bet to play some sort of big-league role, likely as a slugging backup, though some scouts like him as a sleeper regular.

Haase’s collection of statistical indicators earned him the 47th spot on Chris Mitchell’s midseason top-100 KATOH rankings.

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A brief examination of the Cleveland Indians’ roster reveals a number of good players having a number of good seasons. That’s generally the type of thing you’d expect from a team that currently possesses one of the best records in baseball.

Much of Cleveland’s overall success has been the result of a strong second half. By wins above replacement, Corey Kluber has been the club’s most important contributor since the All-Star break. Among non-pitchers, Francisco Lindor has a very narrow lead over one of his teammates in the WAR column. And the identity of that teammate might not be completely obvious. It isn’t last year’s breakout star Jose Ramirez, for example. It’s not big offseason acquisition Edwin Encarnacion, either. No. In a virtual tie with Lindor for second-half WAR is veteran Carlos Santana. The first baseman has arguably been the best player on baseball’s best team in the second half. The 31-year-old soon-to-be free agent has inarguably been one of baseball’s best hitters since the All-Star break.

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I don’t know what brings you joy. Baseball, probably, or else you’re hopelessly lost on the internet. Chances are, you’re a fan of a team, so you root every day for that team’s success. Me, I’m less a fan of a team, and more a fan of players and subjects. One of the things that’s been bringing me joy is observing Mike Trout climb up the WAR leaderboard. It’s amusing because, obviously, Trout missed about six weeks due to injury, and it’s hard, obviously, to accumulate WAR when you miss a quarter of a season. Trout is amazing.

There’s a slightly lesser version of that same exact story. The best pitcher in baseball, by WAR, is Chris Sale. That’s not very surprising, recent stumbles aside. Yet, the second-best pitcher in baseball, by WAR? That would be Corey Kluber, who missed a whole month due to a back problem. Even though a month is a long time, in baseball terms, Kluber has put that unfortunate episode behind him, even threatening to create something of a Cy Young race. Kluber, generally, has been pitching like Corey Kluber. Just, an even better version. The Kluber of today might have baseball’s best pitch.

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With the spread throughout baseball of wearable technology — that is, devices like the Zephyr Bioharness which are capable of capturing all manner of physiological data — it’s tempting to consider everything that teams and players could possibly extract from the information that’s gathered.

While such technology is currently used to monitor mostly fatigue and workload via calorie consumption — noted foodie Russell Martin employed the Bioharness in Pittsburgh to better understand how much he could eat without gaining weight — there are certainly other possible areas for innovation. Like, what more can we learn from heart rate in the midst of performance? Could we better understand performance under stress? How emotions influence play?

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There has been a changing of the guard in the American League as we have a new run differential leader: The Cleveland Indians (+155).

The Indians, thanks to an outstanding August, have jumped the Houston Astros (+153), the AL’s top club of the first half, and have possession of the game’s No. 2 run differential, trailing only the Los Angeles Dodgers (+209). The Indians completed a 19-9 record for August with a sweep of the Yankees on Wednesday, and posted a plus-58 run differential for the month. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a difference between watching the game at home and watching at the park, that much is obvious. Personally, I’m more analytical at home, where I have the tools to identify pitch type and location with some precision, for example. At the field, I can only tell velocity and maybe spot the curveballs, so I get an adult soda, a good companion, and I talk and wait.

What am I waiting for? “People go to the game to see us put the ball in play, throw the ball away, and fall down,” Giants starter Jeff Samardzija told me the other day. “They want to see people doing things,” said Indians slugger Jay Bruce. I couldn’t disagree. The problem, if this is true, is that baseball is trending in the opposite direction. There are fewer balls in play now than at any other point in the history of the sport. There’s less of people doing things, to use Bruce’s words.

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It’s been a long season, so let me remind you of the start. These days, Sam Dyson is pretty good, and he pitches for the Giants. In April, Sam Dyson was pretty bad, and he was pitching for the Rangers. In the first game of the season, the Rangers led the Indians 5-3 in the seventh. The lead slipped away, and Dyson allowed three runs in the ninth to take the loss. In the third game of the season, the Rangers led the Indians 6-4 in the ninth. The lead slipped away, and Dyson allowed five runs to take the loss. The big knock was a one-out grand slam by Francisco Lindor; that currently stands as having been the third-highest-leverage plate appearance of the Indians’ year. The half-inning was as unforgettable as any half-inning can be in the first week of April.

The Indians got things started with a sweep, a sweep that featured plenty of good clutch hitting. That’s a great way to kick off a campaign, and it comes as little surprise that, in the middle of August, the team’s sitting fairly comfortably atop the AL Central. They’ve done well to hold off the Twins. They’ve done well to hold off the Royals. Ask the Indians, and they’d probably tell you they’ve expected to return to the playoffs from day one. They are plenty good enough. And yet in one sense, while the Indians have a good record, they’ve won despite their own efforts.

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For much of the season, the Indians and Cubs appeared to be afflicted by the same sort of World Series hangover. Is it possible that last year’s Game 7 was so intense, crazy, joyous, and heartbreaking that its effects would linger? Most likely not, no, but it makes for a nice, tidy narrative anyway.

Some nine months after the epic, decisive game, however, an important part of the Indians’ roster appears to be getting its act together just as the high-leverage games of September and beyond draw near.

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