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).

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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Cleveland Indians Win on Travis Hafner’s Walk-Off Grand Slam

As if this season couldn’t get any more magical.

When the Indians came to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning down 4-0 against the Blue Jays, FanGraphs had their Win Expectancy at just 1.6%. Not many clubs can come back from a four-run deficit in half an inning.

Even when Travis Hafner stepped to the plate with the bases loaded and Cleveland’s deficit down to three runs, the odds weren’t very good—the Tribe had less than a 1-in-5 chance of pulling off the comeback.

Of course, that was before Luis Perez lobbed a fastball right into Hafner’s danger zone. (more…)

Which Cleveland Indians Deserve Your All-Star Votes?

Less than two weeks remain before the 2011 MLB All-Star voting closes, and Cleveland fans across the country are sure to be punching their ballots for Tribe players to get as many Indians on the AL team as possible.

Believe it or not, several Indians are already among the voting leaders as of the most recent update. But before we cast our final ballots, it behooves us to ask: what Cleveland players really should appear in the Midsummer Classic.

According to yesterday’s Baseball Prospectus playoff odds update, the Indians have a 15% chance of making the playoffs, meaning they have a roughly 4% chance of reaching the World Series. That’s a real, if small, chance that the outcome of the All-Star Game and its prize of home field advantage in the Fall Classic will matter to the Indians.

With that in mind, blindly punching the ticket for the Tribe’s players might not be in the Indians’ best interest. To help you make your decisions, I’ve categorized the nine Cleveland players on the ballot by how much hometown bias it would take to justify picking them. Happy voting!

Pull the Lever

Asdrubal Cabrera, Shortstop (second, 1,647,802). He leads all AL shortstops in average (.296), slugging percentage (.507), OPS (.850), and wRC+ (142). Alexei Ramirez’ big advantage with the glove probably makes him the better player (he leads Cabrera in WAR, 3.1 to 2.4), but Droobs’ star power, presence on the most surprising team in baseball, and clutch hitting make him a solid choice. And someone’s got to stop Derek Jeter. (more…)

Is Cleveland Indians’ Lineup in Trouble?

The wheels are starting to come off the wagon for the Cleveland Indians.

The Tribe had lost five games in a row before last night’s victory over the Twins. Scoring wasn’t the Indians’ biggest problem through the rough stretch—they’d given up 6.5 runs a game this month heading into Tuesday’s action. But with just seven runs scored in their last five games amidst Manny Acta’s lineup shuffling—even last night, Cleveland won 1-0—questions have begun to arise about the reliability of the Tribe’s lineup.

But before any judgment is passed down, we Indians fans owe it to ourselves to ask the question: Are Cleveland’s hitters playing poorly, or are they just getting unlucky?

To answer this question, we turn to Batting Average on Balls in Play, also known as “hit rate.” BABIP is exactly what it sounds like: the proportion of balls hit inside the confines of the diamond that result in the batter reaching base, which for most hitters is about 30% of the time. While some players have abnormal natural hit rates, most major variations from the mean—especially this early in the season—are due to random chance.

Thanks to The Hardball Times’ super-special awesome xBABIP calculator, we can get an estimate of what players’ hit rates would be in a luck-neutral environment based on factors like speed, power, strikeout rate, and batted-ball profile. By plugging his expected hit rate (xBABIP) in for his actual BABIP, we can get an idea of how a player would do in a completely neutral context.

Using their xBABIPs and Power Factors, I calculated luck-neutral slashlines for all 15 Indians to have come to the plate in 2011. Here are the results, sorted by the differences between their expected and actual OPS+’s: (more…)

Could Cleveland Indians Trade For Carlos Beltran?

The Cleveland Indians (33-24) have just suffered a four-game sweep at the hands of the Texas Rangers, and their lead over the second-place Detroit Tigers (31-27) is down to just 2.5 games.

However, the Indians still have the best record in the American League (though now they’re tied with the Yankees), and a diminished lead in the AL Central still means they’re in first place. And with the season now more than a third of the way over, it’s time for the Tribe to start thinking about making some trades.

Yesterday, we looked at the places on the Indians’ roster where they could seek to upgrade before the Trade Deadline. As the Hot Stove starts to heat up, we’ll be analyzing all of the interesting rumors and proposals about players Cleveland could target.

Today, we’ll examine an idea for a trade target I first saw floated by FanGraphs’ Jonah Keri last week: Could the Indians go after Carlos Beltran? (more…)

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