This week's edition is more of the 10-day variety owing to a busy weekend schedule. Still many excellent performances coming out of the Indians' system.

Columbus Clippers: Travis Buck

Buck's return to Cleveland (n.b. contractually obliged to say "pending injury") seems inevitable. Unlike Austin Kearns, Buck is potentially a long-term asset for the Tribe and his performance to date leaves no room for criticism. While everyone in Columbus has been hitting, no one has hit the ball better than Buck since his relegation to Columbus (.340/.450/.574). With more walks than strikeouts, decent power, and defensive abilities that have seen him occupy CF, RF and 1B, what's not to like? Over the past ten games he has hit .303/.429/.485.

Akron Aeros: Chen Lee

In what seems like the never-ending parade of fantasy stat lines for Indians' minor league relievers, Chen Lee is next in line. This Taiwanese, low-arm slot reliever is in his third season in the organization and putting up his best line yet. On the season he sits at 1-1 with a 2.84 ERA, and a 27:5 K:BB ratio in 19 innings. Over his past four appearances, going back to April 29th, Lee has gone 9.1 innings while allowing 0 hits, 1 walk, and 18 strikeouts. Again...that's zero hits and 19 strikeouts on the last 29 batters he has faced.

Kinston Indians: Tyler Holt

Along with high strikeout relievers, the Indians' system is suddenly flush with light-hitting, high OBP centerfield prospects. Tyler Holt, drafted last season in the 10th round, has been an on-base machine of late in Kinston. Over the past 10 games he has put up a .375/.524/.406 line. It is tempting to think the last two numbers are reversed, but no...those games include ten walks (against only four Ks) and just one extra-base hit. On the season he is up to .289/.405/.371, with nine stolen bases and four caught stealing. For now, Holt is taking his place in line behind Brantley (Cleveland), Carrera (Columbus) and Henry (Akron).

Lake County Captains: Anthony Gallas

A local Cleveland product, Anthony Gallas appears to feel right at home in Lake County. Already 23 years old and probably no more than an organizational guy, Gallas is playing better than that label. Gallas leads the organization in doubles with 14 already this season, and is only behind Sizemore and LC teammate Carlos Moncrief in total extra-base hits (17). In the past ten days Gallas has hit a modest .415/.455/.634, to raise his total season line to .349/.408/.560.

Everything seems right in the baseball realm of Cleveland these days...

Columbus Clippers: Luis Valbuena

The return of Jason Donald and Josh Rodriguez has created a small battalion of infielders in Columbus. It seems as if someone is going to need to go soon. After a hot week (9-24, 3 HRs), none of them are hitting better than Valbuena at this point (.300/.355/.543). Valbuena, who is 25, is younger than Donald and Rodriguez, but older than Phelps/Chisenhall/Kipnis, and seems the most uncertainly positioned within the organization. Valbuena's chance at occupying a role in Cleveland seems to exist only in the narrowest of cracks between the current Cleveland roster and the more organizationally valuable guys right behind him.

Akron Aeros: Chun-Hsiu Chen

2010 breakout Chun-Hsiu Chen has not made much noise in 2011. And yet, if you look at his line, .288/.316/.493, it isn't so bad for a 22-year old AA catcher. Most of this has come in the past week, as Chen has caught fire, 8-21 with 4 HRs, raising his line to a respectable level. Chen has not yet found the strong plate discipline he displayed the past two seasons, just 3 walks against 19 Ks, but his line is certainly encouraging. The catching depth in the organization right now, particularly from an offensive standpoint, is impressive.

Kinston Indians: Giovanni Soto

A year ago Kevin Goldstein said this about Soto:

Fantastic command and good secondary pitches; if velocity projects like some scouts think it will, he could turn into something.

This week he said this:

19-year-old precision lefty with sink, but sits in the mid-to-upper 80s; if he can fill out and gain some velo, the Indians might be on to something here.

Reports out of Kinston this year are that Soto has indeed increased his velocity. Soto put up his first scoreless outing of the season on Wednesday, going six strong innings (3 hits, 1 walk, 6 Ks). Soto's been a bit up and down in his four starts thus far, but his overall line 15 hits, 7 walks, 20 Ks in 20.2 IP is worth watching.

Lake County Captains: Jesus Aguilar

I almost gave this slot to Aguilar last week after a 3-HR game. He followed that performance up with two more HRs this week, giving him 6 already on the season. Last year's Lake County HR leader hit a whopping 13, meaning as of May 1st Aguilar is well on his way to topping that number. Aguilar's overall line, .253/.341/.532, shows a nice combination of power and patience, despite having some contact problems (20 Ks) and a sub-par BABIP (.264). Aguilar is a 20-year behemoth Venezuelan (6'3", 240), whose defense is never going to be anything, so he needs a great bat to make his way up the organization.

This has been a pretty dramatic week for the Cleveland Indians and a busy week for Let's Go Tribe.  Over the past 7 days there have been nearly 15,000 comments (and counting) on the front page material alone.  As a result, a number of great things have gotten a bit buried.  Here are some handy links if you would like to go back and check out a few of the pieces you may have missed:

• Ryan's recaps of the Rafael Betancourt trade, Ryan Garko trade, and Cliff Lee/Ben Francisco trade

• Andrew's announcement of the Victor Martinez trade, and his thoughts on Victor

• Jay's reaction to the significance of trading Cliff Lee, and his subsequent piece on the end of the Victor era

• And from me, an overview of our minor league pitchers and hitters, including the new additions

It goes without saying that in each of these pieces and others there is a lot of great content from the LGT community as a whole.  If you are new, check it out, join in, and welcome to LGT.  For those who have been around longer, I think you'll agree that a week like this is a little easier amongst friends.

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@ Texas:  Lost 9-1, Lost 8-5, Lost 12-8
Toronto:  Lost 13-7, Lost 5-4, Won 8-4
@ Kansas CIty:  Lost 4-2, Lost 9-3, Won 5-4
@ New York:  Won 10-2, Lost 6-5, Won 22-4, Lost 7-3

"The Breakdown" is a summary of the club's performance and major developments over a two-week period, and it will appear on Monday or Tuesday, every other week.  At any given moment, we tend to be viewing the season mostly in two timeframes — the first being the last 48 hours, today's game and maybe yesterday's, and the whole season cumulatively from the beginning.  The most accessible stats we look at reinforce this point of view — all the main stat pages are showing season-to-date, and we check out the box score to see what happened yesterday.  In doing so, we miss a lot of the ebb and flow of the season for the team, and especially for individual players.  We patch together vague narratives later on, much of it from inaccurate memories — "Peralta was blocked by Cora," "Francisco was amazing last year" — only occasionally making note of anything in a context larger than a day or two, and missing many in-season developments entirely.  It's my hope that the two-week context will produce less emphasis on fluke performances and give more of a sense of in-season trends developing for each player.

THE BIG STORY:  The club pitched very badly and lost a bunch of games as a result.  The club was outscored 42-21 in the first four games and lost a squeaker in the fifth.  Over the next eight games, the club went 4-4 and outscored opponents 58-40, but of course that 18-run margin is only due to one game.  With several blowouts in both directions, what record should this team have?  In attempt to figure that out, I lined up all 13 games in order of our runs scored, and then lined them up again according to our runs allowed.  Here's what those two lined look like when placed one atop the other, like a scoreboard:

Note that while the average score of these games was 6.7 to 6.4, the median score was 6–5 (favoring the opposition in both cases). This is actually fine for the offense, who are on their way to being one of the league's best offenses either way.  It isn't so fine for the pitching.  If you look at it this way, the Indians arguably deserve only a 1–10–2 record, or 2–11 if we split the ties.  The Pythagorean record is 6–7, based on the 83–87 run differential.  Or we could just toss out the highest and lowest totals from each line — the extreme outliers — which would give us a run differential of 60–72.  Bottom line, I think this is one case where the actual record of 4–9 more or less reflects the team's quality of play.

First, the starters.

Games 1-3:  22 ER in 11 IP — 18.00 ERA, 3.7 innings per start
Games 4-9:  22 ER in 31.2 IP — 6.25 ERA, 5.3 innings per start
Games 10-13:  9 ER in 23 IP — 3.52 ERA, 5.8 innings per start

What we're seeing here is mainly that Lee, Carmona and Pavano have all shown some degree of progression from their trio of tranwrecks in Arlington, to merely poor showings against Toronto and K.C., to a very fine showing in New York.  Note that the starters allowed as many runs in the first three games as in the next six, in about one-third the number of innings.  Even when the club was 0–5, track records suggested that the rotation was going to iron itself out — even Pavano, who has always been a reasonably effective starter when healthy.  I don't know what the deal was in that first start, but if he wasn't injured — and it appears he wasn't — then it appears that that was, you know, just one of those flukey, terrible days.  Pavano might not make many starts, but for those who have read the back of his baseball card and not just the back page of the Post, he really has little in common with Jason Johnson.  Pavano is much more a part of our injury risk than our performance risk, and Carmona may well emerge as the more intractable problem in the rotation. While we have the rotation depth to absorb a few injuries and burnouts here and there, asking our Parade of Filler to cover the #2 spot in the rotation as well seems like too much of a stretch.

Still, the starters have generally and unsurprisingly begun to make their journey back to reasonable run prevention and lasting a reasonable number of innings, and outside of Arlington, the rotation has really not been terrible — but the bullpen has.  Did a bunch of extra innings really stress our best middle relievers into being terrible, or is this just another, horrifying example of the unpredictability of relievers?  One would think that in a series of blowouts, the extra work burden would fall upon the fifth, sixth and seventh guys in the bullpen, yet Kobayashi, Jackson and Smith are not the ones who have struggled — not by a longshot.  Perez, Betancourt and Lewis have pitched a grand total of 21 innings.  If we expected them to go 210 IP on the season — 70 IP each — then by now, they should have thrown about 17 IP.  Did those extra 4 IP really push them over the brink from being good to being terrible?

I'm not buying it, and I'm sorry to say, the truth is probably worse.  These guys are simply struggling, as all but the most elite relievers sometimes do, and they may or may not be able to straighten themselves out.  I'm not saying that the rotation's disastrous performance against the Rangers didn't start the season on an off-kilter note, but whatever is wrong with our nominal "setup men" may not be fixed by a stabilized rotation.  The Indians rotation and lineup generally have performed like a 90-win team over nearly all of the last four seasons of play, with the bullpen's high-leverage performances representing bulk of the difference between 78 and 97 wins more often than not.  It's only a handful of innings, and only half our bullpen looks broken for the moment, but it's a troubling way to start regardless.

We have given 3.5 games of ground in a season where our projectable talent gave us a margin of five or ten wins over our rivals.  We have, in essence, turned a solidly favorable season into a projected dogfight in the space of just two weeks.

IN OTHER NEWS: Travis Hafner shocked and delighted Indians fans with a full-on 2006-esque assault on opposing pitchers, at one point smacking three doubles and three home runs over just five games.  While this proves nothing (and settles no argument about his contract), his early outburst is very unlikely (less than 10% probability) if Hafner's true skill level is merely at his 2007 level, and profoundly unlikely if he's really no better now than he was a year ago.  We probably can never stop worrying about his shoulder problems, which obviously can reduce him to a useless player if he's ever re-injured.  But at least there is now significant evidence that apart from health issues, he's still something of a Scary Monster — and considering how little evidence of that we'd seen over the past 32 months, that's definitely big news.

Scott Lewis looked good for a few innings but went down with an arm injury, and he evidently was not disclosing arm pain to the club after winning a rotation spot in spring training.  Aaron Laffey returned to claim his rightul spot in the rotation and looked pretty good in his first start.

Finally, the Indians had the pleasure of spoiling the grand opening of New Jackass Stadium, handing the Yankees an embarrasssing 10–2 drubbing in their home debut, which was also the home debut for C.C. Sabathia, who is something of a New Jackass Stadium himself.  The Indians hammered the Yankees 22–4 just two days later, including a record-setting 14-run second inning.  Yankees fans seethed as Sizemore and Cabrera smacked the first two grand slams in their new ballpark, while Carl Pavano had the temerity to show up his old club with a quality start, and Justin Chamberlain provided more evidence that the Indians simply have his number.  The Indians outscored the Yankees by 21 runs, adding to concerns that the stadium's best seats are unsaleable, while some kind of jet-stream effect seemed to turn soft flyballs to right-center into home runs with alarming regularity.  It was, all in all, not the debut the Yankees were looking for, and despite emerging with merely a split in the four-game series, it certainly felt like a series win.

WHO FED IT:  Victor Martinez exploded out of the box, thriving in his new split-role at 1B and C.  Not only was his overall .358/.435/.642 line uniformly stellar, he hardly has had a single bad day so far, producing an OPS of 983 or better in each of the four series played. Asdrubal, on the other hand, started off with a pair of O-fers but has an insane 1130 OPS over the last ten games.  (He's still young and could still have some setbacks, but if you told me he was going to make the next five All-Star Games, I wouldn't call you crazy.)  Sizemore (959) and Choo (953) both picked up right where they left off in 2008 (aside from a couple of troubling defensive miscues by Choo), and Shoppach (870) and even Garko (914) are making the best of a time-sharing arrangement.  Hafner led the club with a .667 slugging average.

Joe Smith more or less wowed us with sidearming goodness, striking out four and allowing just one run over his first 17 batters.  He also induced six groundballs and stranded four out of five inherited runners.  Masa Kobayashi, a ticking DFA bomb by nearly all accounts, came up big in 6.2 IP and now leads the club with both his 1.35 ERA and his 1.05 WHIP, as 27 opposing batters managed just two singles and a double.  Chulk and Laffey also made nice debuts.  Kerry Wood lived up to his billing by striking out 7 of the 13 batters he faced.  He allowed three of the first five batters he faced to reach base in his first game as an Indian, but he hasn't allowed a baserunner since.  Absolute best:  Victor.  Relative best:  Hafner.  Lots of folks subscribe to the under-600-over-900 theory on Hafner, and among those, lots of those would have predicted under-600 if forced to make a choice.  Relative to reasonable expectations, Hafner's performance over his first 10 games is a shocker.

WHO ATE IT:  The entire rotation, led by Carmona and Pavano.  Perez was twice as awful as completely terrible -- by which I mean, Jensen Lewis was completely terrible with a 8.10 ERA, and Perez was twice as awful at 16.71.  Ben Francisco has been one of the game's worst position players this side of Cody Ransom, combining a .368 slugging average, a 4.7% walk rate, and too often looked like he was playing left field for the first time in his life.  Absolute worst:  Carmona, but Perez is close.  Relative worst:  Perez.

The series:  Visited Texas (win, loss, win, loss) and Detroit (win, loss, loss, win), hosted Minnesota (win, loss, win) and San Diego (win, loss, win).

But first, an editorial note:  This piece and the two that will follow pick up the threads of the Week In Review series that ran here for the first nine weeks of the season.  Since the last installment on June 2, the season has changed dramatically.  I never lost interest in keeping up with Week In Review, but I had to put it on hold because of other significant demands on my time.  I love this format, but it is frankly a bit time-consuming to put these together  Going back to do piecemeal recaps at this point may seem like an odd idea, but it's something I've decided to do for all the same reasons I started doing the Week In Review — to give the season a little more clarity and structure, to put it into chapters.

At any given moment, we tend to be viewing the season mostly in two timeframes — the first being the last 48 hours, today's game and maybe yesterday's, and the whole season cumulatively from the beginning.  The most accessible stats we look at reinforce this point of view — all the main stat pages are showing season-to-date, and we check out the box score to see what happened.  In doing so, we miss a lot of the ebb and flow of the season for the team, and especially for individual players.  We patch together vague narratives later on, much of it from inaccurate memories — "Peralta was blocked by Cora," "Francisco was amazing last year" — only occasionally making note of anything in a context larger than a day or two, and missing many in-season developments entirely.

I starting writing these Reviews to see better the season that was developing for each individual player, and I'm as interested as ever in doing that.   The first nine installments focused not so much on an exact week as on two series, or six to eight days.  This installment and the next will each focus on a two-week, four-series period.  The one after that will cover three series, ending at the All-Star break, today.  I believe I will go with the three-series format for the second half of the season; in general, the format has seemed still a little too micro to really see trends well.  We'll see how it develops — and I apologize in advance if the dissection is depressing.

The big story:  The Indians' injury problems went from bad to worse, led by the startling news on June 2 that Jake Westbrook would be returning to the DL just days after making a solid return to the rotation.   By June 7, the news got much worse — Westbrook would undergo Tommy John surgery, missing not only the rest of the 2008 season but as much as half of the 2009 season as well.  Westbrook had signed a three-year contract extension in March 2007, at $33 million the largest contract ever awarded by the Indians at the time.  He ran into injury problems almost immediately but returned last July with a huge flourish, finishing with the fifth-most innings pitched and seventh-lowest ERA in the league in the second half.  Coming into 2008, we were regaled with reports of a new pitch and improved velocity, and scouts wondered aloud if the sinkerballer might take his game to a higher level at age 30.  Westbrook did pitch well in April, but his injury dashed completely all those raised expectations, and the Indians have now lost his services for solidly half of that new contract's three years.

In other news:  Asdrubal Cabrera mercifully and belatedly was demoted to Triple-A, where he probably should have started the season, and where he almost certainly would have started the season had he not gone an improbable tear after being promoted into the heat of the 2007 pennant race.  His demotion created an opportunity for Josh Barfield — our erstwhile and bored/untalented second baseman, who certainly had not been forcing the club's hand with his Triple-A performance (.255/.297/.382, 4.7% walk rate).  Barfield responded by going 0-for-6 — he put the ball in play all six times, so you could argue he was just unlucky — before breaking his finger, giving him a very well-paid trip to the big-league DL.

That same day, Victor Martinez was also put on the DL — also mercifully and also belatedly, in that he'd been hitting terribly for nearly six weeks and (let's all say it together) hadn't hit a home run all season.  Three role players emerged and not only filled the shoes of the injured players, but far exceeded the production we'd been getting from those players before they went on the DL.  Shoppach, Carroll and the newly healthy Shin-Soo Choo — essentially taking over playing time from Martinez, Cabrera/Barfield and Hafner — each posted an OPS of 1000 or better over these 14 games.  Reliever Rick Bauer, catcher Yamid Haad and infielder Jorge Velandia, previously known to Indians fans as guys they'd never heard of, joined the big-league roster to play dominoes with Marte.

We drafted some guys with really interesting names — Chisenhall and Cord,  "Jeremie Tice" and "David Roberts" — and though our first three picks were age 19, 17 and 20 on draft day, some people still screamed that the Indians were being "too safe" or "wrong" or "not adhering to Baseball America rankings" — or something or other.  Experts, experts everywhere, whatever are we to make of all of this expertise?

Back in the majors, in general, the pitching slumped and was uncharacteristically carried by the offense in these series.  So while the pitchers posted a 5.68 ERA, including a few critical late-inning blowups by the bullpen, the hitters amazingly posted the feel-good, Garko-in-a-good-year line of .294/.364/.468.  That 1,088-run pace allowed the team to tread water over a period in which the rest of the AL Central was essentially doing the same — Minnesota and KC dropped a few games but held their places in the standings, while the other three clubs each won eight.  The AL Central was still very winnable, and if you squinted enough, you could still see a bruised-but-not-beaten Indians club actually winning it.

(Who fed it and Who ate it are after the jump.)

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The series:  Hosted the White Sox (loss, win, loss) and visited the Royals (win, loss, loss).  Blah.  Went 2-4.  Blah.  With a 4.25 ERA.  Blah.  Scored four runs per game.  Blah.  Hit .243/.318/.435.  Blah.  Not the worst you've ever seen, just.  Blah.  Certainly not at all good either, though.  Blah.

The big story:  As outright awfulness receded into mere malaise, word finally started to leak out that the respective collapses of two of the Indians' best hitters, Victor Martinez and Travis Hafner, probably owe more to injuries than to anything else.  In retrospect, the profundity of Hafner's problems this season never really made all that much sense as a simple collapse of skills, and there is no real precedent for a hitter's version of Steve Blass Disease.  Still, perhaps because of our habitual fatalism, Indians fans never much figured Hafner was injured, so much so that when he was finally placed on the DL this past Friday, many fans speculated that the injury was phony, merely an excuse to make room on the roster for another player while Hafner was sent away to clear his head for a while.

The Indians told local media that Hafner would be available to play first base during Interleague play, and then he wasn't.  The Indians told local media nothing about Joe Borowski's triceps strain, counting on them to not even notice a substantial drop in velocity, let alone write about it.  And until this weekend, the Indians said nothing about Hafner's shoulder being a significant problem, and they never mentioned that it was probably Victor's hamstring that had hamstrung his power, again counting on them not to notice or report it.  Local media was shocked — shocked! — that the team had not been more forthcoming about those injuries, apparently forgetting that the team said nothing in 2006 about Victor playing half the season with a broken toe, or that they already knew that Jhonny Peralta had a vision problem.

Injuries happen, and players try to play through them, and sometimes teams know, and sometimes teams agree to let the player try.  Knowledge about injuries represents a competitive advantage in many sports, and since MLB is not yet dominated by gambling as some pro sports are, reporting requirements are meager.  Socker sniffed, "A credibility gap is developing between the Indians and the local media ... I find it difficult to believe that people in authority at Progressive Field think it serves their purpose to create an aura of distrust between the team and the media."  (Does he really not see this as a self-condemnation, as he implies that he has nothing to report if the team doesn't spoon-feed it to him?)

These developments bring little solace to Indians fans, as players sometimes don't heal in the course of one season, and sometimes they don't heal at all.  All it does is lend a small light of understanding on the widespread offensive collapse.  We've got young hitters struggling in their first full season (Gutierrez, Cabrera), streaky mediocrity from a few veterans (Blake, Dellucci), two of our best hitters playing hurt (Martinez, Hafner), and unsteady results from two more (Peralta, Sizemore) — oh, now I get it.  That leaves us with only one everday player totally sucking without even a halfway-decent explanation (Garko), and the slow-head-shaking resignation that all this crap apparently really can happen to one lineup in one season.

In other news:  Jake Westbrook returned to the rotation with a reasonably solid start, retiring the first 12 batters of the game before succumbing to a series of line-drive hits in the 5th.  Craig Breslow was claimed off waivers by the Twins, and Jorge Julio was designated for assignment to make room for Westbrook.  Hafner's trip to the DL was timed to make room on the roster for Shin-Soo Choo who returned from the DL to play his first big-league game in over a year.  Hafner's absence prompted Wedge to start utilizing his players in more of a rotation, sharing time fairly evenly among Gutierrez, Blake, Aubrey, Choo, Francisco and even Marte.  Adam Miller's finger gave us the finger once again, apparently for the entire season.  Oh, and I guess there was this "triple-steal" thing, supposedly.  Whatever.  We scored a run on that play, which seemed like pretty big news, but on the other hand, we didn't drive in that run, and that didn't seem like news at all.  Blah.

Post of the week:  Looking for nominations as always ...

Who fed it:  Just when we least expected it, Frankie Gutierrez had a huge week in limited playing time, hitting for average (.357), getting on base (five hits, two walks and a HBP) and flashing that enticing power/speed combination with a home run, a triple, and more than one spectacular play in the field.  Peralta had another huge week (1093) and after almost three weeks of hot hitting is on pace for more than 30 home runs.   Blake (1012) and Dellucci (953) were both highly productive in four starts each, and both were bouncing back from substantial two-week slumps (523 and 411).  Sizemore (948) had his worst two games of the year in the past week but still banged out three home runs and a triple; he's basically stayed hot for six weeks solid (947 after May 12).  Masa bounced back from some rough outings last week with two scoreless innings.  Absolute Best:  Peralta.  Relative Best:  Gutierrez.

Who fed it breakdown:  Very slim pickings for standout pitching performances this week, but I'll go with Perez; he gave up one earned run, and one unearned, in the second of his three appearances this week, but those runs were fluke crap, not at all his fault.  He faced 14 batters and induced six grounders and five strikeouts, allowing no walks and just one line drive for a single.  Borowski, meanwhile, allowed three line drives and eight fly balls — eight looooooooooooong fly balls — and, miraculously, no runs on no walks and three hits.  Just ask my shorts.

Who ate it:  Francisco cruelly fell back to earth this week (458), slugging just .208 while drawing more walks (three) in his last 19 PA than he had in his first 82 PA this season (two) — in both respects, possibly a sign that pitchers have started to pitch him more carefully.  Aubrey also struggled (322) to maintain his hot start, getting just one single in his last 11 AB en route back to Buffalo.  Garko's pathetic week (2-for-13, double, 2 BB, 498) was remarkably similar to his prior pathetic week (2-for-11, 2 BB, 490), or for that matter to his whole pathetic last six weeks (.186/.259/.299).  Paul Byrd coughed up 9 ER over 11 IP, and while he walked only one of the 50 batters he faced, he ominously struck out only one as well.  Absolute Worst:  Francisco.  Relative Worst:  Aubrey.

Who ate it breakdown:  As has become the norm over the last few month, Victor was mediocre but not notably awful over the past week, hitting .261/.292/.348.  The real depths of his problems show up over multiple weeks, however, as his line over the past month is .222/.273/.272.  In 88 PA, he's got only four extra base hits — all doubles, of course — and only three non-intentional walks.  It's become a serious breakdown.  Although leading the majors in batting average just three weeks ago, Victor's contributions at the plate have seriously collapsed.  Deepening that black hole in the lineup has been Shoppach, who is just 3-for-31 over the past month while inconsistently filling in for Victor, with two walks and no extra-base hits.

The series:  Visited the White Sox (loss, loss, loss) and hosted the Rangers (loss, win, loss).

The big story:  We sucked.  After climbing to the top of the division in the middle of last week, the Indians went 1-8.  The pitching snapped back to reality, while the hitters produced the same 19 runs this week that they had over the previous six games, only more poorly distributed.  In response, Wedge fumed, while Francisco and Aubrey added to the idea of slump by contagion, hitting far better in Cleveland than they ever have in Buffalo, seemingly immune to the rest of the team's two-month struggle.

The Indians are the worst-hitting team in the league this season, and they have also been, by far, the worst-hitting team in the majors in the month of May, more than a full run below the major-league average, and nearly a half-run per game worse than the worst team in the National League — again, that's the league where the pitchers are batting maybe three times a game.  The offense has occasionally broken out for a big game, but that has only obscured how bad the offense really has been — the average is 3.4  runs per game, but the median is a solid 3.0.  Week-long power outages have been the most notable feature of the 2008 season:

• April 3-9, 20 runs in seven games, 2.9 average, 2-5 record
• April 24-29, 16 runs in six games, 2.7 average, 3-3 record
• May 1-8, 16 runs in six games, 2.7 average, 3-3 record
• May 12-25, 41 runs in 14 games, 2.9 average, 5-9 record

We actually have a better than expected record in those games, of course, because our starting pitching has been so outstanding over most of those weeks.  Incredibly, our Pythagorean record is actually 27-23 despite the awful hitting, but a half-dozen ninth-inning blowups have us at 23-27 instead.

The biggest tragedy here is the missed opportunities within the division, which directly impact our ability to make the playoffs and cannot be recouped.  The Indians have been 32 runs better than the Tigers but have only a two-game edge to show for it rather than six or seven — should both teams have any kind of bounce back after this point, those games will make a difference.

Worse yet, the Indians surrendered three straight games to the White Sox, who may well turn out to be the only other team who can over 85 wins in a deeply disappointing division.  Head-to-head records and BIP luck were the entire difference between these two clubs in 2005, when they ended the season with 99 and 93 wins respectively, and so far, history is repeating.

In other news:  Fausto Carmona went to the Disabled List with a hip injury and is expected to miss a full month — yet nobody panicked, as Jake Westbrook was completing a successful run of rehab starts in Akron even as Carmona's season was getting ruptured.  Westbrook was already scheduled to return on the exact day of Carmona's next would-be start, and even if he weren't, the Indians have other fine options waiting in Buffalo.

The Indians shuffled up the bullpen part of the roster pretty good, returning Joe Borowski to his old closer job late in the week and demoting Jensen Lewis, in the hopes that he can regain his old velocity in Buffalo.  The team put rarely used lefty Craig Breslow on waivers while claiming Oneli Perez, a talented but struggling young reliever, from the White Sox and sending him to Buffalo.  Scott Elarton and Ed Mujica were promoted from Buffalo to fill out the staff.

Post of the week:  AngG gets her Rick James on (or is it her Wayne Brady?) as part of a hilarious sequence of rants.  Other nominess: jhon (summing up Wedge disgust nicely),  mjschaefer (replying to zempf),  gte619n (replying to supermarioelia), drerikbrady (tremendous attention to detail), jakesinger777 (expanding on Cisco's Buckner moment).

Who fed it:  C.C. Sabathia and Ben Francisco led a very slim list of candidates for this week, both of them continuing strong runs.  Sabathia gave up three runs, all on solo-shots, over 14 innings, striking out 13 with three walks.  He has a 1.63 ERA (and RA) over his past seven starts, averaging 8 strikeouts and 1.6 walks in 7.2 innings.  Francisco pounded out five doubles and a home run while batting .320, and in playing every inning of the team's last 11 games, he's put up a stunning line of .395/.422/.721 — contributing more than 25% of the total bases and less than 8% of the outs.  Rafael Betancourt bounced back from three horrendous weeks (16.20 ERA) with three scoreless innings, all in the 8th, although he did allow an inherited run.  Absolute Best:  Francisco.  Relative Best:  Francisco.

Who fed it breakdown:  Relief pitchers are hard to evaluate based on box scores, considering the incredibly blunt instruments used to assign earned runs.  Masa Kobayashi gave up an earned run, an unearned run and an inherited run this week but actually pitched pretty well.   In the first game, he relieved Laffey with no outs and a man on first, facing the top of the Chicago lineup.  He got a strikeout and a deep flyout, with a very speedy pinch-runner advancing to second base.   He then allowed a single on the ground through the gaping Blake/Peralta hole, scoring the inherited runner, and finally his only earned run of the week on the only legit line-drive hit.  In the second game, he faced the Rangers' 2-thru-5 hitters, getting a strikeout and two groundouts, allowing just a single on the ground to Josh Hamilton — a damned fine inning.  In the third game, he faced the Rangers' 3-thru-1 hitters, and he got three groundouts including a double-play, plus a strikeout and a flyout.  He allowed only a walk, a single on the ground and one line-drive single.  Had that one line-drive not followed the walk, or had there not been two outs, or had the ball not rolled under the right fielder's legs, we're looking at another fine shutout inning.  So while it may seem like Masa had a bad week, I'm not so sure.

Who ate it:  Where to even begin?  Blake, back to playing every inning, responded by slugging .143 — over the last two weeks, he's had one great game (2-4, 6 TB), four decent games (4-14, 0 TB) and eight awful ones (0-25, 0 TB).  Dellucci continued his atrocious month, using his 14 PA to generate just 3 total bases, against three double-plays, three strikeouts, and at least three awful throws from left field — his May OPS is just 444, and even worse, it's just 482 against lefties alone.  The Platoon Of Despair®, meanwhile, crushed any hopes we might have had for them last week, combining for .156/.282/.188, and yes, that's a 470 OPS, and yes, they are slugging a combined .361 for the season — thanks for asking!  Not to be outdone, catchers Martinez and Shoppach combined for an empty 3-for-23 with a 297 OPS.  Jensen Lewis gave up three runs on three walks, three singles, two doubles and one HBP, en route to Buffalo.  Jorge Julio stepped into two budding trainwrecks (from Byrd and Carmona) and made both of them much worse (more below).  Absolute Worst:  Julio.  Relative Worst:  Considering positional OPS differences, it's just too close to call among Martinez (267), Blake (360), Dellucci (445) and Hafner (459).

Who ate it breakdown:  Unlike Masa, Jorge Julio's bad week was even worse than it appeared — and with an 18.00 ERA, it appeared pretty bad.  In the first game, Julio relieved Byrd with men on first and second and one out.  The run expectancy here is 0.97, but Julio was facing the bottom third of Chicago's lineup and had the platoon edge on two of the three.  He gave up a deep flyball double to the righty Crede, scoring one inherited runner and advancing the other to third base with only one out.  He walked the lefty Swisher intentionally, then gave up a long sac-fly to righty Alexei Ramirez, who just-by-the-way is terrible, scoring that other inherited run, then got the leadoff hitter Cabrera to ground out to end the inning.  He started the next inning with strikeouts to Chicago's 2-3 hitters, then the home run to Jermaine Dye — Julio's first earned run allowed in five weeks — at which point he was pulled.  So against five right-handers in that game, he got a strikeout and a groundout but also three very hard-hit deep flies, each of which drove in one run.

Of course, that game was just a warmup for the major gas-can emptying he would do two nights later.  Relieving a struggling and injured Carmona in the 3rd, with men on first and third and no outs — but again, he's facing the bottom of the lineup, so he really should get out of this with minimal damage.  The sequence:  walk, walk, grand slam, line-drive double, line-drive double — so already, that's six runs, two inherited and four earned, and there's still no outs.  Julio finally gets a groundball, but it goes for an infield single, then a strikeout.  The inning ends with two more deep flies that get caught — but the adventure wasn't over!  Julio starts the next inning by allowing two more scorching line drives, but it's just his good fortune that the second one is hit straight at Peralta, who catches it and then doubles off the first guy — so that's two outs, bases empty, despite not one batter really beaten by Julio.  Next it's a walk, and then a double on a groundball to right, and at that point, he gets pulled with men on second and third, two outs.

So even though his ERA for the week was 18.00, it doesn't begin to describe how bad he really was.  Outside of those earned runs, he allowed all four inherited runners to score, while the two runners he left behind did not score.  And while he did get some legit outs, he also pitched into some very good luck, and he totally failed to keep the ball in the infield, even with the platoon edge against the other team's worst hitters.  He was, all things considered, about as bad as a pitcher can possibly be while getting nine outs — charged with just 6 ER, he pitched badly enough to allow 12.