Collateral Beauty

Keeping our collective eyes on the goal, tonight looks pretty bad for the Indians.  

First, let's be real.   IF we get to the playoffs, any team could knock us off.  This is especially true in a 5-game playoff series.   Still, everything being equal, the league championship series should be harder than the divisional playoff series. 

Plus, you have the rest of the regular season.   The AL Central championship is NOT guaranteed by any means.

However, if you look ahead and ASSUME (you know what they say about ASS-U-ME) we can hold on to the Central lead, the goal would be to play the wildcard winner instead of Boston, and have the Astros have to play Boston with the winner likely to be softened up for us if we win the first series.  To do that we would have to overtake Houston which, until tonight, looked more and more possible.

Well, all that took a turn for the worse tonight.   The Astros got Justin Verlander which clearly tilts the power in the AL more towards the Astros.  This will  make catching the Astros that much more difficult. Remember the boost we got when we acquired Jay Bruce?   Expect the same thing out of the Astros now.

Plus, the only deadline acquisition that made sense for the Indians, Brandon Phillips, went to the Angels. 

So, tonight didn't help the Indians and, with the Astros trade, made it much more difficult to get to the World Series. 

Will the Astros getting Verlander actually hurt the Indians psyche and cause them to go into a tailspin?  Let's hope not.  However, in the back of their minds they have to be asking themselves if beating the Houston Astros in the playoffs now became more unlikely.  That, plus the fact that the Twins are not currently putting pressure on the Indians, could get us out of whack. 

Still, look around you.   We are in first place, playing great ball and we don't even have Salazar, Miller, Brantley, Chisenhall or Kipnis right now.   If Kipnis would come back at 2016 levels for the rest of the way and Brantley and Chisenhall just return, by the playoffs, the their early season form, we should be just that much better.  If Salazar comes back to his pre-most-recent-injury levels and Miller returns to early season form, our pitching staff would still likely be the best in baseball, Even our catchers are hitting much better than last year when we went to the 7th game of the Series and without Bruce and Encarnacion, our 4-5 hitters now. 

So, the FIRST PLACE Cleveland Indians didn't get better tonight.   The collateral beauty is, well, they are the first place Cleveland Indians, ahead by 6.5 games going into the doubleheader tomorrow in a series where we won't have to face Verlander.  Lots of collateral beauty to be liking there!

So, let's look at the collateral beauty and hope the Indians do the same thing tomorrow afternoon.