Dan Gilbert ranked No. 117 in Forbes’ Richest People in America
October 1, 2014Cleveland Browns: Stocks Rising
October 1, 2014What defines a successful season? Are championships the sole measure of success in sports? Every season is either a resounding success or a complete and utter failure. Go for gold or go home; hoist hardware or have a hard winter; rapturous ecstasy or agonizing despair! Surely, a championship can’t be the exclusive confirmation of a job well done. A portrait of success that binary is too harsh and unforgiving, and ignores the metaphorical bodily fluids like blood and sweat that sportswriters claim go into the pursuit of victory. To value only championships is an affront to the spirit of competition and the joy of both watching and playing sports. If such were the case, no Cleveland sports team would have had a successful season in fifty years—142 consecutive team-seasons of failure—which is a depressing proposition for even Cleveland sports fans, lifelong grief experts. The Bad News Bears lost to the Yankees, after all.
We didn’t have a parade when the 2008 Cavs won 66 games only to fall to the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference Finals.
So it’s a little more complicated than that. Is a successful team simply one that you “like,” or one that you enjoy watching? Is it purely about entertainment value, and the only question for a fan worth asking is, “Did I generally enjoy watching [Insert Team Name]’s games these last X months?” Maybe you’re a congratulation-ist, and think everyone should get a trophy and pat on the back as long as they “tried really hard” and had … “fun”1. If so, you probably enthusiastically celebrated your child’s third grade “graduation” ceremony. Maybe you don’t even care about results, and any successful season is one that enables you to get drunk with your friends and yell loud things at strangers—a respectable opinion, no doubt.
All these approaches have at least a little bit of merit. It’s certainly a combination of factors that go into the determination of the abstract, fuzzy notion of “success.” But the reality is that one approach for evaluating success probably stands above the rest: whether a team met your expectations. This is discomforting because it means that our own calibration of a team’s capabilities can impact whether we later view the season favorably or unfavorably.
The 2014 Indians and how we have received them serve as a peculiar case study on what expectations can do to a team. Last season, the Indians were 7.5 games behind the Tigers in the division and 3.5 games behind the Rays for the second wild card slot on September 1, making the race for a playoff spot an uphill climb. Then, the Tribe went on a September tear, ripping off 21 wins compared with only 6 losses. They needed every single one of those wins, beating out the Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers for the top wild card spot only by the thinnest of margins. Despite hosting the wild card showdown with the Rays, the Indians lost 4-0 in an unfulfilling climax. Cue sad music. Roll the credits.
Entering this season, the Indians, with an only marginally-improved roster, were expected to once again to make the playoffs (“Unfinished Business!”) even though they only made it in 2013 thanks to the sprinkling of some magical September fairy dust or some large helpings of Michael’s secret stuff. The playoff presumption we projected on the Indians was demanding but fair, based on their 2013 performance and the fan-created certainty of incremental improvement. But this season everyone realized the secret stuff was just plain old water, and the Indians faded down the stretch, going a pedestrian 13-13 in September after a stellar 18-9 in August. This was to the dismay of all Tribe fans, who were quick to criticize manager Terry Francona for some questionable decisions and to express disappointment on the lack of growth from players like Jason Kipnis and Carlos Santana, and denounce the sheer suck-itude of an overpriced Nick Swisher.
But here’s the thing: The Indians just aren’t a great team; they’re merely above average. The Indians don’t have an arsenal of dazzling talent. They’re a motley collection of middle talents that had outstanding Brantley and Kluborg seasons acting as buoys to keep the team’s head above water. Where Tribe fielders massively underachieved (the Indians had the lowest fielding percentage and lowest defensive runs saved above average in the AL), the rotation and bullpen overachieved in a season where runs were scarce from a lineup with as much firepower as one of those shitty plastic water pistols perfect for harassing your sister or cat.
The Tigers’ lineup is bolstered by a potent 3-4-5 lineup of Miguel Cabrera, Victor Martinez and J.D. Martinez where each player hit over .300. Michael Brantley was the only Indians player who hit over .300 with more than 100 plate appearances.2 The Tigers have more than twice as many hitters as the Indians that hit .275 with more than 100 plate appearances. The Tigers won 39 games by four or more runs, while the Indians won only 28 such games—the Indians scored three runs or less in half of their games.
The Tribe spent nearly seventy percent of the season within arm’s length of .500, the benchmark for mediocrity.
What’s more, the Tribe hovered around .500 for the entirety of May through July, as if it were an invisible barrier they couldn’t break through. The Indians remained rutted in within 3 games of either side of .500 for 110 games, what I call the Jason Bateman Zone, in honor of one of America’s consistently average actors that starts in consistently average movies. It’s not that different than a Mendoza Line of team success. That means that the Tribe spent nearly seventy percent of the season within arm’s length of .500, the benchmark for mediocrity.
I theorize that the struggle to work into the playoff race and break through that invisible wall exhausted them in the month of August. This fatigue was evident in Michael Bourn’s comments last week: “Our back was against the wall from pretty much jump street. We played good here and then we’d go on a losing streak. We were playing .500 ball pretty much the whole way through, if you want to look at it how I look at it. Most teams that make the playoffs, they have a stretch in there where they’re playing 10 games over .500, 15 games over .500.”
Meanwhile, the Tigers were more than 10 games over .500 or better for 108 games, meaning they spent as much time on cruise control toward the playoffs as the Indians spent struggling to keep pace. Similarly, none of the American League teams that qualified for the playoffs stayed in the Jason Bateman Zone for more than 92 games, which is sixteen percent less than the Indians. Most playoff teams put averageness in the rearview mirror early and never looked back even when they played unspectacular baseball, like the Angels and A’s. Come September, Cleveland was running on fumes and trying to overtake its shinier, less rickety competition.
There’s nothing wrong with being an unremarkable, ordinary team like the 2014 Tribe. They kept me captivated from April until September, which is an accomplishment in its own right. Baseball is an eighteenth century sport in a twenty-first century world, and painful to endure through September when your team is ten games out of relevance. This is not an argument for complacency, or over whether more should have been done to enhance preseason expectations. Divorcing the front office from my point altogether, the Indians on-field product “delivered” in the sense that it performed about as well as could be expected. Maybe you want to fire Antonetti, maybe you don’t. But the players that took the field, as a unit, outperformed the sum of their parts, and showed more fatigue than quit. That, in a context totally separate from the front office, is admirable.
All I can ask for a middling talent like the Tribe is to be competitive and stay in the hunt for October until the end, when you hope they can capture some of that autumn magic and let it carry them to greatness. It didn’t happen this year, but maybe it will next year. It was a summer of meaningful games.3
Summarily, the 2014 Indians were vanilla soft serve with no sprinkles or chocolate syrup—good but not great. The Indians were a .500 team that played mostly .500 baseball, a mediocre team doing mediocre things. Sometimes this is hard to struggle with, because average teams are so tantalizingly close to awesomeness. It was good season that was ultimately dissatisfying. I have the same vibe for the Indians that I got listening to Ryan Adams’ new album “Ryan Adams,” a poppy, mild record that’s non-controversial, short on greatness but listenable nonetheless. It’s not his best work, but it’s certainly not his worst, and it kept me listening until the end.4 I have the same compliment for the 2014 Indians season as I do a sober, married Ryan Adams album: It didn’t suck.
The end of the Indians’ season dovetails nicely with the start of the Cavs’ season, for which expectations could hardly be higher. The over/under for Cavs’ wins is currently at 59, which is staggeringly high. Before last season, the Cavs’ over/under was somewhere around 40 games. Had the Cavs won 45 games last season and qualified for a top-5 seed in the Eastern Conference, I would have fired up cigar and done backwards cartwheels to Disneyland. Instead, the Cavs won 33 games and were a total dumpster fire (with Mike Brown pouring gasoline all over it), which makes the Indians’ season look like a stunning victory by comparison. On the other hand, if the Cavs win 45 games this season, I’ll be walking up the Coronado Bridge lugging a cinder block tied to my waist. All because of a few offseason transactions, including the acquisition of some guy from Akron. Hopefully the Cavs can keep up with the demand. My, how expectations change, even if the end results mostly stay the same.
- Retching sound as I look for trash can to throw up into [↩]
- Unless otherwise noted, all stats were obtained or derived from baseballreference.com. [↩]
- As a San Diego resident, let me tell you, the Indians’ season was better than the Padres’ season times infinite, and the Padres lack a lot of the same built-in excuses the Indians have. [↩]
- Craig might like it more than I do. [↩]
57 Comments
I don’t really think too highly of either of them but i, too, would take Kipnis. But mainly because i think he can sustain an above average level of play while I suspect Chisenhall turns back into a frog at midnight, or season’s beginning, whichever comes first.
But I’d deal both of them together for a Jose Bautista-type (just using him as an example) and some prospects.
what would those 3 months of data tell them that they didn’t already know? They had been successful against him for the past 2 years already. I am afraid the guy just got a little hot-extended (that’s my new term).
Absolutely agree with the statmaster. But I don’t know if pitchers figured him out or if there were other factors involved like better defense, luck, or changing weather. who knows?
As i said above, i think he just got hot-extended.
Their drafts were OK in the 90’s:
David Bell, Manny, Shuey, Sexson, Branyan, Jaret Wright, Sean Casey, Johnny Mac, CC, Ryan Church, Brian Wilson (drafted in ’00, success elsewhere).
Thome, Giles, Leskanic, Dipoto, Embree were in the ’89 draft.
Nagy was ’88.
Belle and Steve Olin were 1987 picks. Hard to believe that Albert Belle was drafted only 1 year after Greg Swindell. wow.
Those teams were really built in the 80’s.
The umpiring in the Marlins series was atrocious on balls and strikes. Livan Hernandez was getting calls that were 6 inches off the plate. Actually, the Braves were, too, in ’95. If there were the electronic systems back then I bet the Indians would have swept both series while scoring 5-10 runs per game. Their offense was that historic. Manny Ramirez batted 7th.
we have 3rd grade graduations? wow.
You are a gentleman and a scholar, sir. Now what I need to figure out is if this season’s outcome qualifies as “doing it again” or not (no playoffs, but pretty close in win total, pitching coming on strong, worth watching til near the very end), so I can act accordingly come March. These teams never make it simple…