As the Cleveland Indians continue to struggle this season, I’m hearing many fans referring to the team as horrible, awful, and terrible. The Tribe’s record this season is 30-33, a few games below the .500 mark, so while the squad is definitely disappointing, they are clearly not horrible. If you are my age, you have seen awful teams and this isn’t one of them.
Since I started being a fan of the Indians in the mid sixties, there have been four seasons where the Wahoos lost 100 games or more: 1971, 1985, 1987, and the 1991 campaign when they lost 105 games. Those teams were god awful. At least the ’91 team featured some of the players who won two American League titles in 1995 and 1997. Carlos Baerga, Sandy Alomar, Albert Belle, and Charles Nagy were on the team that year, and Jim Thome was a late season call up. The ’85 and ’87 ballclubs could hit, but the pitching was truly terrible. The 1971 team was a great building block for the Yankees, as it featured rookie Chris Chambliss and 3B Graig Nettles, both cornerstones of the late 70’s New York champions.
The current edition of the Tribe is not a horrible team, it’s mediocre for sure, but they are not 100 loss bad. Most of the venom dripping from fans lips has to do with the expectations of the team after they won 93 games in 2005. We include ourselves in expecting more, since we thought this would be the year the Tribe returned to the playoffs.
Are there any encouraging signs that the Indians can turn it around this season? One thing is Cleveland’s record in blowout games, that is games decided by five runs or more. The Indians are 16-7 in these games and historically, good teams have good records in these types of games. You don’t see a Kansas City winning a whole bunch of blowouts and losing all kinds of one run games.
The other good sign is the Wahoos run differential, as they have scored 35 more runs than their opponents this year. Based on this statistic, the Indians record should be 35-28, five games ahead of where they currently are in the standings. This shows the Cleveland Indians are not a horrible team.
I don’t mean to come off as a stat geek, because 11 games out is 11 games out. The Tribe has to get it going, and needs to do it right now. But, is this a horrible team? No. Should they be doing better? Absolutely!
KM
Cleveland Sports Perspective 