The Most Likely Indians Player to Win Each MLB Award in 2011

The Cleveland Indians aren’t likely to be contenders in 2011, but it’s not just the team as a whole that’s unlikely to get much recognition this year. It’s way too early to say who the league’s top players will be this season, but the odds of a Tribe player taking home one of Major League Baseball’s annual end-of-season awards aren’t very high.

But, unlikely though it may be, seeing a Cleveland player named the MVP or Cy Young isn’t completely out of the question. Here are my picks for the most likely Indian to win each major postseason award.

Most Valuable Player: Shin-Soo Choo

Am I really giving this spiel again? I bet I’ve revealed my man-crush on Choo so many times that you could patch this whole next paragraph together from other things I’ve written about him.

At any rate, with apologies to Carlos Santana, Choo is far and away the Indians’ best player. According to one measurement, Choo was the second-best player in baseball in 2010, despite missing 16 games with a thumb injury and posting the lowest BABIP of his career. At age 28, there’s no reason to think he’ll decline soon—in fact, he could still add power. Throw in his solid glove and cannon arm and you can bet he’d be in the MVP discussions if he played for a higher-profile team.

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2011 Fantasy Preview: Which Cleveland Indians Position Players Are Worth Drafting?

Not many fans outside of Northeast Ohio will pay attention to the Cleveland Indians in 2011. If everything goes right they could have an outside shot to be contenders, but chances are they’ll avoid the AL Central cellar only because the Kansas City Royals are just so awful.

But while the average fan might not care about how the Tribe as a whole fares this season, fantasy baseball players would be foolish not to pay attention to the boys at Progressive Field. Here’s a look at the Indians position players who will have fantasy relevance in 2011:

Studs

The Indians’ best real-life player is also their best fantasy option. Shin-Soo Choo finished 24th on ESPN’s 2010 Player Rate for 5×5 formats, and had the 21st-most points in my H2H league. He’ll be at the mercy of the rest of the young offense for runs and RBI, but he’s a safe bet to threaten .300/25/100/100/25. His great eye and plus defense make him better in real life than in Roto leagues, but Choo should be an elite fantasy commodity in 2011.

Carlos Santana is another name who could be off the board before the middle rounds. The Indians’ preseason top prospect flashed great contact skills, hit six homers, and even swiped three bases in 46 MLB games last year. And with a .401 OBP, he won’t have much trouble collecting runs and RBI. What more could you want from a 25-year-old catcher?

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Indians Report for Spring Training: Comparing Cleveland Players to “Major League” Characters

For anyone who has a soul, Major League has to rank among the best baseball movies of all time. Its greatness goes beyond the hilarious one-liners (“Jussssssssst a bit outside”) the realistic action sequences (Charlie Sheen pitched in high school), or even the exhilarating depiction of the Cleveland Indians winning the pennant—gets me every time.

The thing that makes Major League a timeless classic is its ability to parallel the real Major Leagues. When Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane went before MLB’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics in 2000 to explain how he ran a successful team on a shoestring budget (as famously chronicled in Moneyball) he said, “Our situation closely resembles the movie.” You could be forgiven for thinking slugging first baseman Clu Haywood was based on Jason Giambi, even though Giambino didn’t make his MLB debut until six years after the movie’s release. And the real Indians followed their fictional counterparts’ example by winning a string of division championships in the late 1990′s.

Today, Cleveland’s position players were required to report for Spring Training in Goodyear, Arizona, and I can’t help but think of the scene from Major League in which the main characters arrive for the start of the preseason. It’s eerie how well life has imitated art. For those who need a memory jog, here’s the clip. The only good video I could find was in Italian, but you can get the gist of it just from the images (the dubbing is actually quite amusing—”Gioco come Mays, corro come Hayes”). (more…)

Quantity, Not Quality, Makes Cleveland Indians’ Farm System Great

After nearly a decade of rebuilding (with brief interruptions in 2005 and 2007), the Cleveland Indians have amassed one of the finest farm systems in all of baseball. At every position, there is at least one promising young player who could make an impact with the Tribe for years to come. And according to Doug Gray’s MLB farm system valuations, the Indians organization is the third-best in baseball.

But you wouldn’t know it from the slew of top prospect lists we’ve seen recently. No Cleveland prospects ranked higher than 36th on Keith Law, Frankie Piliere, or Jonathan Mayo‘s lists, and in all three cases Lonnie Chisenhall was the only one to crack the Top 50.

This sentiment is echoed by analysts who rank prospects by their projected ceilings. The highest grades John Sickels gave to a Tribe prospect were B-pluses, and while Adam Foster was kind enough to include five Indians on his Top 100 list, none earned better than a B-minus (meaning “Slightly-above-average regular”). And Marc Hulet‘s “Peak WAR” projections sit south of 5.0 WAR for every Cleveland prospect.

What gives? How good can the farm system really be if there aren’t any superstars on their way up to Progressive Field?

The key is the Tribe’s incredible minor-league depth. Twenty-six Indians prospects were good enough for Sickles to rank—second-most in the game—and that’s not including snubs like Jared Goedert, Hector Rondon, and Giovanni Soto. If you include the honorable mentions, that’s 42 promising prospects, or almost two full teams’ worth. And that’s not including the young players who already have significant big league experience like Matt LaPorta and Michael Brantley, or even guys who’ve had only tiny tastes of MLB action like Carlos Carrasco and Carlos Santana.

Is quantity better than quality when it comes to prospects? A couple B-level prospects might not be as exciting as a blue-chip first-rounder, but young players don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to. Think back to Mark Prior, Rick Ankiel, and Bryan Bullington. Even Stephen Strasburg might never be the same after Tommy John surgery.

Want a more relevant example? Try Carlos Santana. He’s supposedly healthy now, but he may never fully recover from an injury like that. If the Indians’ future depended on a few great prospects instead of a lot of good ones, that collision would have seemed catastrophic.

What’s more, these rankings don’t reflect that many of the Tribe’s prospects do have elite upsides. Nick Weglarz, Jason Knapp, and Nick Hagadone’s grades are brought down by their injury histories. LeVon Washington has incredible raw talent and definite star potential. Alex White has the makings of an ace, and while I don’t claim that my scouting and prospect-projecting abilities are better than Marc Hulet’s, I have a hard time swallowing his estimation that Drew Pomeranz, probably the best college pitcher in last year’s draft, will have a Peak WAR of just 4.0.

The Indians might not have a future Cy Young or MVP in their midst, but who cares? Even if the organization doesn’t have any great talent, it has a great amount of good talent. Don’t let Cleveland’s underrepresentation on these top prospect lists fool you—the Tribe looks poised to compete for years to come.

Hey, Hoynsie: Cleveland Indians’ Defense Isn’t Their Biggest Problem

When it comes to Cleveland baseball writers, the Plain Dealer‘s Paul Hoynes is the man. For all my delusions of grandeur about Wahoo Blues, there’s a reason Hoynes always hears about Indians-related news from the horse’s mouth while the rest of us get our rumors from him (to be fair, he has a full-time job at a major newspaper, but still). At the risk of sounding sycophantic, I wish I could write with the same confidence and firsthand knowledge that Hoynsie exudes on a regular basis.

But, as all sportswriters inevitably learn (except, apparently, ESPN’s Matthew Berry), you can’t be right all the time. For Hoynes, one such example came as he answered a reader question in his “Hey Hoynsie!” column Sunday:

Hey, Hoynsie: It is nice to read that Antonetti expects the Tribe to contend this year. Do you think that the infield defense is good enough? Will it be easy for a guy like Matt LaPorta to transition to first base at the major-league level? – Vicky Wilhelm, Cleveland

Hey, Vicky: The infield defense going into spring training isn’t good enough to be a contender. (…)

Maybe reading through the old FireJoeMorgan archives has made me hypercritical, but Hoynes’ response bothered me. To be fair, he goes on to make some good points about the uncertainty of what the infield will look like by Opening Day, and unequivocally states that what LaPorta does with his bat is much more important than what he does with his glove. Still, aside from the grammatical error (I know this is nitpicking, but “infield defense” isn’t what’s contending), fielding is not the reason Cleveland is unlikely to make the playoffs in 2011.

The Indians’ defense last year was awful. Atrocious. The Tribe’s team -59.8 UZR in 2010 was the worst in the league. The infield was particularly bad, with a putrid -41.2 UZR. For a team whose pitching staff had highest groundball rate in the league (47.9 percent) and the worst strikeout rate in baseball (6.1 K/9), infield defense is particularly important. The infield UZR rating translates to about -4.1 WAR, meaning the Indians would likely have won four extra games if they’d had average fielders at each base and shortstop.

As famously recounted in Moneyball, Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane stuck miserable defender Jeremy Giambi in left field in 2002. There’s no sugarcoating the abominable fielding of the man who “somehow managed…to convey personal embarrassment” when he ran after the ball, but he made up for it with his bat. It’s not that fielding is less important than hitting, it’s just that the disparity between Albert Pujols’ and Cesar Izturis’ bats is generally larger than the difference between Franklin Gutierrez’ and Adam Dunn’s gloves. In that vein, the Indians’ defensive ineptitude last year was relatively inconsequential compared to their shortcomings in other aspects of the game.

Tribe pitchers combined for 9.4 WAR in 2010 (FIP-based, so fielding doesn’t matter). The average MLB team got 15.8 WAR out of its pitching staff, while the median for the other 29 teams was 16.1 (San Diego Padres). Replace the Tribe’s infielders with league-average fielders and they’d have won 73 games last year, but a normal rotation would have meant 76 victories.

On offense, too, the Indians have some work to do. Taking defense out of the equation, Cleveland position players were worth roughly 15.4 WAR (of which more than a third is from Shin-Soo Choo), compared to the average of 20.0. In other words, you could take a completely ordinary pitching staff and a perfectly uninspiring lineup, throw in the Indians’ defense, and get a .500 team.

But remember, Hoynes isn’t just talking about being an average team—he’s talking contention. Taking his thesis at face value, it means the Tribe’s infield D is bad enough to drag down a team that would otherwise make the playoffs. Does that hold water?

As it happens, the eight teams that made the 2010 playoffs had very good defensive infields—they averaged 10.4 UZR around the horn. However, they also averaged 17.8 pitching WAR and 26.7 defense-neutral position player WAR. Give the Indians the average playoff team’s pitching staff and lineup but let them keep their miserable defense and they’ll win 89 games.

Eighty-nine wins does not an October shoo-in make, but while an 89-win team wouldn’t have made the playoffs in 2010, it would have been enough to win the AL Central in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Better defense would be nice—not many 94-win teams sit at home in October—but the idea that poor D would stop the Tribe from contending is simply wrong.

We should be worried about Jared Goedert’s glove at third, but that shouldn’t stop him from claiming a starting job if he does well enough with the bat. Having a defensive wizard like Nick Punto on the depth chart would have been a boon for Mitch Talbot’s ERA, but the fact that he struck out less than five batters per nine innings last year is more troubling than the Swiss cheese infield backing him up.

Sorry, Hoynsie, but with all due respect, you bobbled this one. The Indians need to see progress from their position players, but defense isn’t the most important place to improve. As you said about LaPorta: “What he has to do is hit.”

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