A look at the Browns secondary shake up
April 4, 2018
The Home Opener from Near and Far: While We’re Waiting
April 5, 2018Allow me to scream at myself before the internet does that five games is entirely too small of a sample size to be making these arguments or observations. In this, the early going, it’s hard to have a fully fleshed out timeline of games with which to pull statistics from. Due to last night’s horribleness,1 let’s get somewhat fun with small sample sizes from these first few games and fully embrace the fact that these are not likely to bear themselves out for the full stretch of a season but do offer a bit of questioning. In other words, grab some salt and count out the grains, because all of these need to be taken with at least one of them.
Has the Tribe gone full power happy?
While not being a prototypical power hitting team, the Indians have scored the vast majority of their runs off of home runs in the early going. In the five games the team has played,2 they have scored 19 runs and hit eight home runs in those games, all but four of those runs have been scored via the home run, which means 78.9% of the teams runs have been scored by home run. After a bit of research to try and put those numbers in perspective, the team scored 117 runs total in the month of April in 2017, 53 of them came from home runs and 64 came from some other sort of hit, walk, wild pitch, etc.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Who knows. It could be how the team was attacking these pitchers, game planning against those that give up more home runs and pitch to contact a bit more than those that try to gas it by you. It could be a cold stretch of games, seeing as how the team is only scoring 3.8 runs per game and they averaged 5.0 in 2017. Launch angle adjustments and a more focused outlook on home runs and fly balls over hits have taken the league by storm and it seems as though you can count Cleveland amongst them, at least in this early going. This could be just a small sample that sees itself fixed over the long haul or with the return to the lineup of Michael Brantley, a much more measured hitter in his approach, over Tyler “Nick Swisher 2.0” Naquin, or it could be the way the team has decided to play this season. Time will tell if the Elevation Revelation has finally taken hold across the entire team or if I am writing nonsense about a very small sample.3
Trevor Bauer and Mike Clevinger need out pitches
It can definitely be said that the last thing Trevor Bauer needs is ANOTHER pitch, but a small tweak to his arsenal and/or approach would help close the gap between Bauer and the upper echelon on pitchers he aspires to be, a grouping that has a teammate, Corey Kluber, in it. Five innings pitched with seven strikeouts is great, but it could be so much better if Bauer was able to keep attacking when he gets up in the count. Again, this was one start in 2018, but high pitch counts have long been an issue with Bauer and it keeps him from going far into games, thereby giving him more opportunities to rack up Ks and innings. In facing 24 batters in Sunday’s start, Bauer threw six or more pitches eight times to hitters, getting to two strikes against 14 batters. If he were to adopt something of an outpitch, like the Kluber Special (the pitch that has no name and can’t be categorized as a slider, curve, slurve, death to ankles), he could have gotten to more batters before giving it over to the bullpen.
Mike Clevinger has the same issue, and while you sometimes get flashes of it like in the Mike Trout at bat Jim Pete wrote about yesterday, often you see him struggling to get batters out as pitch after pitch gets fouled off. Nibbling is not attacking, and again, while the results of Monday’s game were good, (5.1 IP of shutout baseball, five strikeouts, and two walks) 97 pitches came quite quickly for Clevinger and he was unable to get out of the sixth inning. While only throwing six or more pitches to four batters is better than Bauer’s performance the day prior, Clevinger got two strikes on 12 different occasions and got only five Ks.
These instances, unfortunately, are not as small sample sizes, as these pitchers have struggled with this issue in previous years. Bauer is an incredibly smart player, he knows his issues and will continue to develop as I’m still not quite sure we have or ever will see his final form. Clevinger is now in his first full year of being in a starting rotation so it’s possible that with a new pitching coach in Carl Willis, he is able to change a bit of his approach and work on getting batters out quicker before the pitch count mounts.
Bullpen issues make me wanna grab my tissues
Coming into the year the once strong bullpen was already a cause for concern, and it’s only gotten worse as the games have started. Zach McAllister and Dan Otero were the two relievers that were expected by many to take up the Bryan Shaw mantle and the results have not been promising. Both have ERAs over 7.00 and while Otero has a K per inning, Terry Francona’s decision to stretch him out over two innings in last night’s game proved to be the wrong idea. Tyler Olson is not without blame and has seen better days as well. There is hope, however, as last year’s find Nick Goody and non-roster invitee Matt Belisle have both pitched went in their appearances and the tandem of Cody Allen and Andrew Miller have been as advertised.
Five games are hard to judge anything by. If this were a midseason stretch, we would scream our heads off about how small a sample size it is. April is almost always a down month for the Tribe as well, so add any and all of these to the heaping pile of “well, actually’s” that accompany the pitchforks.
