The 67-63 2014 CLEVELAND INDIANS season thread (at CWS): Swisher out for the season.

Perez has suffered another spring injury. Out 3-4 weeks with a shoulder strain. No World Baseball Classic for him.

Speaking of, Aviles (Puerto Rico), Cabrera (Venezuela), Pestano (United States) and Santana (Dominican Republic) will leave camp soon to be with their teams.
 
This is a long and relatively confusing article, but the basis of it is that the Indians' front office is at the forefront of yet another groundbreaking development. The purpose of it is to maximize revenues and, in turn, likely be able to put projected gain towards free agents that no one expected them to be able to afford.

Like I said on Twitter, if anyone thinks this organization scoffs at its product, they are, and have been wrong. A lot of more uncontrollable factors have been the biggest proponents for a lack of success lately.


Among the attendees of the second annual SABR Analytics Conference, which took place in Phoenix this past Thursday through Saturday, were statistical analysts from several clubs; some whose names you’d know from Baseball Prospectus or other sabermetric sites, and others who’ve kept a lower public profile. But with the exception of Bill James, whose stature is such that he can continue to play a public role even from the inside, the team statheads weren’t at SABR to take part in panels or present PowerPoint slides. They were there to keep their eyes and ears open for any ideas or developments that might give their employers an edge.

They sat silently in the back rows of conference rooms, or clustered together outside the exits with other delegates from their own clubs, talking quietly or sending messages back to base with their omnipresent phones. Occasionally, one team’s cluster would meet and merge with another’s, chatting amiably like less athletic versions of opposing players crossing paths before first pitch. But even (or especially) among their own kind, their words were guarded: they talked shop without citing specifics. As Zachary Levine wrote last week after returning from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, team employees tell few tales.

Team employees in baseball operations, that is. And for the most part, Baseball Ops employees are the only ones that the hundreds* of fans who flocked to Phoenix care about, or are even aware of. But they’re not the bulk of a baseball team’s front office. As Bill James described it during his keynote address on Friday, “A modern baseball front office has two almost entirely separate divisions: there is the business side and the baseball operations side…there are a lot more of them than there are of us.” As far as most fans (and maybe even most members of Baseball Ops) are concerned, team employees in the business development, corporate sponsorships, and ticketing and sales departments might as well be working in some less-exciting industry for all the connection their jobs share with the glamorous profession of evaluating, acquiring, and developing players. As James admitted, “I actually don’t have any idea what all they do.”

*According to SABR President Vince Gennaro: 430, to be exact, up from 275 last year.

So it came as a surprise that the most memorable address at SABR (in my mind) was delivered not by a former, current, or aspiring Baseball Ops employee or consultant, but by a member of a marketing department. It had an inscrutable title (“Business of Baseball Analytics: Marketing-Mixed Optimization: Agent-Based Modeling Approach”), and I stayed to see it in part because it was scheduled between the Brian Kenny/Bill James/Joe Posnanski “Analytics Super Panel” and Vince Gennaro’s presentation about “The Big Data Approach to Baseball Analytics.” Had it been held at some other time, or in some other room, I might have wandered off to see something sexier (or what passes for sexier at SABR). That would have been a bad choice.

When you think of the Cleveland Indians’ front office, historically one of the earliest and most open in its embrace of sabermetrics, some familiar names might come to mind: former BP authors Keith Woolner and Jason Paré, former writers/analysts from elsewhere on the internet Sky Andrecheck and Victor Wang, or former Cleveland consultant Russell Carleton. You probably wouldn’t think of Alex King. You probably should.

King has been the Indians’ Vice President of Marketing and Brand Management since July 2011; before that, he was a brand manager at Procter & Gamble and a product manager at The Bradford Group. On Saturday, King addressed the audience at SABR after an introduction by Damon Ragusa, the Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer for ThinkVine, a company that specializes in marketing planning and simulation. Despite the talk’s intimidating title, its subject was as simple as it was appealing to an analytics-inclined crowd: bringing sabermetrics to the business of baseball.

Think back to the days before Moneyball, when the state of player evaluation and the popular perception of what made teams win was much as it had been decades before, a murky mix of tradition, guesswork, and mistaken assumptions. Since then, we’ve seen front offices place an ever-greater emphasis on efficiency, accuracy, and the pursuit of sound process in putting teams together.

Baseball marketing hasn’t had its Moneyball moment, at least until now. Many teams decide which promotions to run (bobblehead or Beanie Baby?), how to advertise (radio or TV?), and when to advertise (shortly before a big series, or well in advance?) based on anecdotal evidence and their incomplete knowledge of what’s worked (or seemed to work) before. As one might imagine, inefficiencies are out there, ready to be identified and exploited by a data-driven approach.

There probably won’t be a movie about baseball marketing, and King won’t be played by Brad Pitt. But with ThinkVine’s assistance, he’s applying some of the same principles to marketing as the game’s new breed of progressive GMs has to Baseball Ops. And the payoff could be just as impressive.

The first obstacle to allocating marketing funds more efficiently is that it’s difficult to tell which tactics work, and to what degree. Say you run a particular promotion, and attendance is especially strong. Can you be confident that the increased attendance is tied to the promotion? Or might there be other factors at work, obscuring the promotion’s actual effects and potentially causing confusion between correlation and causation?

That’s where ThinkVine, which announced in January that it had landed the Indians as a client*, comes in. The Indians gave the company five years of historical data (2007–11) on attendance, ticket sales, and promotions, and ThinkVine used it to generate an agent-based model (as opposed to a more traditional econometric, or regression-based approach) that would help the team develop a “base probability” that an Indians fan would attend any given game. That base probability can then serve as the foundation of a forecast for attendance with one or more additional draws. In theory—and, King is confident, in practice, too—the model allows the Indians to quantify the effects of “exogenous factors” (team performance, weather, competing events, the Cleveland economy, etc.) and isolate the impact of marketing techniques.

*According to King, the decision to work with ThinkVine was prompted in part by former Indians General Manager and current Indians President Mark Shapiro, who was bumped up to that role before the 2010 season. I’ve always wondered why teams decide to promote good GMs out of a position where they’re already making a major impact. Presumably, it’s because it allows them to focus on both the baseball and the business sides of the game and make more of an impact on the club’s overall operations. Free from the day-to-day pressure of constructing a roster, Shapiro can seed other areas of the Indians with the sabermetric approach, producing even greater gains.

Armed with that information, the Indians are attempting to maximize revenue by optimizing their promotional schedule. King showed a bar chart displaying the effectiveness of each promotion, broken down by year. “Dollar Dog” days, for instance, were the biggest draw, better than bobbleheads or Kids Fun Days. But they weren’t necessarily the most dependable; Dollar Dog days did better when the Indians were winning, whereas fireworks nights were highly resistant to team performance: people apparently want to see fireworks whether their team is winning or not.* Nor were Dollar Dog days the most profitable; that distinction went to hat/cap giveaway days, presumably because the low cost of caps relative to the extra attendance generated offers the best return on investment. Not only can the Indians determine which promotions to schedule and when, but they can also arrive at the correct quantities for giveaway days: at the 15,000-item level, only hats are profitable; at 10,000, almost everything is.

*The fireworks finding was my favorite, because of my fondness for Hall of Fame former Indians owner Bill Veeck. Veeck was writing about the positive effects of fireworks over 50 years ago, and putting his ideas into practice even earlier. Using what passed for a scientific approach to promotions at the time, Veeck learned that fireworks would bring fans to the park even if a bad team was playing. He’d have loved to see the data I saw on Saturday, and he’d be even happier that the Indians were the source.

Veeck believed that good promotions had a compound benefit: they’d not only pump up attendance, but also increase concession sales. The impact of promotions on concessions wasn’t mentioned during King’s presentation, so I asked Ragusa via email whether they were considered. “We built the model around ticket sales but did all the backend ROI math considering merch and concession,” Ragusa said. “We are working on a project to build in more sense of lifetime value of different consumer groups in the model. This will include more direct/indirect impacts on both merch and concession simultaneous to ticket sales.”

We can already see the effect that information has had on the Indians’ schedule. The team will always vary its promotional offerings, both to keep things fresh for the fans and to provide more exposure for their corporate partners. But now the Indians are emphasizing the ones that work. King didn’t say how they’d make use of their new awareness of the profit-generating powers of headwear, but it’s easy enough to see. The team’s 2013 promotional calendar includes no fewer than four cap/hat giveaways. Last year’s didn’t have any.* That’s satisfying in the same way that seeing Jose Molina play in a career-high 102 games at age 37 is satisfying: it’s a decision we can explain from afar, because we know it’s driven by recently discovered data which even we outside observers are aware of. And to take the parallels to the sort of sabermetrics we’re used to even further, King presented a “heatmap” of the optimal days of the week for each promotion.

*Another tidbit: King revealed that it’s tough to break even on concerts. That surprised me, since the Rays run a summer concert series at Tropicana Field, and the Rays generally don’t do things that aren’t backed up by the data. Cleveland is putting on only one concert this summer.

The analytical benefits also extend to advertising. King found that 80 percent of visitors to Jacobs Field buy tickets within three days of the game. If that’s the case, it might not make sense to start promoting a series well in advance of its start. Digital spending is easy to change on the fly, so the Indians (who use dynamic ticket pricing) can ramp up their advertising right before a series to maximize their return. King showed two graphs of projected advertising spending over time, overlaid on average ticket price for each series. On the graph for 2012, there was little overlap between the two—spending didn’t correspond closely to potential ticket revenue. On the 2013 graph, the two lined up almost perfectly.

All of this optimization adds up. In the past, King believes, the Indians have earned $1.05 for every $1.00 they’ve spent on promotions, and broken even on their media dollars. But now that they’ve fine-tuned their promotion schedule and media spending, they’re projecting massive gains for 2013: a return of $1.85–$2.50 for every dollar spent on promotions, and $1.15–$1.45 for every dollar spent on advertising. Imagine what that would mean for the Indians’ bottom line.

The Indians’ commitments to player payroll have raised eyebrows this offseason: first they inked Nick Swisher (on the same day that ThinkVine put out its press release), then Brett Myers, then Michael Bourn. The general consensus among internet analysts seemed to be that Cleveland had locked up both Swisher and Bourn at reasonable rates, but that the timing of the expenditures on over-30 outfielders was perplexing, given that the team appears to lack the pitching to compete.

So why were the Indians willing to spend now? Well, maybe because they had (or expected to have) the money. I don’t know whether the marketing department’s projected profits played into those moves, but baseball teams do have budgets that dictate signings, and King’s sabermetric approach to marketing might have made Cleveland’s budget a bit bigger. As Bill James noted on Friday when describing the Baseball Ops/everyone else divide, “We don’t have any control over them at all. They, on the other hand, have some control over us. And it absolutely has to be that way, because teams have to make money.” It’s not far-fetched to think that using sabermetric methods to eke out extra attendance dollars might have permitted the Indians greater payroll flexibility, just as using sabermetric methods to identify an undervalued player would allow for more spending on the rest of the roster.

Ragusa told me that ThinkVine hasn’t worked with any other sports franchises, and that their work with the Indians was a way to “determine the potential value creation for professional sports teams.” Having completed that work, they’re now “actively speaking with other MLB teams, NHL and NBA.” I don’t doubt it. Right after I finished talking to King, a marketing executive from an NL team approached him and asked if they could set up a time to talk. He mentioned that his team doesn’t do anything like the Indians did with ThinkVine, but that they’d like to. If I’d been a marketing executive in the audience, I would’ve felt the same way.

Now, a couple of caveats. First, while those projected profit increases are compelling in PowerPoint, they haven’t yet come to pass. If we told you that we’d made PECOTA more accurate than ever, and that it would predict team and player performance this season much more precisely than it has in the past, you might want to wait and see whether it actually happened before you bought in. Similarly, we might want to wait to assess the Indians’ marketing results for 2013 before we start congratulating them on their on-paper profits.

Second, it seems to me that there’s some risk of overfitting. The ThinkVine model might accurately describe the data that was used to train it, but we don’t know for sure whether it will work as well out of sample (in other words, this season, though out-of-sample data from 2012 was used for testing and validation). I asked King after his presentation whether this was a concern, and he stressed that the heterogeneity of the data decreased the risk. He also mentioned the Indians’ wide range of team performance over the five-season sample, from 96 wins in 2007 to 65 in 2009, which fortuitously helped the team determine how the effectiveness of each promotion held up under differing conditions. And because ThinkVine was modeling only the Cleveland market, not national ticketing trends (because the Indians believed that other teams’ results wouldn’t be as applicable), it took less data to produce forecasts for the Tribe than it would for a larger company that operates in many local markets. However, King did acknowledge that additional data might improve the model’s predictive powers.

I directed the same question to Ragusa, who offered a longer response:

We aggressively validate this model in both hold-out periods and within the marketplace (frequent updates) to assure the model is highly generalizable (not just effective in the years we trained it). These are all (in math terms) largely under-determined problems, which classically leads to overfitting. Because we build and calibrate the model across many dimensions and in consideration of people’s behavior heterogenously, we reduce the under-determined nature, thus dramatically reducing the risk of overfitting.
…
In English, the answer goes like this: the more realistic the system we build is to the actual marketplace the less likely we are to overfit. So if we can simulate realistically how different people carry out their lives differently; use different media, etc. then the subsequent simulation is generalizable.

As Ragusa added, “We’ll get good reads on how effective it is within a short period.” Ultimately, it won’t matter that much to us whether the model works as well as advertised (though it will matter to ThinkVine and the Indians). What matters is that the Indians made the attempt to do something different. Let me go back again to Bill James, as seemingly every speaker at SABR did. “The key is to find the questions,” James said. “Once you find a question that is interesting and compelling, it actually makes very little difference to the world as a whole whether you get the answer right or wrong. … Because if you don’t get it right, somebody else will. Every interesting question becomes the basis for sequential research done by a lot of different people, and the first take on the answer is always wrong, somewhat.” As James pointed out, it’s getting harder to come up with these questions, but Alex King and the Indians are asking some.

And best of all, for fans accustomed to teams not letting anything slip, they’re giving us some of the answers. I asked King how he thought his department’s process compared to that of other teams. He was hesitant to put down anyone else’s methods, but he did say that he thinks ThinkVine’s agent-based approach puts the Indians ahead of the curve. The desire to get ahead of the curve, of course, is what brought all of the aforementioned Baseball Ops employees in the crowd to the conference. It’s impossible to imagine any of them taking the stage to tell other teams about their latest innovation. If King is already ahead of the curve, why did he come to SABR to tell other teams about his ideas?

I asked King whether he worried at all about other teams adopting the same methods and catching up to Cleveland. As you might imagine, given the content of his talk, the answer was “no.” King doesn’t see other teams as competitors, from a marketing perspective. If the White Sox were to start using sabermetric marketing and selling more tickets in Chicago, it wouldn’t directly decrease demand for Indians tickets from fans in Cleveland. He’d worry more about another entertainment company in Cleveland optimizing its promotions than he would a baseball team doing the same in some other city.

There were some limits to what King was willing to share, which is understandable: many dollars died to bring the Indians this information. Plus, while teams might not be competing directly when it comes to tickets, more efficient marketing means increased revenue, and increased revenue can translate to improved performance. Steeper competition for Cleveland might mean fewer wins, and less on-field success means fewer fans in the seats. All of which is to say that we should consider ourselves lucky to know as much about the sabermetrics of marketing as we do. It’s a rare treat to hear a team come this close to telling the truth.
Click to expand...

And Bobby, it has been a great decision, man. Truly don't miss it at all.
 
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The roster is starting to take shape.

The obvious starting position players:

Santana
Swisher
Kipnis
Chisenhall
Cabrera
Brantley
Bourn
Stubbs
Reynolds

The rotation, so far:

Masterson
Jimenez
Myers
McAllister

The fifth spot comes down to Kazmir and Carrasco (likely Kazmir). Bauer was optioned today, so we won't see him for at least a month or so.

The bench will feature Aviles and Marson, for sure. Raburn is nearly a lock. Whether or not there is a fourth player will depend on if they decide to go with 13 pitchers instead of 12. If there is a fourth, it would probably be Giambi.

The bullpen, so far:

Hill
Allen
Smith
Pestano
Perez

Competing for the last two or three spots: Albers (likely), Hagadone (likely), Shaw, Barnes and Huff.

Also, here is an article I wrote about the Indians in the World Baseball Classic:


The World Baseball Classic featured five active Cleveland Indians representatives. Now that the much-maligned tournament has come to a close, we can focus on how each of them fared.

Carlos Santana (Dominican Republic)
8 games, 6-for-22, 5 runs scored, double, 2 home runs, 3 runs batted in, 9 walks, 5 strikeouts

This tournament was Carlos Santana in a nutshell. He swung the bat pretty well, he saw and took a ton of pitches, and his defense left something to be desired.

Offensively, he was one of the most productive players in the entire tournament. He deposited two pitches into the droves of rambunctious fans, and came up with a key double that started the Dominican scoring in a 4-1 semifinals victory over the Netherlands.

More to that point, he also lived on base. As has been the case in the past, though, there were times in which Santana was, perhaps, too patient as he struck out looking with the bases loaded on two separate occasions. Alas, it clearly didn't hurt his team any.

Behind the plate, Dominican pitchers really tested him. When dealing with a staff of Edinson Volquez, Samuel Deduno, Pedro Strop and Fernando Rodney, among others, whom possess powerful, wild and/or unpredictable arms, that will happen. There were dozens of bounced breaking balls or ill-commanded fastballs that Santana had to deal with. He also had a few bouts of stabbing at pitches that may have cost his pitchers strikes.

At the end of the day, he caught the vast majority of the eight games, and was on the receiving end of pitchers that gave up a total of 14 runs. That certainly can't be a negative sign for Santana and the job he did.

Between his team going 8-0, his wonderful displays of power and discipline, and the aforementioned success that he and his pitchers shared, he was the Indians' standout representative.

Mike Aviles (Puerto Rico)
9 games, 10-for-31, double, home run, 9 runs batted in, 3 walks, stolen base

Like Santana, Aviles was incredible at the plate. And like Santana, he did it in the way that he usually does.

For Santana, that meant observing many pitches and looking for a fastball to slug. For Aviles, it meant swinging at mostly everything. He carried a Puerto Rico team that featured Carlos Beltran, Yadier Molina and Alex Rios. He was, far and away, the team's best run-producer, and at opportune times. He drove in runs in all three of the team's round-clinching wins, including one that set the pace against Japan to send them to the championship game.

Just for good measure, he singled off new Indians teammate, Vinnie Pestano, in two different games.

Vinnie Pestano (United States)
3 appearances, 2.0 innings, 3 hits, 2 earned runs, 2 walks, 2 strikeouts

Pestano's first two appearances went much like the majority of his in the 2012 season: he came in and took care of business with ease.

The last one, though, was maybe the most forgettable of his young career. In a win-or-go-home contest against Puerto Rico, he gave up the runs that would ultimately put the game just out of reach and send the United States players back to their spring training camps. It happened in the sixth inning, extending a two-run lead to four. Of course, the blame is not all his. America rallied for three runs, but never the fourth, speaking to a lack of offensive production in most games.

Giovanni Soto (Puerto Rico)
2 appearances, 3.2 innings, 3 hits, 1 earned run, 2 walks, 2 strikeouts

The only non-Major League representative, Soto, proved himself all the same. In a Puerto Rico win that clinched their advancement in the first round, he spelled the team's starter by shutting out Venezuela over three innings in a tie game.

Asdrubal Cabrera (Venezuela)
3 games, 1-for-8, 2 walks, 3 strikeouts

For better or worse, Cabrera was probably the least memorable Indian in the tournament. His disappointing Venezuela team was sent home in round one, after losses to the two teams that would eventually go on to play for the championship.

Missing, of course, is Chris Perez, who was selected to the United States team, only to get injured in Goodyear before he left to be with them.

There was and has been plenty of criticism surrounding this tournament. Much was directed towards the United States team. They didn't have their best players (no one did), they didn't care enough (hasty and misguided), the tournament meant more to other countries than it did to them (other countries didn't consist of 28 Major Leaguers), etc.

Aside from 100 or so unexplainable and/or counterproductive sacrifice bunts, this was a mostly well-played, thoroughly entertaining collection of baseball games. If you are a baseball fan that consciously decided to avoid the sport's version of the Olympics, you missed out. I can speak only for myself, but give me the excitement and exuberance displayed throughout over mostly meaningless spring training walkthroughs, always.

I would bet that anyone belonging to a big league team who played in these games over the last two and a half weeks would agree.

Now, the focus shifts back to Cleveland Indians baseball. The earlier-eliminated players have already rejoined their teammates in Goodyear, and Aviles and Santana soon will too.

The bragging rights belong to Santana, who should be proud of his performance and his country.

The sport of baseball, as a whole, should celebrate the product that was the World Baseball Classic.

Indians fans also have a reason for satisfaction. 2013's representatives represented the organization more than admirably.
 
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Official (sort of) roster:

Michael Bourn
Asdrubal Cabrera
Jason Kipnis
Nick Swisher
Michael Brantley
Carlos Santana
Mark Reynolds
Lonnie Chisenhall
Drew Stubbs

Mike Aviles
Ryan Raburn
Lou Marson
Jason Giambi*

Justin Masterson
Ubaldo Jimenez
Brett Myers
Zach McAllister
Scott Kazmir**
Carlos Carrasco***

Matt Albers
Rich Hill
Bryan Shaw
Cody Allen
Nick Hagadone
Joe Smith
Vinnie Pestano
Chris Perez

* - Giambi has been told that he will make the team, but is starting on the disabled list, retroactively. He should only miss about a week.

** - Kazmir has been named the fifth starter, but he won't officially be put on the roster until he is due to start on April 6.

*** - Carrasco will start the season on the roster, but only to get his six-game suspension out of the way now.

So, there will be a lot of movement early. Kazmir and Giambi will be activated around the same time that Carrasco's suspension has been served, at which point he and a reliever should go to Columbus.

Giambi really has little left to offer as a player, and is essentially a coach on the roster. He interviewed for the Rockies' manager job last season, and it wouldn't shock me at all to see him on Francona's staff at some point within the next year. Not sure how it plays out with him taking up a spot on the team, though.

Carrera and Huff won't make the team and are both out of options, so they will likely be moved.
 
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I'm rooting for you guys this year.

On a side note, I was curious if any of you had heard anything about what you will and wont allow Daisuke Matsuzaka to do as far as training programs. Will your organization set this for him or let him do his own thing? I firmly believe the Boston Red Sox organization is 100% responsible for the arm problems he has had since coming to the US. Dice-K used to throw every single day in Japan. His training was often described as "daily marathon throwing sessions." He never had arm problems in his entire life until the Red Sox forbid him from doing this.

I hope you guys let him do whatever HE feels is the best to for his health. I have always been a fan and hope he can be closer to that pitcher that was unhittable in the World Baseball Classic, than the frequently injured, semi productive pitcher we saw in Boston.
 
I honestly have no idea. He accepted a minor-league assignment because he said he felt comfortable with the organization. Bauer does unconventional things that the Indians aren't trying to change or dissuade him from doing like the Diamondbacks did.

Who knows. I'm guessing there are no daily marathon throwing sessions going on anymore, though.

Anyway, last televised spring game... Lindor is going to be so special. The Vizquel comps defensively are very visible, as is his advanced feel and understanding of the game at age 19. As good as Cabrera is, the Indians will be a better team when Lindor is manning short.
 
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I could definitely do without Giamib, other than that..no complaints on the roster.

Are you expecting good things from Chisenhall this year?
 
Yeah. I just wonder exactly how he'll be used. The job is his, but I expect he'll see the bench a lot against left-handers if those struggles continue. That's really the only thing holding him back (not worried about his pitch selection). Francona will surely give him more of a look than Acta did, though. He isn't going to improve in that regard if he's not getting the at-bats. And I think having the job from day one and being healthy (and stronger) will do a lot for him, mentally.

The only "main" players I would say I'm "down on" are Jimenez and Myers. I fully expect Jimenez to be released/traded/sent to the bullpen at some point, and I didn't like the Myers signing at all. The rotation might be pretty brutal, but at least there are better alternatives than there have been (Bauer, Carrasco and Matsuzaka, as opposed to Kluber, Huff, etc.). I think they can patch together a competent enough staff to keep themselves in it with that offense.

This just probably isn't a playoff team... yet. Close.
 
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Kevin Cleveland said:
I honestly have no idea. He accepted a minor-league assignment because he said he felt comfortable with the organization. Bauer does unconventional things that the Indians aren't trying to change or dissuade him from doing like the Diamondbacks did.

Who knows. I'm guessing there are no daily marathon throwing sessions going on anymore, though.
Click to expand...

I just dont understand why not. Why Major League teams have the nerve to tell a guy who has been healthy and successful all his life that his way is wrong and bad for him. If I am the head of a Major League franchise, and I sign Dice-K, I let him do whatever he damn well pleases to get his arm in the kind of shape that made him what he was.

Dont mean to argue with you Kev. Just sayin.
 
Meaningless baseball is over. 17-16-2 record.

Opening Day lineup:

Bourn
Cabrera
Kipnis
Swisher
Brantley
Santana
Reynolds
Chisenhall
Stubbs

Masterson
 
Nothing like starting the season aka "America's Pastime" in Canada.

Nonetheless, ROLL. TRIBE.

Let's go :smokin
 
Well, scratch Kazmir as the fifth starter for now. Suffered an ab strain during workouts yesterday and will likely need a short disabled list stint.

Carrasco is suspended and it won't be Bauer. Probably Kluber for one start, then Carrasco if it's any longer.

Two hours...

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter if you don't already: @KevinIBI.
 
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Starting up soon!


Kev is Indian Baseball Insider (is that what IPI means?) affiliated with the team like do you have any sort of access or tickets?

Just wondering.
 
Yeah, that's what it means. IPI (Prospect) turned into IBI (Baseball).

Minor league access and tickets, yes. The Indians, not so much.
 
Masterson can't make a habit of laboring like that like he did most of last season, but otherwise, absolutely.
 
I really felt confident in our lineup today. Sets up for guys like Lonnie and Stubbs to step up and they had some nice hits tonight.
 
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