This wasn’t how 2015 was supposed to go for Cleveland. More than half of ESPN’s preseason prognosticators predicted the Indians to win the AL Central for the first time since 2007. The team was coming off consecutive winning seasons for the first time since 2000-01. And Sports Illustrated even put the Indians on the magazine’s cover, with the tagline “Wait till this year. Why Cleveland? Why not Cleveland? Why the Tribe will win its first Series since 1948.”
But the Indians haven’t had a winning record since April 9 and, despite a current five-game winning streak—their first time all year winning more than two games in a row—sit in last place in the division, where they have been mired for all but one day for the past month.
To answer the SI cover: why not Cleveland? Because the Tribe can’t catch the ball.
That answer is probably obvious for fans who have been watching the Indians daily, but for the rest of us, a statistical analysis makes clear that the team’s defense—an oftentimes underappreciated facet of the game—has been the main factor behind its slow start to the season. Indians pitchers have been great at striking hitters out, an outcome they have achieved more often than any team in history; it’s when the batters make contact that Cleveland gets into trouble.
Cleveland last year posted the highest strikeout rate in league history, fanning 8.89 batters per 9 innings. This year’s squad is outpacing that record by an incredible amount, ending play on Friday with a 9.85 K/9 ratio. More than a quarter of opposing batters’ plate appearances have ended in a strikeout, and each of the team’s top four starters ranks near the top of the league in strikeout rate.
But when batters put the ball in play and shift the responsibility from Cleveland’s pitchers to its fielders, the Indians go from the best in the league to one of its worst. Cleveland allowed a .352 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in April, the worst mark for any team in the season’s opening month since at least 1973 (as far back as FanGraphs’s monthly splits go). Going back to 1900, that .352 mark is worse than any team has allowed over a full season, and even a terrible defensive team like Cleveland would expect that outlier to correct itself by regressing closer to the league average.
Indeed, in May, that number is down to a more manageable .305, a mark still worse than league average but one that is more in line with what would be expected over the course of a whole season. That difference is profound—.305 is closer to the Royals’ league-leading mark than it is to .352—and amounts to at least an extra baserunner per game, on average, for which pitchers have to account.
Cleveland entered the season with a promising quartet of under-30 starters: Corey Kluber, last year’s surprise Cy Young winner; Carlos Carrasco, who had a 1.30 ERA and struck out 78 batters in his last 10 starts last season; Danny Salazar, long touted for his electrifying talent; and Trevor Bauer, a former top-10 prospect. But so far, only Bauer has an ERA in the top 20 in the AL, while the other three pitchers have vastly underperformed their underlying numbers.
The slow starts for Kluber (1-5 record, 3.79 ERA after going 18-9, 2.44 last year) and Carrasco (4.74 ERA, vs. 2.55 last year) can be explained by their inflated BABIPs, with each pitcher holding one of the 10 worst marks for any qualified pitcher since 1900. For the most part, the two arms at the top of the rotation have pitched as well overall as they did in their breakouts last year, but that balance hasn’t been borne out in their game-to-game results.
With a 12.37 K/9 rate, Salazar has been the most prolific strikeout pitcher this season; Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson are the only starters in history to post a rate higher than 12 for a full season. But Salazar’s ERA has been inflated thanks to the third-highest HR/FB rate (the percentage of fly balls allowed that become home runs) in the American League, and a correction toward his career average would turn some of those damaging home runs into harmless flyouts.
The advanced metric FIP (fielding independent pitching) attempts to strip out the often random factors that can affect a pitcher’s performance, such as BABIP; the metric modifies ERA by controlling for these fickle variables. By this measure, the Indians’ scuffling starters rate much better than they do by ERA.
A step beyond FIP is expected FIP, or xFIP, which further controls for the fluctuating rates at which the fly balls a pitcher allows become home runs. By this measure, someone like Salazar would expect to see an improved ERA as the season goes on and his home-run rate returns to a less extreme level.
As the above chart suggests, Cleveland’s pitchers have been among the most dominant in the league when stripping away the impact of the substandard fielding behind them—and given that FIP and xFIP are better indicators of future performance than ERA, it follows that the Indians’ pitching woes could soon be taking a turn for the better (or, with the team allowing just 11 runs in its last five games, may already be doing so).
But here’s where an important sabermetic caveat comes in: it’s easy to conclude that the Indians’ pitching BABIP is an extreme and will therefore regress to the mean, in turn improving the pitchers’ performance, but this particular roster may simply be prone to allowing more hits relative to an average team.
It’s a truism that bad defensive teams allow more hits than good defensive teams. In the time during which advanced defensive metrics have been available (since 2003), the worst teams by these measures have consistently allowed the most hits. Of the 20 worst single-season teams by defensive runs saved, 19 placed below league average in BABIP, and more than half of the 20 were among the five worst teams by BABIP in their respective years.
This pattern should be worrisome for fans hoping the Indians’ luck on balls hit in play will continue to improve as it has from April to May. Cleveland was the worst fielding team in baseball last year, both by errors and the advanced metric defensive runs saved. And so far in 2015, the numbers haven’t been much kinder to Cleveland’s fielders. The Indians have 29 errors, fourth most in the AL, and have allowed 20 unearned runs, the league’s second-highest mark; the team also has also been the second worst by defensive runs saved.
Individually, Cleveland’s regulars are among the league’s worst at their respective positions. By ultimate zone rating, among players with 500 innings at a position since the start of 2013, only two of the Indians’ seven starters (catcher is excluded from this metric) rank above league average and the rest rank near the bottom of the American League. (Similar results from other defensive measures support this conclusion.)
With such a bevy of wannabe designated hitters manning the positions behind the strikeout machines on the mound, it may not be as simple as just praying to the regression gods and seeing the team’s BABIP drop and wins spike accordingly. After all, Kluber can’t do everything himself—he’s the Cy Young winner, not Bugs Bunny.
Elsewhere, Cleveland’s offense has been mediocre, ranking ninth in the AL in runs. It’s been a mixed bag for the lineup, which has been buoyed by a pair of All-Star-quality performers. Leftfielder Michael Brantley has better numbers than last year, when he was finished third in MVP voting and was the best outfielder in the majors not named Trout; meanwhile, second baseman Jason Kipnis has been the AL’s best hitter in May, posting an absurd .463/.546/.732 line and the highest on-base-plus slugging average for any AL batter in the month since 2000.
But the batters at the bottom of the order have flirted more with the Mendoza line than with a potential All-Star berth. At third base, Lonnie Chisenhall seems to have taken a step back in his development—the Indians’ former top prospect has so far tallied career lows in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage and has the worst offensive numbers of any third baseman in the majors. Even worse has been shortstop Jose Ramirez, who has the worst OPS of any qualified player at any position.
Behind the plate, the team has struggled due to the lengthy absence of Yan Gomes, who suffered an MCL sprain in the fifth game of the season. From 2013-14, Gomes hit .284/.325/.476, a line 24% better than league average, but replacements Roberto Perez and Brett Hayes have hit just .174 and managed numbers 18% worse than average so far. Gomes is slated to return to the team on Sunday and should provide a boost both in the lineup and on the field, where he is one of the top defensive catchers in the game.
But the damage in the season’s first month and a half has been enough to put a serious dent in Cleveland’s playoff aspirations. According to FanGraphs, the Indians’ postseason odds have been slashed almost in half since the start of the season (58% then to just 33% now), and the history of slow-starting teams attempting to rebound and make a playoff run is not encouraging.
The Indians’ winning percentage on May 15 was just .382. According to analysis in The Hardball Times, only twice in the last century has a team with a sub-.400 record on May 15 gone on to win the pennant, and just four such slow-starting teams have won their division.
Similarly, since the expansion to three divisions in 1995, just three teams that entered Memorial Day in last place have won their division—but only one of those three had a losing record while in last place (the 2013 Dodgers). Four other clubs in that situation advanced to the playoffs via the wild card route, and those odds—just seven of 120 last-place clubs qualifying for the postseason, almost all of them having the best record in their respective leagues from Memorial Day through the end of the season—are what Cleveland is up against for the rest of the season.
And they’ll be up against those odds while playing in the best division in baseball from spots one through five. The Royals have the best record of any first-place team, the Tigers the best of any second-place team, the Twins the best of any third-place team, the White Sox the best of any fourth-place team, and the Indians of any last-place team. Overall, AL Central teams have a .657 winning percentage—translating to 106 wins across a full season—against teams from other divisions.
Not surprisingly, then, the Indians have faced the second-hardest schedule of any team to start the year, and also not surprisingly, the past week’s winning streak coincided with Cleveland’s easiest stretch so far. With series against Texas and fellow underachievers Baltimore and Seattle (twice) coming in the next two weeks, now is an opportune time for the Indians to start combatting those long odds.
Regardless of what happens the rest of the season, the Indians are well positioned for the coming years. After next season, the onerous contracts of Michael Bourn and Nick Swisher—who account for a remarkable third of the team’s payroll despite combining for a meager .236/.302/.342 line since the start of last season—will be off the books, giving the team ample payroll flexibility.
Triple-A shortstop Francisco Lindor—who placed fourth in Baseball Prospectus’s preseason prospect ranking, one spot ahead of Cubs wunderkind Kris Bryant— is poised to join a young core that should lead the Indians for a long time: Kluber, Carrasco, Brantley, Kipnis, and Gomes have all signed team-friendly extensions in the last year and a half.
Cleveland appears poised to contend in the American League for years to come. But wait till this year? Probably not.