Let's recap two!

via www.fangraphs.com

In spite of some wildness, Fausto Carmona pitched a very efficient shutout in the first game of today's doubleheader. Of course, a cursory look at Fausto's basic stats (3-1, 2.95 ERA) would make you think I had confused him with Paul Byrd, but take a look at his walks and hits, and you'd be puzzled again, in this case how he'd manage that low an ERA in the first place. The Toronto offense has been in a miserable slump - until the 10th inning of the nightcap, they had only scored 1 run in the four-game series. As much as we'd love for the near-domination to be entirely due to the Tribe pitchers, the Toronto offense played a significant role in the Blue Jay offensive brownout. But in a season where he'd often be his own worst enemy, Fausto stayed in the strikezone enough to shorten his innings and finish the game.

AJ Burnett, who had awful career numbers (8.46 ERA in 4 starts) against the Indians, pitched well, keeping the game scoreless into the sixth inning. David Dellucci broke the deadlock in that inning by singling in Grady Sizemore. Burnett stuck around into the eighth, and came within one out of completing the game.

Asdrubal Cabrera accounted for the second and third runs of the game by hitting his first home run of the season. Not counting tonight's action, he's hitting poorly by any standard, but he's playing excellent defense, and more importantly, Josh Barfield isn't exactly pressing the issue. It also bears remembering that Asdrubal is only 22 years old and has just over 300 major-league plate appearances.

via www.fangraphs.com

I guess it would figure that the Indians come back to win a game after the starter barely got through five innings.

Fausto Carmona's frequent walking spells, which would have sent a pitcher with lesser stuff to the minors by now, shortened his outing tonight. Even though the Yankee lineup tends to chew up starters before their normal finishing point, I don't really think it was their patience that forced Fausto out. It was Fausto's mechanics that acted up; like most of his starts, he'd be in the strike zone for several batters at a time, then his pitches would go off the radar. Carmona has now walked 30 batters in almost 40 innings, an astounding number, especially if you consider how low his ERA remains.

Victor Martinez was a late scratch, making Jhonny Peralta (.216/.276/.392) and Ryan Garko (.242/.361/.354) the #3 and #4 hitters. The scary thing is that those were the proper choices, unless you wanted to move Sizemore down. Ben Francisco was in the lineup, just up from Buffalo, not to mention one of Andy Marte's rare appearances. (Side note: If you throw out Jamey Carroll, every one of those in tonight's lineup either made their major-league debut with the Indians or still had rookie eligibility when they debuted with the Indians. And that includes all the pitchers who made appearances in tonight's game as well.)

But despite another shaky outing from Carmona, despite not doing much against Andy Pettitte, the Indians won the game. The offensive production came on two swings of the bat. The first swing was Jhonny Peralta's home run to right-center in the fourth. The second came in the eighth inning off Joba Chamberlain when pinch-hitter David Dellucci flew out to the short porch in right field. Dellucci's home run came after Ryan Garko seemingly let Joba off the hook by weakly flying out when ahead in the count.

For a game in early May, this win was pretty significant. The Indians haven't been the only team struggling early this season, and even with a below-.500 record, they are now just 1.5 games behind the first-place Twins. For all the trials and tribulations April brought, the Indians don't really need to make up much ground.

The series:  Hosted the Mariners (loss, win, win) and the Royals (loss, loss).

The big story:  The lineup suffered a massive power outage from every player except Sizemore, as our other 12 "hitters" combined for zero home runs, zero triples and just nine doubles over 145 at-bats — and incidentally only 11 walks over 163 plate appearances — for a .262 slugging percentage.  (The major league average last season was .422.)  Our middle infielders produced just one single in 30 at-bats.  Blake and Hafner combined for just four hits, though all were doubles, in 29 at-bats.  The other four regulars (Martinez, Garko, Gutierrez and Dellucci) went the "empty batting average" route, hitting a solid .294 but combining for just three doubles and three walks between them.

The team's curious response was to jettison Jason Michaels in favor of Ben Francisco.  Curious, because after a horrendous 3-for-33 start in the team's first 15 games, Michaels had posted an 880 OPS over the past 16 games and was not part of the team's problems in any visible way.  Curious, because Michaels has a very team-friendly contract.  Curious, because Francisco had gotten off to an equally slow start in Buffalo and had made less of a rebound.  Curious, because the two players bring a very similar mix of skills to the roster.  Curious, because most in the industry expect Francisco to be a role-player or fringe everyday player, just like Michaels.

Curious, in sum, because it's not clear the Indians have done anything at all except replace one face with another, and usually, that kind of superficial move is reserved for the manager's job.  But, you know, they say you can't start a fire without a spark.  I guess.  Whatever.

In other news:  The rest of the rotation also continued to dominate, allowing just one earned run all week before the 7th inning, capped off by Aaron Laffey, who tossed an even better Sunday gem than he did last week, making the Indians look smart for not taking an easy chance to skip his turn in the rotation.  Paul Byrd continued a totally unpublicized four-game tear in which he's given up four home runs but only six runs total, and just one walk total, averaging 6.6 IP with a 1.71 ERA.  Garko more or less broke out of a hellacious 0-for-24 slump.  Wedge seethed a lot.  Betancourt was less than inspiring, failing to record a scoreless appearance in three tries.

Meanwhile, over on the Bizarro Planet, Cliff Lee was untouchable for six more innings before finally ending his un-scored-upon streak at 28 innings — giving up a three-run bomb, reducing his outing to a mere quality start, and ballooning his ERA all the way up to 0.96, still easily the best in the majors this season.  Like two regressions passing in the night, Sabathia's start was eerily similar to Lee's, beginning with six scoreless innings and ending with three straight hits to start the 7th.  Sabathia pitched well overall but still owns the league's worst ERA at 7.51.

Post of the week:  Maybe I need to rethink this.

Who fed it:  Byrd pitched the best game of the week, allowing just four singles and one walk.  Two of those five baserunners were erased trying to steal second, and none of them ever reached second.  Byrd retired the leadoff batter in all eight innings, and only two batters reached base with less than two outs.  Laffey was nearly as good in his start, allowing just one unearned run on four singles and two walks.  Sizemore busted out a 1311 OPS, including as many extra bases (nine) as the rest of the roster combined, and as many walks (five) as the four corner positions plus DH and catcher.  Perez had an odd but successful week, at one point earning a "Hold" without facing a single batter; he faced four batters over three other games, producing three groundballs and one flyball, resulting in a single and three outs.  Jensen Lewis allowed no hits and one walk over 4.1 innings, and Tom Mastny struck out one guy and allowed another to reach on a groundball error, the only two batters he's faced in the last 19 days. Absolute Best:  Sizemore.  Relative Best:  Byrd.

Honorable mention:  in his final start as an Indian (and only start of the week), Jason Michaels hit a double and a sac fly.  The next day, he scored the 11th inning game-winner as a pinch-runner in his final game here.  Not as dramatic as a farewell home run, but a fitting send-off for a role player who always seemed to be working his ass off out there.

Who ate it:  It's been feast-or-famine almost every week for Peralta, and this week, it was an all-out 0-for-13 famine.  Cabrera was nearly as bad at 1-for-16.  Blake's strikeouts (six) were double his times on base (three); he's played every inning of the last nine games, producing a line of .100/.206/.167.  Betancourt, filling in capably for Borowski, yielded two home runs and four singles while retiring only five batters.  Hafner hit two doubles in one game but went 0-for-10 in three others; he's struck out 14 times in his last 56 trips to the plate, hitting just four singles and four doubles and drawing only five walks for a line of .167/.250/.250.  Breslow totally crapped the bed in his only appearance in the last 19 days.  Absolute Worst:  Peralta.  Relative Worst:  Betancourt.

The other guys:    The Twins surged while the White Sox struggled and the Tigers scuffled.  The division more than ever looks like it will go to any team that can manage anything close to 90 wins, as the Tigers' pitching and the Indians' hitting look no more likely to come together than the White Sox or Twins going on a big flukey run.

False alarms:

• Not one single hitter having a good year by his own standards.
  
• Betancourt, terrible.
• Roger Clemens, apologizing for something.
• Not one formidable opponent in the AL Central.

Open questions:

• Can the starters walk on water long enough for the lineup to regroup and win a few games?
  
• Is there something fundamentally wrong with the organizational approach to hitting, and how long can Derek Shelton keep his job?
  
• When Cliff Lee returns to reality, what will that look like?
  
• Which teams are really in the AL Central race, anyway?
• 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?
• Too soon to write Laffey's name into our starting rotation plans, 2009-2013?
  
• Can Betancourt regain anything remotely resembling his 2007 dominance for any amount of time, or will he scuffle back-and-forth all season as he did in 2006?
• Is Jensen Lewis back on track, sort of?
• 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?
• Could the Indians really consider Marte more or less expendable and Blake more or less untouchable?
• Really?

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?

via www.fangraphs.com

Between FOX's sycophantic devotion to the NFL Draft and Tim McCarver's hysterics after watching Kobayashi's straight-leg windup, the Indians beat a reasonable facsimile of the Yankees to win their fifth in row and reach the .500 mark for the first time since April 8th.

Jeremy Sowers had the good fortune to face New York's B lineup, and although there were hard-hit outs, his velocity peaked around 90s and his pitches stayed away from the middle of the plate. With Jake Westbrook now out for at least another month, he's now competing with Aaron Laffey for a rotation spot.

After the Indians scored three runs against a young and frustrated Ian Kennedy, the game sped merrily along until the sixth, and then interesting things started to happen. Sowers ran out of gas in midway through the sixth inning, so his college teammate Jensen Lewis was called in to bail him out of a bases loaded jam. Lewis struck out pinch-hitter Robinson Cano, but pinch-hitter Jorge Posada cleared the bases by hitting a "triple" into the left field corner. David Dellucci had no business diving for the ball and should have at least prevented the runner from first from scoring.

Lewis stayed on another inning, staggering through the middle of the New York order in the seventh. He struck out an ailing Alex Rodriguez after a lengthy at-bat; the pitcher kept missing his location, and the hitter kept missing the mistakes.

By the time Masa Kobayashi entered the game, the lineup he was facing was filled with the usual suspects; each of the four starters who started the game on the bench were back in the lineup. But no matter, for the Yankees had not seen Kobayashi's bizarre windup, and it was obvious that even after seeing a couple pitches, the hitters swung not merely because they were fooled by his pitches but because of fear of what he was capable of...sorry, I got carried away, the hitters were actually just fooled by his pitches.

Joba Chamberlain wasn't available because of some obscure reason, so the Yankees elected to go with Ross Ohlendorf to pitch the ninth. Grady Sizemore and David Dellucci singled with one out, then Ohlendorf uncorked a wild pitch. Travis Hafner was then walked (thank you, Joe) to bring up Victor Martinez, who dumped a single into shallow left to win the game.

via www.fangraphs.com

So the baseball deities were playing an elaborate joke - CC Sabathia is actually a good pitcher, the hitters are good at working opposing pitching, and Casey Blake is an MVP candidate. I was kidding about that last part.

Ignore the 15 runs for a second. CC Sabathia pitching six shutout innings after what he'd done to start the season overshadows a 30-run output, because if CC isn't a reasonable facsimile of last year's Cy Young winner, the Indians' chances of making the playoffs goes from likely to unlikely. The 11 strikeouts that accompanied those six innings serve as a potent amnesiac. And if you watched Sabathia pitch, looking nothing like the body double who pitched in place of him in his first three starts, you'd mark April 22nd as his first start of the season, because whatever happened before didn't matter. At least you'll think that for the next five days, for then that start will mean absolutely everything.

OK, the second's over. Grady Sizemore, Travis Hafner, and  Victor Martinez went a combined 2-for-15, so all that offense was created by the guys that haven't been carrying their weight. Casey Blake lead the way with four hits, including a game-breaking grand slam in the fourth inning. After that, it seemed as though the offense collectively went into the zone, working counts without thinking, hitting pitches the other way like they do every day in batting practice.

One worry about the game, though - the 14-run margin of victory means that the Indians have now scored more runs than they've allowed. And you know what that means: Pythagoras will be angry at Eric Wedge.

via www.fangraphs.com

Westbrook pitched just as well as Nick Blackburn, but Blackburn had the Twins defense behind him. Whether it was good throws, turning hard-hit grounders into double plays, or making good catches in the outfield, the Minnesota glovework essentially won the game.

Jake Westbrook made a first-inning mistake to Justin Morneau, and in this game, mistakes were fatal. Normally throwing 7 innings and allowing 3 runs would be good enough to at least avoid a loss.  The non-Sabathia starts have been promising; now the team just has to start hitting.

via www.fangraphs.com

The best thing about this game is that it ended.

What can you say about CC Sabathia's outing, other than heading to the local digital thesaurus and listing all the synonyms of horrible, ghastly, and other assorted epithets? 13 baserunners, nine runs, all of them earned, just one strikeout, and thousands of disturbed scalps across Northeast Ohio. The same guy who won the Cy Young Award last season has given up 27 runs in 18 innings pitched. The same pitcher who was getting at least $150M at the end of the season is currently the worst pitcher in baseball.**

And of course getting shut down by a 26-year-old pitcher making his second major-league start needs mentioned. On normal days this would be the recap's top rant, but hey, it was up against stiff competition. Yesterday one could at least mention the missed opportunities for the offense, today we don't even have that to lament. David Dellucci hit his first home run of the season, and he's actually been one of the better hitters in the lineup. Asdrubal Cabrera has been an offensive non-entity, Jason Michaels has 3 hits on the year, and Casey Blake has a .450 OPS.

*Both were guests during the STO broadcast; needless to say, they were much more interesting than anything happening on the field.

**No, i didn't check to see if anyone's been worse than Sabathia; if you all know it's true, what's the point in actually proving it?

The series:  Visited the Angels (loss, win, loss) and hosted the Athletics (loss, loss, win).

The big story:  The 2008 rotation became Bizarro 2007 Rotation.  Westbrook and Lee were the team's biggest problems in early 2007, combining for a 6.99 ERA through June 2, with just four quality starts in just 13 tries, having missed nine starts due to injury.  Their paths diverged after that, with Westbrook returning from the DL to be one of the league's better pitchers in the final three months, while Lee's downward spiral culminated in three straight seven-run trainwrecks and a demotion to Buffalo.  This season, the two have combined for a 1.31 ERA and have the same four quality starts in their four tries.  This week, Westbrook was either one ground ball or 480 feet away from a shutout, depending on how you look at it, while Lee baffled the Athletics for eight innings of two-hit ball.  Lee has allowed just one walk and one extra-base hit in his two starts.

On the flip side, Carmona, so dominant in 2007, started 2008 with fine results but worrisome walk totals, and they finally caught up with him this week in an eight-walk trainwreck in which he was lucky to give up only 3 runs in 3.1 innings.  Byrd, surprisingly good to start 2007, has been surprisingly terrible to start 2008.  Sabathia, the Cy Young incumbent, produced his third trainwreck in three tries, in fact the worst of the three, and has been the worst starter in all of baseball this season.  The last time an Indians starter made three straight starts with an 11-something ERA, he was demoted to the minors the next day, despite his multi-year deal and multi-million-dollar salary.  That man, of course, was Cliff Lee.

In other news:  All in all, it feels like we're closer to 4-8 than 6-6, whether or not that's actually the case.  JoBo served up the first totally incomprehensible and indigestible loss of the year.  Iron Rafi seemed to right himself with two perfect innings following a very shaky start, while Steel Rafi got roughed up pretty good.  Carmona signed a deal almost too good to be believed, with the Indians guaranteeing just $14.5 million for 2009-2011 while securing Carmona's services at bargain prices clear through 2014.  Victor slowly returned to the lineup with little sign of ill effects.  The Tigers deepened their early-season hole with a 2-4 performance, getting outscored 39-18 and suffering the losing side of three shutouts along with a minor rash of minor injuries.  Gutierrez had the sniffles ("I am Jay's total lack of surprise"), leading to the natural conclusion that Wedge should be fired, while Dellucci defiantly emerged as our second-best hitter behind Garko.

Post of the week:  Now taking nominations.

Who fed it:  Peralta slugged a cool 947 with three home runs, now on pace for 40.    Dellucci smacked three doubles in his four starts, scored as a pinch-runner, and pulled a bases-loaded walk as a pinch-hitter, ending the week with an astonishingly useful .400/.526/.600 line.  Lee and Westbrook rocked.  Masa, J.J., Craigers and Stomp gave up 3 runs total in 13.2 innings of mostly long relief, with 10 K, 5 BB and 8 hits.  Jamey Carroll was transcendently solid, pairing deft defense with a .545 OBP.  Shoppach hit .375 with a clutch home run.  Absolute Best:  Peralta.  Relative Best:  Dellucci. 

Who ate it:  Sabathia and Byrd unequivocally crapped the bed in their only starts.  AbaCab went 4-for-19, but it's 4-for-24 if we include last Sunday's game, with just one walk and no extra bases.  Michaels was an empty 2-for-14, no walks or extra bases – which sadly raised his OPS by 50 points, all the way to 315 – and in fact his OBP (.133) was even lower than his average (.143).  Sizemore slugged just .275 over the past ten games, with no extra base hits despite a fine average (the same .275 of course) and decent OBP (.362).  Finally, since his clutch double on Opening Day, Blake's line is .129/.206/.161, and he really might be playing his way out of a job.  Absolute Worst:  Michaels.  Relative Worst:  Sabathia.

The other guys:  Joe Saunders had a terrific outing against us to start the week; K-Rod did not.  Vlad and Torii combined to go 8-for-23, and each smacked two home runs in three games.  Darren Oliver faced ten batters, hit two of them and walked one, but gave up no hits or runs.  Some poor bastard named Fernando Hernandez gave up six runs to us in two outings, recording only a HBP and a run-scoring walk in the first game.  The second time out, he very nearly got through two whole scoreless innings, but then he changed his mind and quickly gave up four runs.  Bobby Crosby went 5-for-11 with a home run and two walks.

False alarms:

• Royals and White Sox, still in first place.
• Sabathia being the worst pitcher in the league.
  
• Cliff Lee as Cy Young candidate.
• Marte getting a start.
  

Open questions:

• Could we stop screwing around and have one really good week please?
  
• Since any blogger writing in his/her parents' basement in his/her underwear can speculate on whether C.C.'s contract situation is distracting him, what exactly do we need newspaper columnists for?
• How good can Cliff Lee really be, and for how long?
  
• Can Dellucci be the nice role player he was meant to be for us?
• Still too soon for a Michaels death-watch?
• Too soon to mention a Caesy Blake death-watch, even in hushed tones?
  
• Martevich?  Martevich Martevich Martevich Martevich?
  
• Still too soon for a Tigers 2008 season death watch?
• How healthy will Victor be this season?
• Could Peralta be charging into a breakout season, just one month from his 26th birthday?
  
• Can Cliff Lee really bounce back to be a pretty good pitcher?
• Does anybody have any clue who will be our 2009 Opening Day starter?
• For more than half our relievers, do we really have the slightest idea if they're really good or really bad?
  

via www.fangraphs.com

Once again, it was Cliff to the rescue, helping the Indians prevent an Athletics sweep. After watching three straight Indian starters struggle to throw strikes, it was rather refreshing to see Lee, even in tough conditions, forcing Oakland batters to hit their way on. The Athletics don't have a lot of power in their lineup, so their traditional patient approach is that much more important to their offensive success. That patient approach worked against Carmona yesterday, who allowed just two hits but walked eight, but not against Lee, who pounded the strike zone.

In some ways the weather was on Lee's side: the wind was whipping straight in, which combined with the cold made it virtually impossible for anyone to hit the ball in the air with any authority. But Cliff didn't really need the wind, as he was missing bats; he struck out eight, most of them swinging. While his velocity didn't seem appreciably better, opposing hitters reacted as though Cliff's fastball had much more life on it than in the recent past.

But even with Lee's eight strong innings, the game wasn't broken open until the bottom of the eighth, when Grady Sizemore and David Dellucci came through with two-out hits to turn a Joe Borowski save opportunity into a Rafael Betancourt mopup outing.