While we at FanGraphs have tried to supply you with plenty of Indians-related content during their historic torrid streak — Cleveland matched the 2002 Oakland A’s for the American League record with a 20th straight win Monday night — it seems like the club’s run might be failing to receive the recognition, nationally, that it’s due.

Perhaps one reason is Major League Baseball’s criteria for what constitutes a “winning streak.” The 1916 New York Giants are credited with baseball’s longest winning streak, at 26 games. But that Giants club didn’t actually win 26 consecutive games. Over a 27-game span in September of that year, they sandwiched a 12- and 14-game winning streak around a tie.

A 26-game winning streak? Fake news!

To this author, it’s nonsensical that a “winning streak” would not feature an actual, uninterrupted, consecutive series of wins. A better way to characterize the Giants’ feat would to define it as baseball’s record non-losing streak. The “real” mark ought to belong to the 1935 Cubs, who won 21 straight and whose achievement Cleveland has the opportunity to match this afternoon against the Tigers.

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Tonight, the Indians will attempt to win their 20th consecutive game, one shy of the Major League record. They are playing the Tigers, who weren’t good before they got rid of their best players, and are especially not good right now. That not-good Tigers team will throw Matt Boyd, while the Indians will counter with Corey Kluber. Accordingly, our game odds have the Indians at 72% to win today’s contest.

Kluber, of course, is one of the main reasons the Indians haven’t lost since August 23rd. Cleveland has a few of the very best players in the game, and along with Kluber, the team’s core includes Francisco Lindor, Jose Ramirez, Carlos Carrasco, Carlos Santana, and Edwin Encarnacion, all of whom are performing at a high level. But the Indians had all these guys early in the season too, and for the most part, these guys were performing well before August 23rd too.

It might be stating the obvious, but you only win 19 in a row when you’re getting contributions from up and down the roster. So today, while waiting for Kluber to run through the Tigers depleted, let’s take a minute to talk about the other guys who have made the Indians unbeatable.

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Francisco Lindor is again one of the best players in the game. Following last night’s strong performance, he’s posted an even 5.0 WAR this year, the third straight in which he’s reached the four-win threshold.

The combination of youth and remaining years of team control certainly make him one of the most valuable assets in the game. He’s a significant reason why the Indians enter today with a franchise-record 19 consecutive wins. He’s slashed .365/.434/.770 during the streak.

But he’s arrived here in an unusual way. He’s a very different player than in the past. The 5-foot-11, 190-pound shortstop is tied with Bryce Harper for 26th on the sport’s home-run leaderboard with 29. He’s joined the air-ball revolution. He’s a slugger, but his defense is at career-worst levels in his age-23 season.

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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 »