Thursday afternoon, the Indians lost another close game, which is the sort of thing I have to presume they find awful maddening. Among the few bright spots was Michael Brantley, who batted four times and wound up with a homer and a walk. Said homer was all of the Indians’ offense, and it did come close to holding up. Brantley’s been outstanding on a team that’s underachieved.

Let’s stick with the same baseball game for a moment. In the game, Matt Adams struck out swinging three times. Nick Swisher struck out swinging two times, and so did Roberto Perez. I don’t bring this up to say anything about Adams, Swisher, or Perez. Rather, it just seems like an appropriate lead-in to this astonishing fact: Brantley has struck out swinging two times all season.

What’s taking place for Brantley isn’t a breakthrough. Brantley’s breakthrough happened last year, following seasons of gradual development. He wound up a participant in the All-Star Game, and he finished third in the voting for the American League MVP. What’s taking place is a continuation, a demonstration that Brantley doesn’t intend to return to what he was before as an almost impossibly average ballplayer. Brantley doesn’t have a single flashy skill. His team is threatening to drop out of the race before the season’s half over. The ingredients are there for Brantley to become a forgotten star. Consider yourself urged to not forget him.

So far this season, Brantley has been a top-15 hitter, a hair behind Mike Trout and Joc Pederson. If you expand the window to the start of last season, Brantley’s been the fifth-best hitter in the game, between Jose Abreu and Andrew McCutchen. There’s nothing about his results that seems particularly unsustainable. His improved power is almost all to the same area, but in that way, Brantley is sort of an outfield equivalent of Kyle Seager. More than anything else, Brantley’s been able to combine a quick and smooth swing with a smart approach. He hasn’t meaningfully altered his swing. It just seems like he’s always getting smarter.

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Corey Kluber just regressed very quickly. After a high-profile winless start to his post-Cy Young-winning campaign that had many wondering what was wrong with him, the Cleveland right-hander struck out 18 Cardinals yesterday over eight innings, allowing only one hit and no walks along the way. In reality, there was nothing wrong with Kluber; his 5.04 ERA was mostly a mirage overlaying a 3.20 FIP, and given the fact that his peripherals were almost in line with last year’s stellar figures, better times were always ahead.

The better times came all at once, however, and they came in a package that almost made (and did make) history: Kluber finished the eighth inning just three strikeouts shy of the single game record for most in a game, 21. He didn’t get the chance to go out for the ninth, something that is being hotly debated, but the facts speak for themselves: Kluber had the most strikeouts in a game since 2004, he was only the second pitcher ever to have 18 Ks in eight innings (Randy Johnson, 1992), and his game score of 98 was the highest in an eight inning outing since 1914.

I won’t list all of the records because there are a lot of them, but the bottom line is that he had an almost impossibly great day. August summed up the impact on Kluber’s season stats well in this tweet:

Corey Kluber today: ERA from 5.04 to 4.27 FIP from 3.20 to 2.57 K% from 23.8 to 29.2 BB% from 5.7 to 5.0 Record from 0-5 to 1-5

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_MLB) May 14, 2015

That’s quite a turnaround, as you might expect, so let’s dive a little deeper into the start. We’re going to kick this off with a GIF. It’s a good GIF, and it illustrates a few points we’re going to talk about. The camera angle changes slightly as the innings progress, but it still gives us a pretty good idea of where Kluber was operating yesterday. Green circles are swinging strikeouts, red circles are looking strikeouts:

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A little over a year ago, the Cleveland Indians locked up much of their future core, signing Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley, and Yan Gomes to contract extensions. Kipnis received double the guarantees of his teammates after a great, five-win 2013 season, but last year the fortunes reversed, as Brantley and Gomes both had breakout years and Kipnis struggled. Kipnis got out of the gate slowly in 2015, as the hits were not falling, but a solid approach taking the ball the other way has the new Cleveland leadoff hitter’s production on the rise.

Last April, Kipnis performed well in the first month after signing his $52 million extension, posting a .234/.354/.394 line with a 120 wRC+ that could have been much higher if not for a .250 BABIP. At the end of that same month, though, Kipnis strained his oblique on a swing, forcing him to miss a month. He never got going in his return, hitting just .241/.299/.315 with a 77 wRC+ in 442 plate appearances over the rest of the season despite an acceptable .297 BABIP. Kipnis finished his lost season having produced roughly a win.

Determining the effect of Kipnis’s oblique injury on his production the rest of the season is a tricky proposition. The injury does not require surgery, varies in severity and does not have a set recovery time. Chris Davis and Ryan Braun suffered oblique injuries last season and neither player had a good season, but Joe Mauer played well, albeit without power, after hitting the disabled list for the same injury. Jason Kipnis played through his struggles last year, but he did admit in the spring that the injury gave him trouble.
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Breaking out for three consecutive years certainly has some positive elements to it, but it also means that the first two breakouts did not completely take. After failing to make the rotation out of Spring Training, Danny Salazar might have moved himself from potential breakout star to post-hype sleeper. After his hot start, the sleeper tag has been removed, and only a potential star remains. Salazar has had periods of dominance in each of the last last three seasons, but those dominant stretches have been followed by problem periods. This is now the fourth time Salazar has been called upon to for an extended role in Cleveland’s rotation, and Salazar, helped by his previous experiences, is now pitching as well as anyone in Major League Baseball. Consider his first roughly-30 innings each time.
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We have a Madison Bumgarner, right now. He just put a whole team on his shoulders and blew our minds last October, even. And with that Paul Bunyanesque workmanlike yet fiery demeanor, he seems a snowflake. Unique and alone. But maybe we have we seen pitchers like him before?

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We didn’t envision April going like this. The Cleveland Indians received 35 total votes for a playoff appearance in our 2015 preseason staff predictions, the most out of any team in the American League. Four weeks after those predictions were published, Cleveland finds themselves 7-14 — seven and a half games back of the Royals in the AL Central — tied for the biggest deficit in any division outside of the one containing the Brewers.

If we’re searching for a silver lining, the early going hasn’t been easy schedule-wise, with six games against Detroit that resulted in one win and a few bullpen implosions that have ended up as walk-off losses. Those one-run games on the road are the types of results that can easily swing win/loss records; however, if we look at Cleveland’s Pythagorean W/L, it gives us only an ever-so-slightly healthier 8-13. Alas, we can’t simply blame many of their losses on volatile one-run results.

Still, as we like to point out here in the early going, losses count in April just like wins do, and Cleveland has now gone from trendy sleepers in the division to having to play catch up against two fast-starting squads in Kansas City and Detroit. Before the season began, we gave Cleveland a 43% probability of winning the Central with 86 projected wins, and after yesterday’s results, that figure now stands at 13.4% and 82 projected wins.

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One year ago today, I wrote an article right here called  “The Indians Are Missing The Easy Ones,” which looked into just how awful the Cleveland defense had looked to that point. Though it included all the usual “it’s still early in the season” caveats, the simple fact was that the Indians had done little to help what had been (and would be) a fantastic young pitching staff with repeated miscues in the field, flaws that seemed obvious even in mid-April. (It was also a great excuse to have an article full of blooper GIFs. This is going to come up again.)

As it turned out, it wasn’t just a small sample size problem. The Indians went on to have the worst DRS in baseball at a shocking -75, and as Jeff Sullivan ably noted in August, the defensive gap alone was a huge component of what set the Indians apart from the Royals. If you buy into the idea that 10 runs equal a win, then DRS saw a difference of 11 wins between the two clubs on defense alone. Even if you don’t completely accept that full value as an accurate accounting, it’s pretty clear that poor fielding was a huge detriment to the 2014 Indians, and that’s a big deal considering that they missed the wild card by just three games.

So! Now it’s 2015. With somewhat of an inflexible roster, management was limited in the moves they could make, so while things look similar, they aren’t identical. The Carlos Santana third base experiment is long over. Asdrubal Cabrera‘s adventures at shortstop are now Tampa Bay’s problem, with Jose Ramirez presenting a far superior defensive option. Yan Gomes‘ second half looked a lot better than his first half. Nick Swisher’s achy knees haven’t yet appeared in a game. Tyler Holt showed defensive value as a backup outfielder late in the year. Jason Kipnis swore he was healthier after oblique and hamstring issues helped to tornado his 2014 season.

Story after story after story came up about the team’s focus on it this winter. This was never going to be a good defense, not with so much of the same cast and crew, but maybe enough had changed to think, okay, maybe this won’t be so bad. So how’s that going? Read the rest of this entry »

Hello! The baseball season just started. We’ve gone from one Sunday to a second Sunday, and we still aren’t allowed to do anything with statistics because nobody cares about them yet. While, in theory, spring training is supposed to get everyone ready for the year, the beginning feels like an extended spring training, a transition period following a transition period, and at this point the standings mean nothing. If you were to ask a player today about the wins and the losses, you’d get laughed out of the clubhouse. It doesn’t just feel like there’s a long way to go — it feels like there’s the whole way to go. Also, the Indians and White Sox are four games back of the Tigers and Royals.

It happened fast. It happened before anyone cared, but the White Sox have been swept by the Royals, and the Indians have been swept by the Tigers. Series conclude every few days, and standings change literally every day, but this is notable because the AL Central has four teams who’ve been thinking about the playoffs. The same four teams are still thinking about the playoffs, but as much as you want to say nothing matters yet, everything matters. This is my most- and least-favorite post to write every season.

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The Cleveland Indians already had much of their team in place for many years on the position player side after extensions for Michael Brantley, Jason Kipnis, Yan Gomes, and Carlos Santana. In one weekend they solidified their future on the pitching side as well, locking up ace and Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber as well as fellow rotation member Carlos Carrasco. Deals for pitchers are never a guarantee of performance, but with the cost to acquire pitching outside the organization so high, the Indians made out very well in securing potentially six years of free agent years with $60 million in guarantees.

Carlos Carrasco was not the player most likely to receive an extension, but he will now be guaranteed $22 million over the next four years with two club options after that believed to be worth around $10 million. Carrasco entered arbitration for the first time this year and was set to make close to $2.3 million this season. Extensions for players in their first year of arbitration are not common. Before this offseason, there had not been an extension for a player with between three and four years of service time since January 2011, when Johnny Cueto signed a four-year deal with the Cincinnati Reds for $27 million that included a team option and bought out two potential free agent years, per MLB Trade Rumors Extension Tracker. Even expanding the parameters a little finds few players close to Carrasco’s situation in the recent past. Gio Gonzalez signed his five-year, $42 million deal as a super-2 three years ago, and Jaime Garcia was about two months from arbitration when he signed his four-year $27 million in July 2011.
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We’re halfway done, with the wests — both NL and the AL — and covered NL Central yesterday. Today, we tackle the AL’s version of the country’s heartland.

The Projected Standings

With no great teams and only one franchise not really trying to contend this year, this is one of the most up-for-grabs divisions in the sport. Our forecasts suggest that there are two tiers within those going for it, but I think things might be a bit more bunched up than the numbers above suggest. Let’s go team by team.

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