May 19, 2013

Perhaps It’s Only Appropriate…

May 6, 2008 by 6 Comments

Go English.com lists Beating a Dead Horse in between He Lost His Head, and Can’t Cut the Mustard. So, with that in mind here’s Les on the offensive woes of the Tribe…

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=po2pvxDBcNs[/youtube]

I’m not sure what more can be said. The offense sucks, hasn’t performed to expectations and fans are ticked off, voicing their displeasure. Of course, if we listen to Rick Manning during the game, we will be enlightened by hearing that all players and teams go through such slumps, and our boys will be just fine. Of course, Manning is paid by the Indians…

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  • Phil

    Yeah, those numbers suck, but does anyone who cares need the Cleveland Sports Crank to churn them out for them? Whah, whah, whah… “true and reason”, whah, whah, whah… “self-proclaimed,” whah, whah, whah… If Les had a batting average applied to his many flailing attempts at trying to hit upon something well-turned, inspiring or insightful, Mendoza’s infamous numbers would put him to serious shame.

    Not to sound like a crank myself, I’d recommend Les beef up his self-proclaimed truth and reason by reading someone like Yahoo! Sports journalist Jeff Passan, a writer who understands that his medium is not mere statistics or tireless whining, it’s language and the human dimension of the sport.

  • http://www.waitingfornextyear.com RockKing

    Wow. But how do you really feel about it Phil?

  • Phil

    Yeah, it’s a brutal situation, but one has to weight the options against the apparent necessity of provoking a change of some sort. You start small–team meetings, the Fransisco promotion was good–and wait a bit more. Then, if nothing improves after another few series, you go a little bigger, taking one more step. You think about changing the hitting coach, you think about a trade. But at this point, it does no one any good to insinuate that the Tribe should have made all sorts of roster changes in the off-season, because no one could have seen this offensive depression coming. And it would be hasty to trade off players signed to long-term contracts, especially when the trading market looks so meager, anyway. Sometimes, you just have to sit these things out. I don’t buy the “40-game threshold” that Mr. Crank evokes her.

    Incidentally, I recall Torre waiting out some truly brutal stretches by the Yanks’ offense in years past. He maintained his cool and his team went on to some serious fun (for Yankees’ fans, at least). I hope Wedge shows the same leadership and that Shapiro lets him.

    I’m neither a journalist nor a person with much baseball experience, so I am just responding to your question on my gut sense of how these slumps can hit teams for fairly long periods and still not sink their seasons.

  • Phil

    correction: I don’t buy the “40-game threshold” that Mr. Crank evokes here.

  • Rick

    I would agree that you start small and keep tinkering, however I think that signs of this team’s offensive woes were quite evident last year. Remember that mid-season funk where Cleveland and Detroit were both struggling to win games? Truthfully, without a shot in the arm by Kenny Lofton and Asdrubal Cabrera I don’t think the Tribe would have made the post-season despite the pitching performances they got.

    As for comparing this line-up to the Yankee line-up last year that Torre had patience with…are you kidding? That roster had/has Hall of Fame caliber hitters that have proven track records. Our line-up most certainly does not have that kind of consistency. Cabrera, Peralta, Garko, Gutierrez, Dellucci these players haven’t had many seasons worth of getting the job done to say with certainty that they will ‘bounce back’. We hope they do, but we don’t have a ton of evidence to support that for each of them personally.

    Obviously Hafner’s struggles have been well documented, and date back more than a year, Casey Blake is never going to be confused with an all-star quality hitter, and I’ll even throw Sizemore’s name out there. Other than potential, a gold glove, and decent…not great, but decent numbers over the last 3 years, what makes us think that he is one of the best offensive players in the game, besides the Sports Illustrated articles and Peter Gammons projections?

    Not really trying to defend Les here, but I don’t see how you can expect this team to pull out of their slump because the Yankees did it last year. I don’t expect that these batting averages will stay this low, but in order to be a champion, we will have to hit significantly better than this.

  • Phil

    Rick. Thanks for the comments. Was there any point of disagreement in what we wrote? I couldn’t find one.

    There was confusion, perhaps, over my alluding to the Yankees, but no apparent disagreement. In my comments, I did not make the claim attributed to me that because the Yankees pulled out of a funk last year, the Indians surely will, too. Nor did I claim that the talent level of the two teams’ offenses is identical. Rather, the reference served as an illustration of a general trend in baseball that not only Yankees but many teams go through. With the help of that reference, I called for prudence. The reference was not the center-pin of my argument; it was only an example of a trend I believe the team might reverse in the coming weeks.

    The point you are concerned about is whether the Indians’ offensive lull is merely temporary. You seem to believe that it is not. I can see why you believe so. The problems do seem to extend back to last season. Despite this, I remain slightly more optimistic, but I do not think we would disagree in how Indians’ management should respond to the problem.