The Cleveland Indians’ offseason was unusual, which is fitting for a franchise that’s been an anomaly in the major leagues these past seven seasons.
Since Terry Francona took over as manager (and I’m not attributing this success primarily to him—it’s just a convenient inflection point), Cleveland has had a winning season every year, has made the playoffs in four of six years, and came brutally close to winning the 2016 World Series.
This in itself isn’t all that unusual. Plenty of teams maintain success over a six or seven-year period.
But generally, people show up to watch those teams play.
Since 2013 (Francona’s first season), Cleveland fans have never put together an attendance ranking higher than last year’s 21st-place finish. In 2016, in which the Tribe won 94 games and nearly brought home a World Series title, they ranked 28th in the league, just behind fans of the 79-82 Miami Marlins. They’ve never quite finished last, thanks in large part to that heartbreaking expanse of fiberglass and artificial turf a mile off the shores of Tampa Bay, but they aren’t exactly selling out The Jake.
Not entirely a consequence of this, but probably related, is the fact that Larry Dolan, like many professional sports owners, is losing money most years on the Indians. This ignores the fact that professional sports teams have wildly appreciated as assets since Dolan bought the franchise in 1999 (the Boston Red Sox sold for nearly $700 million in 2002, the Miami Marlins sold for $1.2 billion in 2017, and those aren’t exactly comparable franchises), and is therefore somewhat disingenuous to say without that caveat, but Dolan isn’t lying when he says the Indians lose money every year.
Within that context, the Indians had the aforementioned unusual offseason. With one of the best rosters in the league, they focused not on adding extra pieces to contend with the Astros, Red Sox, and Yankees for the title of the American League’s best, but on paring payroll while extending their window to stay ahead of the Twins and the Central Division’s trio of “rebuilding” franchises. Cleveland went so far as to reportedly flirt with trade offers for their aces—Corey Kluber, Trevor Bauer, and Carlos Carrasco—though they ended up holding on to all three, and extended Carrasco.
The game theory on this is intriguing. No team enters baseball’s playoffs in any given year with better than a 25% chance of winning the World Series, thanks to the extent to which parity exists in baseball as a sport and the MLB’s rather egalitarian playoff structure. Since the change in playoff structure in 2012, there’s now a major incentive to win one’s division and thereby avoid the wild card game, and there are certainly major advantages to holding a higher seed, but it’s nearly impossible, in baseball’s current state, to position a roster such that its World Series odds are better than those of flipping ‘heads’ on two coins at the same time.
What the Indians seem to be doing, then, is maximizing the amount of times they get to flip the coins. They’re willing to play longer odds if they get to play those odds a greater number of times. It’s a debatable strategy, but its logic is understandable if one accepts that Dolan’s ownership group will never spend like, say, George Steinbrenner. Within the context of today’s MLB, it also fits the description of swimming against the current strategically, a concept that, while not flawless, can lead to the exploitation of inefficiencies. Regardless of whether the specific moves were the right moves, the general strategy at least makes sense conceptually.
It especially made sense this offseason within the context of their division. The Royals were going to be bad. The Tigers were going to be bad. The White Sox were going to be bad. Only the Twins stood out as possible competition for that valuable division title, and they weren’t exactly going out and signing Manny Machado.
But then the Twins got good.
Weirdly good.
Possibly unsustainably good.
But nonetheless concerningly good.
Since March 19th, the day before the Mariners and A’s opened the baseball season in Japan, the Minnesota Twins have gone from a FanGraphs projection of 85.4 wins, with an 11.1% likelihood of winning the American League Central, to a projection of 91.3 wins, with a 46.7% chance of winning the Central. On FiveThirtyEight, whose projections tend to be more conservative, they’ve gone from a projected 84-win season with a 20% chance of winning the division to a projected 92-win season, with a 52% chance of winning the division.
The Twins are winning games at an alarming pace (alarming for the Indians, that is), and they’ve already played the entirety of their games against the Astros, not to mention their road series against the Yankees. They have yet to play the White Sox a single time. Yes, they might fade, and their current success has defied the odds, but they’re to be taken seriously—perhaps more seriously than the Indians took them in, say, December.
Helping the Twins’ cause is the development that the Indians have struggled a bit out of the gate. They’re still projected by FanGraphs to win 92.0 games, but that’s dropped from a 96.7-win projection in March, and FiveThirtyEight has shown a similar downturn in their forecast (down to 91 from 95). The projections for the two teams feed off of one another, given how often they play head-to-head and given they’re each other’s primary competition, so the combined effect of the Twins playing better than expected so far and the Indians playing more poorly than expected is greater than the effect of either of those happenings without the other. And the consequence of all that, to the Indians, is that their title chances have dropped significantly. On FanGraphs, the likelihood that they win the World Series is down from 13.0% preseason to 8.3% today. On FiveThirtyEight, it’s dropped from 8% to 6%.
Cleveland’s problems aren’t limited to the Twins, of course. Corey Kluber’s arm was broken by a Brian Anderson line drive. Carlos Carrasco is suddenly drawing a lot more fly balls than ground balls, leading to a spike in his opponents’ home run numbers. The Indians’ offense’s collective batting average on balls in play, a number very susceptible to the effects of luck, is .270, which would be the worst for any team since 2010 if sustained over the entire season.
It’s a bad combination of events for Cleveland. An unlucky combination of events. But it’s come against a strategy more easily impacted by bad luck than that of teams willing to chase a single championship, and with that, the strategy is under fire. Which is fair in that results matter, but unfair in that a different sequence of luck would result in very different results.
Where do things go from here? Even with their worsened odds, the Indians still have the fourth-highest probability of any team of winning the World Series, according to FanGraphs, and are tied for that distinction with two other teams, according to FiveThirtyEight. And, of course, trades are always an option, as is signing Craig Kimbrel to bolster a middling bullpen (though that seems laughably unlikely for Cleveland). The vast majority of the season has yet to play out, and the American League playoff race currently looks like a six-team affair for only five spots. The Indians are still about 50% likely to win their division, and in circumstances in which they don’t, a wild card appearance is about 50% likely.
The Indians might win the World Series.
The Indians might give Larry Dolan a black eye.
The Indians might land somewhere in the middle of those two fringe-ish scenarios.
We’ll see.
