Quick Tribe notes

Suspensions were handed down after Gary Sheffield's 19th nervous breakdown on Friday night, and they are as follows:

Indians
Carmona 6 games
Martinez 3 games
Cabrera 3 games

Tigers
Sheffield 4 games

This is insane. The whole thing was Sheffield's fault. A fairer allotment would have been Indians 0 games, Sheffield 16 games. He goes and picks the fight, and Fausto is out more games than him? Huh? And Fausto won - can't it at least be like Blades of Steel where the fight winner gets the puck? I know he got more because he's a starting pitcher, but I don't see why any at all. No idea what sort of warped logic MLB uses to decide these things.


What a pathetic on-field celebration the red socks executed after buying another trip to the playoffs. They jumped around and all that, but could anyone really have been excited about it? I mean, they won the World Series last year and everyone knew they were going to get in easily this year. I frankly don't see how either player or fan could muster any interest in this.


So the Tribe win streak ends at 7, but have you considered what it takes to win that many straight? The Indians (79-78) are roughly a .500 club, and played some good and some bad teams in their streak, right around .500, and baseball is a .500 kinda game. If we ignore momentum and confidence (not because they aren't relevant, but because I can't quantify them), and treat each game as a 50/50 proposition (not a bad approximation), the odds of even a modest 7-game streak are 27, or 1 in 128. That's impressive! The Tribe's 10-game winning streak: 1 in 1040! Han Solo says "never tell me the odds," but he'd have to be impressed by that, especially the kind of cobbled-together crew the Indians did it with.

And just for fun, the Oakland A's 20-game win streak in 2002 had a probability of just over one in a million, keeping those same assumptions. Now that's a win streak.