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July 3, 2010LeBron/Cavs Meeting Open Thread
July 3, 2010Cleveland’s five-game winning streak came to a halt Friday night at Progressive Field as the Oakland A’s pitching staff dominated in a 3-0 shutout victory. It was an all-around rough night for the Indians as the team lost for the first time since Saturday of last week, including a four-game series sweep against the Toronto Blue Jays.
Mitch Talbot (8-7) pitched well enough to win most ball games as he allowed three runs (two earned) in 5.1 innings pitched. It certainly was not one of his more efficient starts but no matter what, there was nothing going on for the Cleveland offense at all.
The team managed just four singles, a double and four walks against Oakland’s Gio Gonzalez (7-5) and a pair of relievers. Nothing else to exciting to report from the contest as second baseman Jayson Nix was the only Tribe batter to finish with a multi-hit outing. Click below the jump for more news and notes about in the Cleveland Indians in bullet point form:
- Talbot has a 3.86 ERA on the season, but has been relatively inconsistent lately. I attended his start on June 16th against the New York Mets when he permitted 13 hits and eight runs in 5.2 innings, although he followed that up with back-to-back quality starts. He has now allowed at least four runs in six of his 16 outings, and at least six hits 11 different times. That’s not surprising when you consider opponents are batting .316 against him with runners on base, but in the end you can’t complain too much about his rookie season in the big leagues.
- Catcher Carlos Santana had one of his worst outings in Cleveland Friday, finishing 0-for-4 at the plate with a pair of strikeouts. The Dominican phenomenon won’t be likely to struggle for much longer however, as I analyzed in an article nearly two months ago about his 10-game stretches in the Indians organization. He is ridiculously consistent every single week and it should be interesting to see how well he responds to his first bit of adversity since his promotion from Columbus.
- Random Stat #1: Although they didn’t have any of these opportunities Friday , now is a good time to emphasize one of the strangest Cleveland stats this year. The Indians are batting .338 (23-for-68) with the bases loaded along with 57 RBI, but have a relatively mediocre .256 batting average with runners on base and .257 with runners in scoring position. Cancelling out the opportunities with the bases loaded, that means the other two stats are at .250 and .248, respectively, on the season.
- Cleveland entered play Friday night having used 70 different lineups in 78 games played this season. That’s an absolutely unbelievable idea to fathom, even with all of the injuries that the team has suffered to their offensive stars.
- I was talking recently about Shin-Soo Choo with Indians iTrac vision trainer Jason Stein (cleverly referred to as the “Master of Self Promotion” by MLB.com beat writer Anthony Castrovince.) Stein told me that Choo is clearly the best player on the team in just about everything possible; he hits laser beams all over the field in batting practice, he will easily steal 20 bases again this season, he is an above average outfielder and if given the opportunity, could potentially fire a 90+ mph fastball as a pitcher. He’s truly the real deal and he is only turning 28 years old in 11 days, meaning he should absolutely positively be a huge part of Cleveland’s future core.
- Random Stat #2: The Indians finished the month of June with a 12-16 record and ranked third in the American League with 30 home runs. Only Boston (36) and Texas (32) collected more in the past month, as seven different Cleveland batters had at least two homers (Branyan, Choo, Duncan, Hafner, Kearns, LaPorta and Santana).
(Photo of Mitch Talbot above via AP Photo/Mark Duncan)
3 Comments
Donald starting at SS again as a result first inning error that didn’t help Talbot.
Talbot reminds me of a young Cliff Lee. That’s one of the million stat-articles I would love to see Jon write about a little later in the season.
Haven’t seen this game yet (just finishing up the Toronto series now, love that we finished the 4-game sweep on Canada Day), but sounds like it was at least a well-pitched game. Will be interesting to see if LaPorta continued his solid 1B play.
Santana will have this game stricken from the record books.
Carmona is your All-Star. I forgot about Talbot.