Brickyard 400, Tribe Woes and #ActualSportswriting: While We’re Waiting…
July 27, 2015Matthew Dellavedova agrees to one-year deal with Cavs
July 27, 2015To say that the Cleveland Indians were just “defeated” four straight times by the Chicago White Sox feels like a woefully inadequate summation of a series in which Cleveland (45-52) was outscored 26-5 on its home field and banished back to the Central Division basement. It’d be more fitting to say that Tito Francona’s club is “defeated” in the adjective form of the word — completely demoralized, lost at sea, overtaken by their own ineptitude. A long closed-door meeting after Sunday’s loss and a string of frustrated quotes from players couldn’t epitomize this sense of doom quite as well as the bottom of the ninth inning already had. It wasn’t that Giovanny Urshela’s leadoff triple in a 2-0 ballgame failed to ignite a comeback rally, it’s that no one in the ballpark seemed to believe it could have. That’s when “defeat” transcends the simple win/loss realities of sports and becomes something far more morbid indeed.
With that in mind, WFNY is proud to debut a special excerpt from one of the lost existentialist plays of the great Irish author Samuel Beckett (best known in sports circles as being a different guy from the one who published Beckett’s Baseball Card Price Guides). In this somewhat self-derivative piece, titled “Waiting for the Cleveland Indians to Turn Their Season Around,” we find two sour old Tribe beat reporters, Andrew Clayman and Michael Bode, inexplicably dressed in ragged hobo suits and bowler hats, stuck in a state of symbol-laden limbo.
[Setting: the sparse, surreal “office space” of an internet sports publication]
BODE: (Sarcastically, while scanning an Indians box score). Charming team. Inspiring prospects. (He turns to CLAYMAN). Can we move on now?
CLAYMAN: We can’t.
BODE: Why not?
CLAYMAN: We’re waiting for the Cleveland Indians to turn their season around.
BODE: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure about that?
CLAYMAN: What?
BODE: That we’re covering the right team?
CLAYMAN: Sports Illustrated said this was the one.
BODE: It might have been a misprint.
CLAYMAN: What are you insinuating? That we’re barking up the wrong tree?
BODE: It’s just that they should have started turning the corner by now. We’ve covered every game. We should have seen some signs.
CLAYMAN: SI didn’t say for sure when they’d start winning.
BODE: And what if they don’t?
CLAYMAN: We’ll come back tomorrow and write the next recap.
BODE: And then the day after tomorrow?
CLAYMAN: Possibly.
BODE: And so on.
CLAYMAN: The point is—
BODE: Until they turn the season around.
CLAYMAN: You’re merciless.
BODE: You’re sure it was this season?
CLAYMAN: What?
BODE: That we were to wait.
CLAYMAN: They said 2015. (Pause). I think.
BODE: You think.
CLAYMAN: I must have made a note of it. (He fumbles in his pockets, bursting with miscellaneous rubbish). Some other sources say we’re actually waiting for next year.
BODE: What if the Indians started winning already, and we weren’t paying attention?
CLAYMAN: But you’ve said we’ve been covering every game.
BODE: I may be mistaken. (Pause). Let’s stop talking for a minute, do you mind?
CLAYMAN: (feebly). All right. (BODE sits down at his computer. CLAYMAN paces agitatedly to and fro, halting from time to time to gaze into the distance. BODE falls asleep reading the Indians Twitter feed. CLAYMAN halts finally.) Bode! . . . Bode! . . . Bode!
(BODE wakes with a start).
BODE: (restored to the horror of his situation). I was dreaming about clutch hitting! (Despairingly). Why couldn’t you let me sleep?!
CLAYMAN: There’s no time for that. You’ve got a big Royals series coming up. And we’re waiting for the Indians to turn their season around.
(Curtain)
Weekend Re-Capping
Thursday:
White Sox 8, Indians 1
W: Jeff Samardzija (7-5), L: Trevor Bauer (8-7)
Boxscore Excerpt: Alexei Ramirez | 2-4, 1 HR, 3 RBI
Here is Bode’s courageous recap of this clunker from last week.
Friday:
White Sox 6, Indians 0
W: Jose Quintana (5-9), L: Corey Kluber (5-11)
Boxscore Excerpt: Carlos Quintana | 9 IP, 0 ER, 7 H, 0 BB, 8 K
Friday’s crowd was treated to a “something’s gotta give” matchup, as the Indians’ Corey Kluber (lowest run support in the AL) battled Chicago’s Jose Quintana (second lowest run support in the AL) in the ultimate tough luck duel. Obviously, both the Sox and Tribe absolutely detest scoring runs with their respective starters on the hill, so the outcome was likely going to boil down to a classic game of chicken. The Indians flinched first, as fresh call-up Jesus Aguilar — perhaps unaware of his team’s feelings about assisting Kluber — punched a base hit through the left side in the second inning to put two men on with just one out. Fortunately, Gio Urshela did his duty and immediately grounded into a double play to quell the threat.
The Sox tried their darndest to keep Quintana starving for aid, but when Corey Kluber uncorked a wild pitch with Alexei Ramirez on third base in the third inning, they were forced to avoid criminal suspicion and score the game’s first run. Jose Abreu, not realizing his own strength, added a “whoopsy daisy” solo homer in the sixth to make it 2-0 Chicago. With Quintana now mowing down Indian hitters with minimal effort, it became clear that the Sox were going to have to bite the bullet and begrudgingly let their guy get a W. The Tribe’s year-long Cy-Young-shaming of Kluber, meanwhile, continued unabated.
The Klubot eventually got in some trouble in the eighth and left with the score 4-0. Bryan Shaw, who apparently also hates his friendly, talented teammate, let in both of his inherited runners on a double by Alexei Ramirez, a guy who entered this series with an OBP 50 points lower than Michael Bourn’s. Thus, Kluber was charged with six runs on the night.
The Indians didn’t have any hits with RISP in this one, but in their defense, they only had two such at-bats. Kluber retains the No. 1 spot in all of baseball with a Worst Run Support average of 2.52.
Saturday:
White Sox 10, Indians 3
W: Chris Sale (9-5), L: Carlos Carrasco (10-8)
Boxscore Excerpt: Carlos Carrasco | 4 IP, 6 ER, 7 H, 2 BB, 5 K
Cleveland honored Larry Doby on Saturday with a long overdue statue outside the stadium. Inside the stadium, the 25,000 fans who came to see the statue and postgame fireworks had to sit through an annoying three-hour intermission known as “the game.”
By all the non-traditional metrics, Carlos Carrasco is an elite Major League starting pitcher. He misses bats, and in a slightly different way than Kluber, he’s been burned by the failures of his teammates — more as a result of subpar defense than spiteful run support shortages (Carrasco actually has the ninth highest run support in the AL). Still, tonight marked the fourth time this year that Cookie gave up five runs or more without escaping the fifth inning. For all the great strides he’s taken over the past year, that regrettable “dud” outing still seems to pop up a bit more than you’d like out of a guy with his skill set.
The first inning was a total nightmare: single, single, single, passed ball, single, (two quick outs), double, single. It was 5-0 Chicago before Chris Sale even took the hill. This is what “defeated” feels like. Among the few highlights: 2.1 very solid innings of relief from the surprising Jeff Manship, two more hits for the increasingly comfortable Francisco Lindor, and the first RBI of the season for Aguilar coming on a two-out single off Sale. Outside of that hit, the Indians were their standard 1-for-11 with RISP. During Larry Doby’s two pennant-winning seasons in Cleveland, he hit .300 (1948) and .337 (1954) in those situations.
Sunday
White Sox 2, Indians 1
W: Carlos Rodon (4-3), L: Danny Salazar (8-6), S: David Robertson (21)
Boxscore Excerpt: Carlos Sanchez | 3-4, 1 HR, 2 R, 1 RBI
Having officially swapped spots in the standings with the Indians on Saturday, Chicago now looked to sweep a four-game series on the road for the first time since 2007, while also moving a full game and a half up on the Tribe in a nitty-gritty battle for second-to-last-place. And to think, it was just a few months ago that I predicted these two teams would be battling at the top of the division.
Danny Salazar, who has generally enjoyed the same kind of surprisingly reliable run support as Carrasco, suffered his second consecutive quality start loss. He allowed just two runs over 6.2 innings, striking out eight. But fellow youngster Carlos Rodon went the same distance and bested him, holding Cleveland scoreless with nine K’s. When Rodon departed, he hadn’t walked a batter, meaning the Indians hadn’t drawn a walk off a White Sox starter the ENTIRE series. For Chicago, it was five straight walk-free starts in all, their longest streak in 43 years. More incredibly still, the Indians only drew one walk against a reliever in the series, too, and that was Michael Brantley on Thursday night. Quick diagnosis: ultra-frustrated hitters trying to be aggressive out of desperation.
23-year-old Sox second baseman Carlos Sanchez should have been feeling desperate himself coming into this series. He was hitting .200 with a .490 OPS and zero homers across 197 plate appearances. By the end of Sunday’s game, he’d gone deep for the second day in a row and raised his average to .221 — which is just a few points shy of what the Indians are hitting with runners in scoring position as a team.
With every indication pointing to a white flag and a mini firesale by week’s end, Jason Kipnis delivered a postgame rallying cry that could also read as the team’s eulogy.
We’ve been playing like shit, there’s no way around it. Embarrassing. No fight, giving up early. We’ve got people worrying about their own things, nobody’s held accountable. It’s just not the way we’re going to do business here. So we held a team meeting today to rein the guys back in, get us back to where we need to be, get our heads straight, get our heads out of our butts and start playing like a better baseball team.
BODE: They’re probably not going to start playing better though, are they?
CLAYMAN: No, probably not.
BODE: Well, shall we go then?
CLAYMAN: Yes, let’s go.
(They do not move).
58 Comments
Exactly. They are all making money.
And Cleveland rocked the “Blue Monster” in center-field.
With the NFL and NCAA starting soon they will be even more irrelevant..
no, but do you think the big markets made revenue sharing in such a way that the smaller markets would wind up making ‘more’ profit?
When did this town last think the Indians were relevant? Maybe October 2013 for a week or so?
Either then or September of last year.
The Indians drew over 30k just one time after the ASB last year, on fan appreciation night.
Television ratings were good, it helped that they were contenders until September.