It’s looking like it might be that time. What time is that?
Time to categorically blow up the Indians (Chief Wahoo included).
I’m still sorting through exactly what’s happened this year, what’s happened over the past few years, whose fault it is, and what should be done about it. I’m hoping some of those answers can be revealed over the course of a series of columns about the Indians organization as we stand back and watch the whole thing burn to the ground over the next three months.
But I believe this season’s problems start with what was done in the offseason.
Last year, we know that much of the Indians’ troubles were blamed on the bullpen. So, this past offseason, Mark Shapiro traded for Joe Smith and signed Kerry Wood. This was supposed to solve the problem. Larry Dolan added salary at a time when almost no other team was doing so, giving Kerry Wood a two year contract at $20.5M. This move to get a closer was deemed especially important by Eric Wedge (aka “Wedgie”) who made a point of saying how important it was to a team’s psychology to have someone at the back end of the bullpen who could shut the door on the opposition.
Yesterday, Kerry Wood blew his 4th save of the year in 12 opportunities.
Joe Smith has an ERA of 6.17.
Today, thanks to Jeremy Sowers, it isn’t looking like Wood will have the chance.
As a team, the Indians have blown 50% of their save opportunities in 2009, which is 13th in the AL. For those of you who want to keep track of these kinds of things, there are 14 teams in the American League.
Last season, the Indians completed 61% of their save opportunities (10th in the AL).
In other words, what was believed to be a bad bullpen last year has only gotten worse.
Of course, these stats don’t tell the whole story - Indians’ starters have also lost 25 games - but they do suggest that things haven’t gone like Shapiro planned they would this off-season.
Why is that?
A fair question to ask is whether or not the Indians’ bullpen really was the problem last season.
If you look at the 2008 combined ERA of the big dogs from the Indians’ pen (Borowski, Mujica, Perez, Bettancourt, Lewis, Kobayashi) you’ll find that it was 4.69.
That doesn’t look like a great number.
The Indians total pitching staff had an ERA of 4.45, which suggests that the starting pitching was only marginally better than the bullpen. Overall, the team gave up 4.70 runs per game (the discrepancy between this number and the ERA comes from extra inning games and games in which the Indians’ opponent didn’t have to bat in the 9th).
The AL average of runs given up per game was 4.68 in 2008, so the Indians were just slightly below average as a team.
In other words, the starting pitching was almost as much of a problem as the bullpen - but neither was terrible. They were both middle of the pack. However, we can understand why Shapiro attacked the bullpen with more intensity since it was in fact worse than the starting rotation.
But here’s where Shapiro’s decisions start to unravel - and they begin with Jensen Lewis.
Lewis finished last season with 13 saves in 14 opportunities for an outstanding 93% success rate. Had Lewis been the closer for all of 2008, the season might have gone differently as, overall, the team blew 20 of their 51 save opportunities. Let’s say that hypothetically Lewis had closed all of the team’s games in 2008. Let’s also assume he did so at a less stratospheric success rate of 80% (which would have been second in the AL). The result?
The Indians could have added 10 wins to their total.
91 wins would have won the division by at least two games.
Presumably, this is why Shapiro decided to focus on a closer - since not blowing saves can be the difference between winning and losing a pennant. So he signed Kerry Wood, who saved 85% of his opportunities last year for the Cubs, even better than the hypothetical number we’ve assumed for Lewis.
Yes, Wood’s percentage was based on a larger sample size - but he was still only a closer for one season - and it still wasn’t a better number than Lewis’s actual save percentage.
In other words, Shapiro decided to spend $10M dollars in 2009 on a player the Indians already had - when he could have spent that money on a player the Indians didn’t have. Like, say, a starting pitcher.
The counter to all of this, of course, is that Lewis has been an unmitigated disaster this sesaon, blowing 4 out of 5 saves with an ERA of 5.40. Some might argue then that the Indians would have been in even worse trouble if they hadn’t signed Wood in the off-season and had decided to stick with Lewis.
Obviously, we don’t know how the hypothetical player they might have signed instead of Wood could be producing right now, so it’s a little bit hard to quanitfy this argument exactly, but I also don’t think it’s fair to look at Lewis’s statistics in a vacuum. After all, shouldn’t we expect there to be some sort of repercussion when a player is moved away from a position he’d been highly successful in, particularly when the position he’s moved into is widely believed to be a lesser role? Make no mistake about it - the Indians asked Lewis to be the closer, he performed as well as anyone in the game, and then they demoted him.
What kind of sign do the Indians send the rest of their team and the orginazation when that is how they reward success?
No doubt Lewis is confused and frustrated and probably angry, even moreso when he watches Wood struggle.
The franchise seems to be at a critical point. Wedge and Shapiro have been to the playoffs one time. The team was one win away from the World Series in 2007 and they have done nothing but get worse since.
The organization has to go one way or the other. And, it’s becoming clear to me that the way the Indians should have went at the beginning of the season was with Jensen Lewis as the closer.
(view comments)
