Thank You, Day Off

As a person with little motivation to write on a regular basis, I truly relish knowing that the Tribe have an off day, meaning I can postpone the series review post. Yesterday was no exception, obviously. Even though the Tribe played a get-the-hell-out-of-here-and-back-to-the-east-coast-before-tomorrow day game, after seeing the score I thought to myself, “this can wait for tomorrow” and wait it did.

Monday’s series opener saw the Indians coming in hot off a series win (2-1) against Seattle, a team even worse than the Tribe. The Angels came in after sweeping the Red Sox, what some people would consider a good team. That, and given the pitching matchups, you might have wanted to shut your eyes and maybe not open them for a week hoping good things would happen between now and then. Well, this night good things did happen. After this game was done Paul Byrd had raised his record to 4-10 and Ervin Santana had lowered his to 11-4. Yes this matchup was horrible on paper for the Tribe but worked out well. I think Santana is now 0-4 lifetime against the Indians, but some people don’t like lifetime against a certain team stats. Anyway with the effective pitching of Byrd, Perez and Kobayashi the Tribe stretched their winning streak to three road games (amazing, really). The Tribe offense supplied 5 runs via home runs by Blake, Peralta, and Marte, and Dellucci had an RBI single. How is Dellucci doing anything on this team? With his 79 OPS+ on a team rebuilding what is his contribution? I say we drop Dellucci and trade a bag of balls to the Giants for Omar. As I hear they won’t release him to save face. Why not do it just so Omar ends his career with a really tall Wahoo on his head? OK back to the regularly scheduled post.

Tuesday’s game saw a return to normal Indians baseball circa 2008. Ginter pitched well with 6 innings and 3 runs allowed, which isn’t bad considering the Angels' offense. Of course, the Indians offense, which had done a fine job in the three preceding games, regressed back to the Tribe offense we all know and hate. 2 runs in the first two innings and that’s all she wrote, 3-2 Angels win.

Now upon seeing Wednesday’s results I was shocked! Shocked, I say! The final was 14 -11 Angels. How in the hell does a team score eleven - eleven! - runs without winning? Well the answer is simple, really: give up a week’s worth of runs. I’d rather not go over the offense since it is a lot of runs that didn’t matter but I want to touch on the starter Aaron “I was once good” Laffey. Mr. Laffey gave up 8 earned runs in 4 innings of work. At least he made it to 4 innings this time. His last start was only 3.2. Of course, Mastny is brought in on 10 days rest to promptly earn himself 4 runs in 1.1 and just to complete the cycle of frustration Jensen “slow pitch” Lewis earned 2 in 1.2.

This series brought a few things to the surface. What do you do with Ginter and Laffey? Do you let Laffey work his problems out in the majors? Do you release Ginter when Carmona returns? The other major question is: what the hell do you do with this bullpen? Perez has done a nice job of late but who here isn’t scared of almost everyone else in the bullpen right now? Wedge has gone on record saying he thinks the organization is going to have to go outside the farm system to help this situation out next year. Here’s my two cents. Send Laffey down. Ginter isn’t the answer of the future but I hate to think Laffey may become frustrated at the major league level trying to work this out. As far as the bullpen goes I agree that a closer is not visible anywhere in the Tribe’s system, but a FA answer is too big for a hack like me to answer, especially at this time.

So it’s time to look forward and welcome the Minnesota Twins to Progressive Field. The Twins come in 55-46 and 2.5 games back of the division-leading White Sox.

Game 1: Livan Hernandez, RHP (10-6, 5.29) vs. Cliff Lee, LHP (13-2, 2.29)
Game 2: Scott Baker, RHP (6-3, 3.26) vs. Fausto Carmona, RHP (4-2, 3.10)
Game 3: Nick Blackburn, RHP (7-6, 3.83) vs. Jeremy Sowers, LHP (1-5, 7.33)

Without really looking into it (that's what real writers do, not me) I have to imagine Livan had a couple bad games to be sporting an era that high but still be carrying around 10 wins. Saturday marks the return of Fausto who was injured in that one game I attended. While Sunday's matchup will hopefully result in Jeremy's second win to keep his streak alive. I'm going out on a limb here and say the Tribe take two, at least.

Go Tribe!

(AP Photo/Chris Carlson)