Cleveland Indians 2009 Production Analysis

Cleveland Spider: Not Impressed by the Tribe

 A buddy of mine had an away message yesterday that said “Big Jim is excited the Mets are on pace to win 162 games this year and are sitting pretty at 1-0″.  I laughed, and then I cried.  I cried because I was looking at the Tribe’s stats from today.  I don’t mean to go all Jacob Rosen on you, but this is pretty deep and meaningful stuff.

The Obvious Problems:

After yesterday’s debacle, the Indians are on pace to lose 162 games.  There’s no getting around that.  What’s more astounding is the fact that the Indians are on pace to give up 1458 runs and 2430 hits.  This would decimate the current runs per season record that’s held by your own 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who gave up an astounding 1252 runs on 1844 hits, which is depressing in its own right.  This year’s Tribe looks to be worse.

While the Indians will give up a record-setting number of runs, they will only score 162.  The Tribe are also projected to leave 1134 runners on base and hit into 324 double plays over the duration of the season.

Individually, Cliff Lee looks like he may have the worst season in the history of the game.  Assuming 32 starts, Lee will give up 224 runs, 320 hits, 32 home runs, and astoundingly will be hit by 32 comebackers.

Now to be fair, the sampling size for these stats may be a bit on the small side.  I couldn’t give you an approximation for the value of my confidence intervals, let alone draw in error bars.  Nevertheless, the outlook is grim.

On the plus side (because there’s got to be a plus, right?), even with these horrendous projections, the Indians are only currently 1/2 game behind the Royals and White Sox for the lead in the AL Central, with the Twins and Tigers both losing yesterday.  And as bad as Cliff’s outing was, at least he didn’t pull a Verlander.

Before you tell me “you can’t project stats based on one game”, you need to realize – it’s math, folks.  Maths doesn’t lie.

Your 2009 Cleveland Indians.