• Can you CC clearly now? Now that the Indians, incredibly, have reeled off nearly the same record since the CC Sabathia trade (30-20) as the Brewers (30-19), the most-asked question in baseball is: Where would the Indians be if they'd kept Sabathia instead of trading him?
So we posed that very question to their vice president for baseball operations, Chris Antonetti. And one of the first things he did was to head for the ESPN.com standings page. He then dialed up the date of that trade (July 7) and reported that our own site (via the geniuses at coolstandings.com) was projecting back then that the chances of the Indians making the playoffs was 0.7 percent. Apparently, they didn't think that was too good.
"I think it's human nature to go back and retroactively look at different decisions," Antonetti said. "But in life, you're left to make those decisions with the information you have at hand at the time. And the information we had at hand at the time was that our record wasn't good (37-51), and we had a number of key guys on the disabled list, and we just weren't getting enough performance from the vast majority of our players. So when we evaluated our chances of making the playoffs at the time, we just didn't think that was a very realistic possibility."
And it's tough to disagree. Even if Sabathia had gone 9-0 in Cleveland over these last eight weeks, remember, that doesn't mean the Indians would have picked up nine games in the standings. In fact, Anthony Reyes -- a pitcher they then turned around and traded for before the trading deadline -- has a 2.01 ERA as an Indian. We can't even be sure CC would have beaten that.