Da Clip Show: Keeping an Eye on the Tribe’s AAA Squad – 4/13/11 And, We’re Back!
April 13, 2011Angels 4 Indians 3: A Durbin Debacle
April 14, 2011While We’re Waiting serves as the early morning gathering of WFNY-esque information for your viewing pleasure. Have something you think we should see? Send it to our tips email at tips@waitingfornextyear.com.
Some good cop, bad cop by TD and Jacob about the Tribe. (I’m having trouble picturing Jacob as the bad cop though.)- “But realistically, is this a team that will maintain this level of play for the whole year? Are we even looking at anywhere more than 80 wins? I’m not so certain there. The 2002 Indians began with an 11-1 tear and faded to a 74-88 record. I think that’s about what we’ll see by the end of this year, give or take about five wins, and hopefully certainly no managerial change.” [Still WFNY]
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Weekend editor Brendan Bowers has a unique experience with Cavalier Christian Eyenga- “To be clear it wasn’t Skyenga’s fault that the exchange was awkward. It was mine. It was awkward though, and the review of said exchange is pretty comical as a result. So anyways, I rolled into the locker room postgame a few weeks ago with the shirt in my computer bag – thought I’d look too stupid walking in holding a t-shirt. Then once Skyenga was out of the shower and decent, I rolled over to his locker and busted out the shirt, offering the following…” [Stepien Rules]
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Picking sides in the NFL labor dispute- “So while it may be politically incorrect to root for a billionaire owner over a millionaire player, I don’t care, I just don’t want the NFL to change. I’m not an owner or a player, I’m a fan, and the players having no power in football works great for me. We have to stop comparing professional athletes to any other type of American worker, like the players are the NFL’s “workforce,” and everyone is free to decide where they want to work. First of all, that’s not how America works at all, and second, this is different anyway.” [Dawg Pound Daily]
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Adam Rittenberg weighs in on Cameron Heyward, and specifically comparisons to Vernon Gholston- “The Gholston comparisons are a little unfair. Heyward is more than just a pure pass rusher and played quite a bit on the inside at Ohio State, which does a nice job of moving around its linemen. Heyward can affect games without solely pressuring the quarterbacks.” [AFC North Blog]
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“Obviously, we all know that the Indians’ won’t win 2 out of every 3 games all season long, and you’ve seen the national media jump on the Tribe story, full of perfectly reasonable caveats, but I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the back-end of the Indians’ bullpen simply won’t let up a run this year or that Asdrubal Cabrera is going to lead the league in HR or SLG. Instead of using those specific instances to assert that the Indians’ time at the top of the Central won’t be long, let’s simply start to believe that this is a better team than most realized when the season started and they’ve been inching forward for some time now.” [Cousineau/DiaTribe]
11 Comments
I don’t even want to look at Chad Durbin right now. I’ve seen little leaguers throw less wild pitches in a game than this dude did in one inning. Gross.
I love Brendan’s contributions to the site, but can we please stop endlessly promoting this “Skyenga” thing? It has become a festering cliche
Image fixed.
As Manny Acta said…I’ll take 4-2 on the west coast all season long. They had their chances last night, but just couldn’t get the big hit when they needed it.
Let’s get back home and get some home cookin’ going…
The big lesson from last night is that while the youth movement is great, and having a couple veterans isn’t a bad idea, there’s still a reason washed up veterans are called washed up veterans. (Or maybe they just never really had much.)
4-2 on the WC is fantastic, especially when it was the 2 that were in doubt and not the 4.
I know it’s easy to want to pile on Durbin at this point with the way he has pitched this season, but I guess I feel like if your pitching staff only allows 3 runs in 11 innings, it’s hard for me to blame them. There were several situations where a clutch hit likely wins that game, and they just couldn’t deliver. (Choo and Hafner were the main culprits here if my memory serves me right…)
I’m glad people can look at this glass half full. But 4-2 sweeping a team that is more 4A than we’ve been for the past 5 or so years, and losing a series because of our first bullpen implosion, kind of leads me to believe things might be coming back to earth. Someone set the alarms for those bats and make sure they’re awake by game time this Friday. Also, I feel like Chad Durbin should be carrying the backpack in the pen for the next month or so for that garbage.
@Scott – Thank you for the fix. Much more appropriate.
@stin4u Sweeping a team (Seattle) that is more 4A than we’ve been for the past 5 or so years? Seattle .460 winning percentage the last five years. Cleveland .480 winning percentage the last five years (including the 96 win season in ’07).
The point I’m trying to make is that a road sweep is significant no matter who it is against. Plus two losses to the Angels by a combined 3 runs is not horrible, especially with all the chances the Tribe had to win yesterday.
I wondered how many losses it would take before the fans started calling the Tribe a fluke. It turns out it was just 2.
@Rick – I get what your saying, forgive my pessimistic attitude. I honestly do like this team, I’m just saying I feel like they came out red hot and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon 10 games into a 162 game season. I want to get behind this team 100% but I feel like once things begin to settle we’ll see what this team is made of.
I suppose that is me calling this a fluke (which sounds very black and white to me) but I’m ok with that.
is the Tribe winning 80% of it’s games a fluke? you betcha.
is the Tribe being so much better than we expected a fluke? doesn’t seem like it. defense is playing great, starting and backend pitching is doing great. only the hitting hasn’t really come around (note: Choo, Santana especially).
if we get some hitting (one of our supposed strong suits this year), then we could potentially contend for our weak division. I mean I don’t think we even need 90wins for it as Minny is taking steps back, the Tigers are imploding, and the White Sox bullpen is worse than ours was in ’08.