Week In Review: April 22-28

by Jay on Apr 29, 2008 1:43 PM EDT in Week In Review

This week: 5-2
Overall: 12-14
Scoring: 38-20
Old Mood: 2.9
New Mood: 5.2

	W	L	%	GB
Chicago	14	10	.583	-
Cleveland	12	14	.462	3.0
Minnesota	11	14	.440	3.5
Kansas City	11	14	.440	3.5
Detroit	11	15	.423	4.0

The series: Visited the Royals (win, win, win) and hosted the Yankees (win, win, loss, loss).

The big story: There were several, and perhaps the biggest was simply that we had a strong week, winning five of seven to move into second place. But the most significant development for the 2008 season going forward was C.C. Sabathia's total U-turn from trainwreck to dominant starter. Sabathia gave up just one run over 14 innings, striking out 11 hapless Royals in the first game and tossing an 8-inning gem in which only five Yankees reached base in the second. This pair of consecutive starts was one of the best of Sabathia's career, surpassed in 2007 only by his back-to-back shutouts in June. At the same time, his first four starts were so horrendous (13.50 ERA) that even after the extreme two-start bounce-back, his ERA is still the worst in the majors at 7.88 – even worse than Barry Zito's. Sabathia's excellence ended up being of no real immediate consequence, as the Indians turned the first one into a 15-1 rout, then handed Sabathia a tough 1-0 loss in the second.

In other news: Jake Westbrook unexpectedly went on the Disabled List with a lower-back muscle strain. Initially expected to miss only a few starts, he's now expected to be out for a full month after his symptoms persisted for a full week. His injury, combined with a rain-delay-induced double-header, resulted in a flurry of call-ups and send-downs as the Indians played with an extra outfielder for a few days (Ben Francisco), swapped out for a spot starter (Jeremy Sowers) on Saturday, swapped out for another extra outfielder (Brad Snyder) on Sunday, and finally on Monday swapped out for Aaron Laffey, who will join the rotation at least for the following week. Both starters made fine 2008 debuts against the Yankees, with Laffey looking significantly stronger than Sowers even though the box scores will claim the opposite.

Lee deepened his improbable run as the game's most effective pitcher with a complete game shutout, as the national media joined Indians fans in collectively dropping their jaws. The lineup blew up for 24 runs in the first two games but then fizzled with just 14 runs in the next five, a trend led by Casey Blake, who posted a 2125 OPS in two games against the Royals but just a 350 OPS starting all four games against the Yankees. The post-Borowski bullpen started to come together as Kobayashi asserted himself with a few strong setup performances while Betancourt breezed through his first two Save opportunities, making the closer's job look suspiciously un-different from his old setup-man gig.

Adam Miller finally made his official 2008 debut in Buffalo, following a few weeks rehabbing a blister and a few weeks in extended spring training. Miller pitched nine scoreless innings in two starts while continuing to build up his pitch count, and his velocity was intact even if his peripherals weren't. Miller's return, coupled with Brian Slocum's solid start, suggests that the Indians remain an absurd eight-deep in big-league-ready starting pitchers, even after putting Westbrook on the DL and shipping Sean Smith off to Colorado. At the same time, David Huff, 39th overall draft pick in 2006, overcame a rocky first two starts to pitch his third straight gem for the Akron Aeros, allowing just one run (on a solo shot) and 13 baserunners against 19 strikeouts over the three games, and he picked off a couple guys, too. If Huff continues to emerge, that may further tempt the Indians to move Miller into the big-league bullpen.

Post of the week: Now taking nominations.

Who fed it: Sabathia dominated in two starts while Lee was near-spotless in his one. Julio excelled in two low-leverage outings, while Kobayashi and Betancourt settled into their new roles; the three relievers faced 32 batters and got 29 outs, including two erased on double-plays, and allowed no one past first base. Blake had the best all-around numbers of any hitter on the week but was abysmal against the Yankees. Victor batted .375, achieving a 902 OPS on the week with (once again) no home runs. Dellucci and Peralta each combined a solid average with a pair of home runs. Seemingly competing for at bats, Michaels and Gutierrez both accounted for a major chunk of our otherwise anemic offense against the Yankees, the former batting .400 while the latter slugged .600, and they looked damned good in the field, too. Special mention must be given to Aaron Laffey, who no-hit the Yankees for five innings and, through sheer horrendous luck alone, gave up four runs in the 6th when he deserved to give up, at most, one. Absolute Best: Sabathia. Relative Best: Lee.

Who ate it: It's hard to say what the worst part of Ryan Garko's week was, the .042 average, the .115 OBP or the .083 slugging. I'm going with the .042 average, because he was just one walk short of decent walk rate, and hey, his isolated power is almost 2.0! Unfortunately, even those minimal contributions were mostly confined to last Tuesday's game, and Garko's line for the last five games was .000/.048/.000. Aside from Garko, the rest of the Indians put up a more-than-respectable .302/.360/.451 line for the week. Hafner continued his harrowing march to the bottom, with week-by-week OPS totals of 824, 761, 592 and (this week) 512 — or, if you prefer, he has a 559 OPS over his last 17 games. Absolute Worst: Garko. Relative Worst: Garko. Twenty Other Kinds Of Worst: Garko. And Yet The Guy Who Really Makes Me Suicidal Is Still: Hafner.

The other guys: We made Wang look like Bob Gibson. The rest of it, pretty fuzzy, maybe I'll fill it in later, does anybody really care about this section?

False alarms:

Cliff Lee, greatest pitcher in the universe.
Chien-Ming Wang, second greatest.
C.C. Sabathia, third greatest (he's actually about tenth).
Ben Francisco in a Cleveland uniform.
Ryan Garko, worst hitter ever.
Jhonny Peralta on web gems last night.
J-Mike, serviceable big-league hitter.

Open questions:

How long will Jake be out, and once he returns, will he be totally awesome, or merely awesome?
How long can Chicago stay at the top of the standings?
Since any blogger writing in his/her parents' basement in his/her underwear can notice when a reliever's velocity is down 3-5 mph, and might actually write about it without the team's permission, what exactly do we need newspaper columnists for?
Too soon to start panicking about losing Cliff Lee after 2010?
When the hell is Slider's birthday, anyway?
Can Kobayashi confuse hitters with his deathballs all season like Okajima did?
Can Julio be useful?
How long will we keep marching Stomp Lewis out there with reduced velocity?
Just how bad will the game have to be going before we see Mastny or Breslow again, and how bad will they be after a 15-day layoff?
Has anyone noticed that Eddie Mujica is in his last option year? Does anyone care?
How much better can Laffey be than he was last year? Is his ceiling is higher than we think?
Can Steel Rafi get settled and find some semblance of his 2007 consistency?
How many relievers would have to be failing completely for Adam Miller to get the call to the big-league bullpen? Do we even want to see him there?
Could Sowers be on the block soon?
Is it really possible for Marte to spend 120 more days on the roster than Ben Francisco this season, and yet still get fewer at bats?
Is Wedge basically just testing Marte to see how long it takes him to get an obviously bad attitude, at which point they ship him out?
Will Shapiro fall for this kind of nonsense again?

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Comments

Tonight is Marte’s only chance. He gets three hits—solid hits, no bloops—he might play again before June.

by odradek on Apr 29, 2008 7:04 PM EDT reply reply 0 recs

I think he’s in there because Garko is sucking. So if Garko continues to suck, Marte gets to play.

by Julie on Apr 29, 2008 7:43 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

yes, but if Blake continues to suck Marte sits. Its a mystery to all….

by hans on Apr 29, 2008 9:46 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

Who will they recall if they send Laffey down on Sunday? Toregas, Barfield and Aubrey are the only hitters on the 40 man eligble since BFran and Snyder cant for a couple of days. Is this finally Aubrey first look?

by riter on Apr 30, 2008 9:05 AM EDT reply reply 0 recs

I doubt it.

by Jay on Apr 30, 2008 1:03 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

One quibble and several answers:

Peralta’s OBP for the last 7 games is .208; his OPS is .573 (for the season he’s at .283/.713). I can’t agree that that’s a “solid average.” I still like Peralta and think he can be a good player, and I’m not suggesting we trade him/bench him/chop him up into little pieces, but I think that he should share some of the “blame” with Hafner and Garko for the failures of the middle of the batting order.

Yes, Kobayashi can be a very effective reliever.

Julio is too wild to be effective—it’s hard to put him in a situation where there are runners on base or the game is close because of his lack of command.

Lewis’ velocity may be down, but he hasn’t been hopeless. In the last Yankee game, he induced a slow roller that he couldn’t handle, then got through almost two innings before he succumbed to a heavily left-handed line-up. I think they’ll keep running him out there for a while, although not in the 8th inning (which seems to have become Masa’s realm).

Miller needs to demonstrate that he can throw strikes consistently before they call him up as a reliever. And, since he’s in a starting role in Buffalo, my guess is they won’t call him up to relieve unless Lewis implodes (leaving them with only three in the “circle of trust.”

The Francisco/Marte “battle” for AB’s would be even more fun if we added Choo to the mix—if they keep him, he might get more AB’s than both of the other guys (despite two months or so on the DL).

My own question: Since Rich Ankiel turned into a major league hitter after losing the strike zone, could Julio become a clean-up hitter for us? I know; this belongs on one of those venting posts LGT does from time to time.

by peter m on Apr 30, 2008 9:59 AM EDT reply reply 0 recs

This piece covered the Royals and Yankees series, as you can see by the dates. Over that span, Peralta’s batting average was .304, more than solid, and his OPS was 898, not 573. If you want to look at just the Yankees series, he hit .267 with a 780 OPS. If, however, you go out of your way to look at a handful of games that starts and ends with an 0-fer, then yes, you can make Peralta look pretty bad.

by Jay on Apr 30, 2008 10:22 AM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

We’re both looking at an arbitrarily chosen small group of games. I’ll take the point that he hit relatively well in those two series, but I still think his overall performance has been inconsistent at best and that he has to bear some of the responsibility for the team’s offensive struggles. His overall numbers for the season thus far, small sample size acknowledged, are mediocre. People are all over Hafner and Garko, but their numbers thus far aren’t that much worse (actually better on OBP) than Jhonny’s (.302/.642 and .346/.698).

It’s still early in the season and one can hope that those numbers will get better (track records suggest they should). I guess I’m reacting a bit to the focus on Hafner, who HAS been bad, but the team’s problems at the plate go way beyond him.

by peter m on Apr 30, 2008 10:35 AM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

Yes, but my games weren’t chosen specifically to make Peralta look bad. I look at a week in snapshot for all the players, and one thing you learn pretty quickly is that it’s not really noteworthy for a single player to have a 573 OPS over the course of a week, that’s just a couple of bad games, and all players will have that week a few times over the course of a season. I’ve done four of these so far, and as it happens, I pegged Peralta as our absolute worst player last week and and our absolute best the week before.

Looking at his season on the whole: .237/.283/.430, .06 walk rate, .254 BABIP. What jumps out to me:

The low OBP, which is unacceptable; this is a function of his contact hitting, his BABIP and his walk rate.
His career BABIP is .323 and was actually stable for 2006 (.324) and 2007 (.327)
I wondered if his low doubles total was something to worry about, possibly an indicator that the low BABIP wasn’t just bad luck. He’s got 8 extra-base hits in 100 PA, and for his career he’s got 180 in 2247, which is … exactly 8.01 per 100.
On the other hand, his line drive % is way down at 8.3, where he’s usually up near 19.0, with the difference going evenly into groundballs and flyballs. If there’s a problem indicator, this is it, but this alone doesn’t account for the bad luck on BIP. PrOPS normalizes for BIP but pays attention to groundball rates as it does it, and it still says Peralta is earning a 750 but getting only 713.
His career walk rate is .09, by the way. (Maybe I should start showing that as BB% — 9.0 — so that it’s per 100 PA. Seems more digestible that way.) It was 9.1 last season, and he’s seeing the same numbers of pitches, 3.9 per PA. I’m concerned, but I suspect this will correct itself.

On the whole, though, your basic premise of “Peralta deserves some of the blame” just doesn’t pass the sniff test. The team’s OPS+ is at 89, how can it makes sense to blame the shortstop who’s at 91? For that matter, how can it ever make sense to blame any team’s hitting problems on a shortstop who’s on pace to hit 30 HR?

by Jay on Apr 30, 2008 11:19 AM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

And by the way …

he hit relatively well in those two series

... “relatively” well? He hit very well. Any skill position player is going to get MVP votes if he hits .304, or has an 898 OPS, or hits two HR for every seven games, which would add up to 46 for the season.

by Jay on Apr 30, 2008 11:25 AM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

We can argue back and forth what relatively means (and for the record, I didn’t choose the set of games in order to show that Jhonny was bad – looking at the last 7 games is hardly an unusual thing to do, although I have already acknowledged that any set of games is inherently arbitrary).

I was focusing on his consistency over that set of games - he had two really good games (the 4 RBI game, and one against KC where he went 3 for 4 - both HR’s in those games). In the other 4 games in which he played, he was 2 for 15 with 1 BB. Inconsistent, in other words. Overall, a good series of games, but the kind of week that also has holes in it. I’d be less critical of Jhonny’s season if he demonstrated some consistency, the kind you really need out of a guy who’s hitting in a key spot in the order. He has had some good slugging numbers, certainly better than the rest of the team and much more than adequate for a middle infielder, as you note. But, he has the worst OBP of any regular on the team (only Michaels and Marte are worse). You acknowledge that; I guess I just see it as a bigger factor in the team’s overall struggle than you do.

All told, I don’t think he’s their biggest problem, but I still think he has been inconsistent and his inability to get on base with regularity isn’t helping.

Footnote: Out of curiosity, when you say the team’s OPS is .89, do you mean in those two series? That’s obviously not for the year. I couldn’t figure out what you were referring to.

by peter m on Apr 30, 2008 12:41 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

Oh, sorry. I see you meant OPS+. Missed the last “letter”.

by peter m on Apr 30, 2008 12:52 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

The team’s OPS+, not OPS, is 89 for the year. I don’t know what it was for those two series, but the team OPS was 756, and it’s 696 for the whole season. This is counter-intuitive, but it reflects the massive numbers piled up in the first game, somewhat meaningless, and also in the second, where they actually mattered.

In looking at the hitters for this piece, I tried to avoid those kinds of distortions. While not wanting to discount those numbers entirely, I set out not to credit a hitter for having a “great week” if he’d been poor outside of that one game. I found that it was really only Blake who was guilty of that. Leaving out the first two games, the team had a 606 OPS in the other five.

Now I’m going to be a pain in the ass about one thing: “relatively.”

You threw in the word “relatively” to imply that Peralta’s performance was only “well” based on some lower standard. In fact, his performance in those games was excellent by any standard.

We cannot “argue back and forth” about this. As with the word “relatively,” you are trying to sneak in a little suggestion of ambiguity where there is none—“argue back and forth” suggests that there are at least two fairly reasonable ways to interpret the word “relatively.” There are not.

Try conceding a point once in a while. Believe me, you’re due.

by Jay on Apr 30, 2008 1:02 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

I used the word relatively to indicate that I didn’t think he was great last week; just good. But, as measured by OPS, I will concede he had a good two series against KC and the Yankees. Maybe that’s the lesson to be learned in this discussion – the Indians had some success when one of the guys (Peralta) in the middle of the order hit. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened consistently this year (Hafner consistently bad, Garko and Peralta up and down).

by peter m on Apr 30, 2008 2:03 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

I have a really hard time remembering posts of the week to nominate. Is there a way to keep track of them, like create a never-closing fanpost where we can dump them in?

Sizemore-Shapiro 2008. The Official Red Bull of Let's Go Tribe Game Threads.

by Gradyforpresident on Apr 30, 2008 3:31 PM EDT reply reply 0 recs

If you see a post you like, recommend it when you read it. That makes it easy to go through the threads and see which posts have been recommended the mosts as candidates for POTW.

Free Andy Marte!

Pronk Needs You

by woodsmeister on Apr 30, 2008 3:40 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

I nominate F.O.B.

by Brick. on Apr 30, 2008 3:49 PM EDT reply reply 0 recs

that was this week?

Sizemore-Shapiro 2008. The Official Red Bull of Let's Go Tribe Game Threads.

by Gradyforpresident on Apr 30, 2008 3:55 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

i’m not sure. thought it fell in the timeframe of this wrapup.

by Brick. on Apr 30, 2008 3:57 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

Yeah, I think it was only a 4-5 days ago in fact.

by Jay on Apr 30, 2008 6:15 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

feels like forever ago

Sizemore-Shapiro 2008. The Official Red Bull of Let's Go Tribe Game Threads.

by Gradyforpresident on Apr 30, 2008 7:32 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

As if you remember it.

by Jay on Apr 30, 2008 8:09 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

i’m pretty sure i was entirely sober when i said it

Sizemore-Shapiro 2008. The Official Red Bull of Let's Go Tribe Game Threads.

by Gradyforpresident on Apr 30, 2008 10:55 PM EDT up reply reply 0 recs

Jay, just my two cents, I think you could drop “The Other Guys” paragraph. It might be more instructive to include a graf about what the other teams in our division did although you might not have as good a handle on that, I don’t know how broad your baseball interest is. Just a suggestion.

by NickFantana on May 1, 2008 4:20 PM EDT reply reply 0 recs