Monday night’s Indians-Tigers game was one of those moments that often lead to other moments. One of those moments that you -- down the road however far – realize was the finger that flicked the first domino.
It’s only the first week of August. There is still a lot of baseball left to be played. The Indians were still only four games out as of Tuesday morning. They’re in the thick of the wild card chase. They still have another series left against the Tigers, at the end of the month in Detroit.
And yet….in those moments of postmortem lucidity, when you look back at what this season ultimately became, you can’t help but think you might finger Monday’s game as the point when the division slipped away. The point when the Indians went from a fight for homefield advantage in the division series to, at best, the wild card and a first-round date with the Red Sox, who won six of seven against the Indians this year.
The Indians came into this week absolutely needing no worse than a split with Detroit. Maintain your three-game deficit, and the division is still quite winnable. Let Detroit take three of four, and their lead swells to five games. Let them come into your house and sweep four games from you, and their seven-game cushion all but signals the end of the division race.
Jhonny Peralta’s 50-game doping suspension and Miguel Cabrera’s bum hip would seem to work in favor of the Tribe's chances of at least clawing out a split. But the concrete evidence of the season series to date (a 9-3 Tigers advantage), and the Tribe’s often-combustible bullpen, can rot wood faster than you can build a raft out of it.
The Indians announced a contract extension to Ryan Raburn on Wednesday afternoon that keeps him in an Indians uniform through 2015. The deal, worth a minimum of $4.85M with a $3M option for 2016, comes as Raburn is having a career year at the plate. The Indians initially signed Raburn to a minor league contract with an invitation to Spring Training this past winter. Now, he’ll be a fixture on the Indians’ bench for the next two seasons, and possibly a third.
Growing up, your world is small. As you get older, it gets bigger, but you lose the innocence that comes with a certain amount of ignorance about the ways of the world. You don't understand any level of perspective that isn't your own, because you have very few points of reference. Those people with the funny accents that come to Cleveland Stadium, just to root for the Yankees, are bad people. In fact, it's difficult to understand why people in Pittsburgh like the Steelers so much, and why their parents raised them to be so awful. So life comes at you, and you come around; you are supposed to cope with the fact that Cleveland is not actually the center of the universe in any way, shape, or form. In some places, the Cleveland Indians are the "bad guys" and that maybe you are looked up in a negative light for liking them, and hoping they made some other kids' "good guys" lose.
Just a quick Weekend Wrap this week to touch on a couple national issues that caught our attention and led to a lot of conversation. In both cases I’d like to see a whole more shutting of the cake holes and whole less of what most people think.
I could not sleep Monday night and it had nothing to do with the sunburn that I'm dealing with. I'm going to reveal a behind the scenes trick right now, but I write most of the Rundown the night before it actually goes up. My job requires me to be at work early, so I get up ridiculously early to make sure everything is still good, double-check it, and add in quotes or finish up the game recap. 