WINTER HAVEN, Fla. -- They scored more runs than the Red Sox. They pounded more extra-base hits than the Yankees. Their starting pitchers threw more innings, and had a better strikeout-walk ratio, than that vaunted rotation in Detroit.
Their leadoff hitter (
Grady Sizemore) led the league in extra-base hits. Their cleanup hitter (
Travis Hafner) led the league in slugging. They had three different starting pitchers tie for the league lead in shutouts.
And they outscored their opponents by 88 runs -- a bigger margin than what four of the eight playoff teams, including the the World Series champion Cardinals, and two 90-win teams registered.
So …
There is only one question really worth asking about the team that did all this, the
Cleveland Indians:
AP Photo/John Raoux
Grady Sizemore led the American League with 53 doubles last season.
How the heck did they ever have a losing record (78-84) last season?
"I'll tell you what," says their biggest bopper, Hafner. "It's really tough to put your finger on what happened."
But the men who run this team -- ever-astute general manager Mark Shapiro and his creative assistant, Chris Antonetti -- are guys who don't let any mysteries go unstudied or unsolved. And they've done their best to fix what was broken.
So if you're going to pick one American League team with a chance to go from a losing record last year to a long ride through October this year, the Indians have to be that team. It's basic logic.
"We weren't really that bad last year," Shapiro says. "We just had a year where one area of our team [the bullpen] was so disastrously bad, it undermined our core of young talent and other components of our team that competed on a championship level."
Well, it may not all have been the bullpen's fault. But it was, in fact, almost that simple. So here are five reasons the pieces are in place for the Indians to be this year's Detroit Tigers:
1. The law of averagesStart with this: What happened to this team last year can't possibly happen again, if only because it was practically impossible in the first place.
There's an old saying in baseball -- that you're only as good as your record.
But not in the Indians' case.
It's never safe to say how many games a team should have won. But based just on their run differential, which is almost always a reliable barometer, the 2006 Indians should have been a 90-win kind of team -- not a 78-win kind of team.
How hard is it to outscore your opponents by 88 runs and still have a losing record?
Well, no other team in history had ever done it. So we wondered what a "normal" team's record would have been in a season like that. We found 11 other teams in the last decade that outscored the opposition by 85-100 runs. They averaged 93 wins.
Using a variation of Bill James' Pythagorean Theorem of win expectancy, the Indians calculated they should have won 90 games last year in a "normal" season. By Baseball Prospectus' calculations, they should have won 88-89 games. But no matter how many they should have won, it's still clear they had one of the flukiest years ever.
"It was a strange year," Hafner says. "We could lose 4-2 and 5-2, and then win 12-1 with the best of them. … But you know those games where you'd make a couple of errors and leave some guys on base, and then you'd still come back and win and you'd say, 'We had no business winning that game?' We didn't have many of those games. And that was the difference between last year and two years ago."
That's also the difference that shows up in the record, not in the calculations. So even though we're pretty sure the Indians won't be allowed to play this year's schedule on their calculators, it would be off-the-charts unheard of for them to underperform their talent level by that humongous a margin again this year.
"I hope so," Shapiro says. "But we can't rest on that in this job. We've got to keep trying to get better. And I think we have."
I like the way he introduces the story by stating all of the pluses of this said baseball team. Even though you have to read on in the story, to find out what team he is talking about, the team is really irrelevant. All you have to know about the subject of the article is that the team Stark is speaking of has promise. The baseball team that Stark is talking about is the Cleveland Indians. I think he does a great job of making this a human interest story, in the eyes of basbeball viewers.
