It’s odd to be in first place with the best run differential in baseball.
Don’t get me wrong: I love it. It’s great to have entered the season with low expectations and have the team perform well beyond them. It’s great to watch—slowly, at times—the national sportswriters come around and recognize that the team is better than they thought. It’s great to write pieces about the Indians that get people riled up and interested again. It’s been a long three years, and all of this feels new and exciting.
But one of the problems I’ve noticed of late is that every time the Indians lose a game or two, I start waiting for the other shoe to drop. I fear that maybe this is the beginning of the end of the magic of the first two months. I felt it last week when we were swept in the two game set in Chicago. What if, I told myself, we lose five in a row? What if we lose ten? What if this is it, and all my hopes are about to be dashed? All this after having survived the rapture? What a bummer.
Of course, after dropping two straight to the White Sox, we rattled off four wins in a row. Then we lost two to those other Sox, and I had the same feelings all over again: Boston exposed us as a flawed team. We were playing over our heads. It’s ending.
And there really are some reasons to worry that this team is going to come back to earth. After all, they sort of have to. I plugged their Pythagorean record into a calculator the other day and it spit back a projection of 106 wins, which is patently ridiculous. The team, almost by the sheer intractability of history, is really unlikely to keep up the pace they set early in the year. Which is probably why I keep waiting for a punch to the gut.
So today, let’s play the sky-is-falling game, along with a little counterpoint of rationality to try to get me sane again. Here are the reasons to worry about the Indians, followed by my brief rebuttals.
1. The Indians aren’t as good as they showed early in the season. That was fluky and impossible to sustain. They will regress.
To me, this is more or less true. The Indians probably aren’t as good as they appeared, but actually, that’s ok. I wrote several weeks ago about how, whether fluky or not, the Indians’ early season wins still count. Did you know that if we play .500 ball for the rest of the season, we’d win 88 games. I think we can convince even some of the more strident doubters out there that this could be a .500 team for the rest of the year, and 88 wins in the AL central might still get us a playoff berth. At the very least, we’d be in a division race in September, which is pretty freaking awesome, considering our the last few purgatorial years.
2. The pitching is smoke and mirrors. It is, for all intents and purposes, the same staff as last season, which was fairly awful.
Again, this isn’t unreasonable. If you think of our five starting pitchers, they’re really the same guys who pitched us to 93 losses last season. But there are two reasons to think this year is different. First, they really are pitching better. For example, last season our pitching staff had the highest walk-rate in the AL; this season it’s the second best. That’s a real improvement to me. Second, we are a demonstrably better defensive team this season, which can only help the pitching staff. Will both facets stay as strong as they’ve been? Obviously, we don’t know. But the gains look to be both significant, and that’s not something to disregard as entirely unsustainable.
3. Asdrubal Cabrera and Michael Brantley and Travis Buck are not good enough to carry this team offensively.
True. Good thing we have the player with the second highest WAR in baseball in 2010 and a catcher who can only get better; Santana and Choo should be able to pick up some of the inevitable slack. Not to mention the two former All-Stars who should be healthy for the stretch run. And while we’re on the subject, Matt LaPorta’s OPS is above .800. Finally. I don’t worry about our offense, not one bit. Some people think I’m blind for feeling this way. But I’ve been pretty certain for two years that these guys can hit. Two losses to Josh Beckett and Jon Lester ain’t going to change my mind.
4. This is, after all, Cleveland. Murphy’s Law, etc.
I don’t believe in this nonsense. If we lose a game, it’s not part of a myth or a narrative or a curse or a national story. It really isn’t. We’re going to win some games this season. We’re going to lose some games this season. And guess what? It’s going to be fine. Scratch that: it’s going to be more than fine. It’s going to be fun. Every last game. And that’s enough for me. I can hardly wait.
