The Cleveland Indians, Now Playing Catch Up

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.

We always knew this was going to be an unstable, competitive division; we also knew the situation in Cleveland had the potential to go really wrong given the reliance on a young pitching staff and shaky bullpen. Both of those considerations have proven themselves valid in the early going. However, it’s the way that those considerations have validated themselves which is interesting, and points toward an element of the game we didn’t put enough stock in.

The main component we counted on being present for success this year in Cleveland — the talented pitching rotation — has been there. The Indians have the fourth-best FIP of any starting pitching staff in the majors; unfortunately, they also have the eighth-worst ERA. Here is that vast chasm between expected outcomes and actual outcomes visualized with the help of Sean Dolinar, which you can roll over for some fun interactivity:

Finding Cleveland isn’t too hard. They’re the team with the really long line toward the bottom of the chart, the one that isn’t the Red Sox. That chasm, as you can probably guess, is due to the poor defense of the 2014 iteration of the Indians carrying over to this season. Perhaps we didn’t count on the defense continuing to be this bad this season in our preseason projections: after all, improvement had to come, right? There was really only one place to go from last year’s historically bad defensive season, and that was up. Yet here we are:

As Mike explained last week, a lot of this is on the Cleveland pitchers posting a DRS of -8 at their position so far, accounting for over half of the negative run value for the entire team. And, to be fair, UZR likes Cleveland a lot more than DRS does. It’s still early to put a lot of stock in defensive metrics (or much of any), but the fears over the continuation of last year’s terrible defense are substantiated by the early returns, and even the eye test. Cleveland doesn’t look comfortable on defense, and I could post any number of GIFs of weird errors and strange defensive decisions they’ve made so far in 2015. I will spare you that.

Cleveland has a BABIP against of .352, 18 points higher than the next team in the league. Some of that is surely luck, yes, but a lot of it is the guys in the field who are supposed to prevent those BIPs from becoming BA. The Indians were counting on their pitchers carrying them this year, and by the FIP numbers, they’ve done their part. Unfortunately, you can’t strike out every batter, and by the very nature of human will and endeavor, balls will be put into play. For the Indians’ pitching staff, this simple truth haunts them.

The crux of the issue: the Cleveland defense can’t simply hope to improve. It must improve, or else Cleveland is going to have a hard time being a good pitching team, which is what they’re built around. That’s a unique position to be in: usually defense is a smaller piece of the puzzle, or a positive trait that certain clubs build around. Team-wide defense doesn’t often strongly skew the performance of your pitchers on an everyday basis. But that’s exactly what happened in Cleveland last year, and it’s what has happened so far in 2015. Defense isn’t solely to blame for this team’s struggles: they haven’t hit much, they’ve had some bad luck, and the bullpen has been terrible. However, this team was built to excel in one particular area of the game, and that area is being impacted by poor fielding.

Now let’s bring in a graphic we’ve been using in these pages recently, showing the difference between the actual winning percentage and the forecasted rest of season winning percentage of all 30 clubs:

Let’s put it this way: Cleveland is a bit like Washington in how they’ve both started, but Cleveland has far less room for error in their division. Washington’s big advantage in the NL East has been more or less erased by the Mets; for Cleveland, there wasn’t really an advantage to begin with, so stumbling out of the gates while Detroit and Kansas City surge ahead means they now have to play catch up.

To that point, the Indians are projected by our site to play .529 baseball for the rest of the season. This team is obviously not a .333 winning percentage team over 162 games: there are signs their bats might be starting to awaken after a slow start, and the hope is that the bullpen can’t be as bad as it’s looked. And, given the early going, the pitching staff looks about as great as expected if everyone stays healthy. Unfortunately, .529 baseball almost certainly isn’t going to cut it if they expect to win their division, or even the wild card.

Let’s say 88 wins gets the division or a wild card spot, which would be a very optimistic figure given the past few years. Assuming that, Cleveland has to have a .574 winning percentage the rest of the way. Possible? Absolutely. Think they need 90 wins to get a playoff spot? That’s a .589 percentage the rest of the way. After all, it isn’t the middle of June with Cleveland sitting on a .333 winning percentage. It’s still early, which means there’s still a lot of time to catch up.

The Indians have played some tough teams to open the season. Canvassing a few sources, they’ve played anywhere between the fifth and seventh hardest schedule of any team in 2015. Unfortunately, Cleveland has little to show for those games, and their division rivals — who they will play more often than other clubs for the remainder of the season — look strong and are responsible for almost all of their losses.

That they play both Kansas City and Detroit more often might be a blessing and a curse: on one hand, they have to play two good teams a lot this season. On the other, they better control their own final place in the standings. The playoffs are still a possibility for the Indians, but they’re doing it the hard way: there seem to be no easy fixes for their team-wide poor defense, and that will continue to impact their pitching in ways that are difficult to predict.