Team's get hot. You have to deal with it. Remember that schedule we touted so much? How incredibly easy it looked compared to the first half schedule?

That's all well and good, but you know you are going to run into some teams that you are supposed to beat that may be playing good enough ball. It happens, which is what is happening now in facing the Mariners. Are the Indians playing well? Not particularly, but they aren't playing horribly. They're a better team than Seattle. They're just not playing better right now. 

You just have to hope at some point the Indians can make up for these losses in another way. If not, then we know what will happen.

INDIANS - 3 | MARINERS - 4

W: Erasmo Ramirez (1-0)

L: Zach McAllister (4-6)

S: Tom Wilhelmsen (23)

[BOXSCORE]

Not a sharp Zach McAllister in his return to a major league mound. But that can be expected with his long layoff and few rehab outings. 

Still, it wasn't a bad Zach McAllister. One good enough to get through five innings with only three earned runs. If not for some shaky defense, maybe he could have thrown less pitches, and he definitely wouldn't have surrendered that fourth run.

Which was ultimately and unfortunately the difference in the game.

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"All things end badly, otherwise they wouldn't end."

It's probably one of the greatest lines you're going to pull out of any Tom Cruise, though arguments will be heard regarding ghostriders and full patterns, and as our favorite TV shows of the late 90s and early 2000s conclude, we are honest enough with ourselves to know that they will probably end badly.  Seinfeld was a train wreck, the masses didn't care for The Sopranos instant blackout, and The Office was at the tail end of a 2-year tailspin when a passable finale bailed it out.  Make no mistake about it; they all ended badly. So too, has every season of Indians baseball, from Mark Lewis's strikeout for the final out at Municipal Stadium to Edgar Renteria's ground ball up the middle at whatever Joe Robbie was called on that particular night in 1997.

They all end badly.  For many, this summer will be the time to start fooling ourselves that it will be different, that Vince Gilligan has something up his sleeve, and the final act of The Ballad of Walter White will satiate our needs as viewers.  So, why should Breaking Bad be any different?  Is it because we know we're watching something great as it's happening?  I don't think we really knew that as we watched The Wire, not until it was over and we looked back.  Even with that being the case, it didn't end well; it just ended, with a very up-front lesson in reality.  The bad guy doesn't always lose.  Not to go all Hawk Harrelson here, but it's okay to refer to the home team as the "good guys" in the case of the Indians, and we've dealt with the same reality for 65 years.

The good guys never win.  It always ends badly.

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Seventy-two days. Sixty-seven games. That is all that is left of the 2013 Major League Baseball regular season for the Cleveland Indians. As the Indians begin play in the “second half” of the season, they sit just 1.5 games behind the heavily favored Detroit Tigers in the American League Central Division, 6.5 games ahead of the Kansas City Royals. It will be a two-team race for the next 10 weeks as the Indians try to take advantage of a friendly schedule to punch their first postseason ticket in six years.

The Tigers have been installed as a 1/5 favorite at the Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, giving them an implied probability of 83 percent to win the division. Baseball Prospectus gives the Tigers an 84.2 percent chance of winning the division while the Indians have a 15.4 percent chance of winning the division and a 16.7 percent chance of being one of the two wild card teams. In total, Baseball Prospectus gives the Indians a 32.1 percent chance of making the playoffs. If you had been given those odds back on April 2, would you have been happy with that?

To date, it’s been a roller coaster ride for Indians fans. The team opened the season 2-0 and lost 13 of its next 19. At 8-13, the Indians rattled off 18 wins in 22 games for a 26-17 record, the high point of the season at nine games over .500. By June 10, a span of 20 games, the Indians were 30-33. By June 30, the Indians had a record of 44-38, going 14-5 the rest of the month. The Indians entered the All-Star Break at 51-44. Including off days, the Indians spent 17 days in first place over the first 95 games, leading by as many as 2.5 games. The biggest deficit was 5.5 games on June 17. From June 17-July 14, the Indians went 17-9 and picked up four games in the standings, despite losing three out of four to the Tigers during that span.

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Well if pitching ain't the problem. Then I don't know what is. 

You certainly can't blame two solo shots as reasons to lose. So you must blame an offense that has struggled and sputtered over the course of the past week since the break ended.

INDIANS - 1 | MARINERS - 2

W: Aaron Harang (5-8)

L: Ubaldo Jimenez (7-5)

S: Tom Wilhelmsen (22)

[BOXSCORE]

I guess you could consider Seattle a hot team. They came into this winning six straight with a reverse record to the Tribe, so they aren't horrible. But you kind of expect more than one run off Aaron Harang and company.

They simply did not make Harang work enough. He was able to get through seven innings, barely breaking a sweat. Seattle's bullpen is the second worst in the American League and the Indians did not get a real good chance to dig into it. Something you have to do when you have an opposing team with a weak bullpen. Even Harang knew the Indians had to go with that game plan, and they still couldn't stop him.

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