Cleveland Indians Midseason Awards: Who Takes Home the Hardware?
Well, the first half of the season is officially over (though the 50 percent mark was more than a week ago). The All-Star Break is a good time to reflect on the first 89 games of the season before we look ahead to the trade deadline and the pennant race.
So I decided to hop on the bandwagon.
Without further ado, here are your Cleveland Indians first-half awards, as voted by the one-man democracy of the WBWAA (Wahoo Blues Writers Association of America).
Asdrubal Cabrera is the Indians' first-half MVP.
Most Valuable Player: Asdrubal Cabrera. Like this was even a choice. Among Indians with at least 200 PAs, Cabrera leads in homers (14), runs (55), RBI (51), steals (12), average (.293), slugging (.489), OPS (.836), wRC+ (137), WPA (102), and WAR (3.3). And he’s done it while playing shortstop. No doubt the All-Star starting shortstop has been our best player.
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What Should Cleveland Indians’ Lineup Look Like?
The Cleveland Indians lost again last night, and it wasn’t Justin Masterson’s fault.
The Indians have scored just three runs in their last two games and nine in their last six, spoiling more than one brilliant pitching performance in this week-long homestand.
Newly called-up second infielder Cord Phelps wasn’t the silver bullet (not that he could reasonably have been expected to be), going 0-for-4 in his MLB debut. Nor has Manny Acta’s lineup shuffling seemed to have much impact.
This second point is particularly interesting, as the optimization of the Tribe’s batting order has been a topic of much debate this season. It didn’t seem to matter much when the Indians were invincible early on, but now that they’ve hit a rough patch, people are starting to question how Acta is filling out the lineup card.
In their seminal work—simply titled The Book—Tom Tango, Michael Lichtman, and Andy Dolphin undertook a massive study of how batting orders should best be arranged. In general, the first, fourth, and second hitters should be the best in the lineup at getting on-base, followed by the fifth and third hitters. Power hitters should be lower in the order than on-base experts, and the No. 9 guy should be able to set the table for the leadoff man.
Baseball Musings’ Lineup Analysis tool applies these principles to determining how best to fill out a lineup card. Using the luck-neutral numbers we calculated yesterday (see below) and Jeff Sackmann’s minor-league equivalency numbers for Phelps (.344 OBP, .422 SLG), I ran some lineup optimization tests for the Indians to get an objective idea of what Acta should be doing.
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Here’s the optimized lineup for the Indians as their roster stands now: (more…)
Cleveland Indians Shut Out Again: Why is Orlando Cabrera Batting Second?
It had to happen eventually. The Cleveland Indians’ 2-0 loss Sunday afternoon—the final game in the Texas Rangers’ four-game sweep—marked the first time this season that the Tribe had dropped four straight.
As a result, the Indians have now fallen into a tie with the New York Yankees for the best record (33-24) in the American League, and their once-formidable lead over the second-place Detroit Tigers is down to 2.5 games.
Losing four straight at home is bad enough, but the worst part of the series was that the Indians got shut out twice in a row, falling 4-0 on Saturday before Sunday’s 2-0 loss. There’s no single silver bullet that can explain how one of the best lineups in the league could be completely silenced in two consecutive games, but part of the problem is quickly identified from the box score.
In both of the Tribe’s shut-out games, manager Manny Acta had Orlando Cabrera batting second. A suboptimal batting order can’t fully explain Cleveland’s inability to score, but this is not a coincidence. (more…)
Manny Acta is Awesome, Part I: Tribe Manager Defends Carlos Santana
Fans and writers who get wrapped up in narrow-minded traditional statistics don’t think too highly of Cleveland Indians catcher Carlos Santana.
The 25-year-old backstop is hitting just .228 in 51 games. His 6 home runs, 24 RBI, 26 runs, and 2 stolen bases aren’t bad for a catcher, but they don’t compensate for the fact that he’s looking up at names like Yuniesky Betancourt (.232) and Mike Aviles (.230) on the batting average leaderboards.
Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Santana has an extremely low .252 BABIP, from which we can reasonably infer that he’s gotten unlucky. But even if this was his true talent level he’d be a well-above-average hitter (119 wRC+ entering Friday’s game) thanks to a .692 Power Factor and the second-highest walk rate in the American League (18.4%).
There are some—the Plain Dealer‘s Chuck Yarborough, for example—who look only at Santana’s batting average and declare that he is mired in a slump. But, as the PD‘s Paul Hoynes reported Thursday, Indians manager Manny Acta is not one of them: (more…)
Attention Manny Acta: Matt LaPorta is a Good Hitter
Filling out the Cleveland Indians’ batting order must be a hard job for Manny Acta.
It’s not just that everyone in the lineup is producing—it’s that, for many Tribe hitters, statistics to date aren’t necessarily reliable for predicting future performance. Michael Brantley, Asdrubal Cabrera, and Jack Hannahan are looking better than ever before. Travis Hafner and Grady Sizemore have gotten fairly lucky (when healthy—another factor), while Carlos Santana and Shin-Soo Choo have been struggling because of bad fortune.
There’s a lot of gray area here, and I don’t think there’s a single right way to fill out the lineup card. But there’s one thing Acta continuously does that seems to be to be objectively wrong: putting first baseman Matt LaPorta in the No. 8 slot. (more…)
