Early in the season, the surprise Indians were the surprise of the baseball world, surprising just about every baseball fan in that surprising kind of way. They were a surprise. Every season has to have one, and the Indians were that team. Surprise!
Series Preview: Cleveland Indians At Detroit Tigers
A couple of months after the 4,209,039 different articles on the surprising Cleveland Indians, though, we're kind of used to them. They've hung around the top of the division, and they made a huge dealine trade like contending teams are supposed to do. Even though they had a pretty wicked slump to allow the Detroit Tigers back in the race, we're pretty used to the idea of the Indians playing meaningful baseball late into the 2011 season.
The Tigers and Indians are starting a three-game series in Detroit, and it’s almost certainly the biggest series of the weekend. The Indians are a game-and-a-half back before play starts on Friday night, and it’s the kind of series that can make a team, break a team, or change very little other than moving one team slightly closer to the other. The smart money’s on that last one. But it’s a good chance to re-reevaluate the AL Central with the knowledge that the Indians are a pretty solid team and that the Tigers are as well -- points that we didn’t quite have in April when the Indians were still stunning the world and the Tigers were pretty lousy.
So the urgent question, then is which team is better on paper?
Hitting
The Indians have been hit hard with injuries this season, losing Shin-Soo Choo to a broken hand and Grady Sizemore to lower-torso failure. They finally ejected Orlando Cabrera from the roster, but only to have hot-hitting Jason Kipnis hit the DL. Their team OPS+ is at 99, right at the league average.
The Tigers, on the other hand, have been hitting the snot out of the ball, getting contributions from the expected sources (Victor Martinez, Miguel Cabrera) and the unexpected (Jhonny Peralta, Alex Avila) all season. Their team OPS+ is 108, which is the third-best mark in the AL, and fourth-best in the majors.
More importantly than the full-season OPS+, though, is the lineup both teams have put out there recently. The Tigers traded Casper Wells, an early-season contributor, and recently acquired Delmon Young. The Indians gave up on offensive sinkholes Austin Kerns and Travis Buck, and the Indians' last lineup was downright respectable, even without Kipnis:
Michael Brantley-LF
Jason Donald-2B
Asdrubal Cabrera-SS
Travis Hafner-DH
Carlos Santana-C
Shin-Soo Choo-RF
Kosuke Fukudome-CF
Matt LaPorta-1B
Jack Hannahan-3B
It's not the Red Sox, but compared to some of the things they were going with in July, it's a start. The Tigers are probably a little better, but not by much right now.
Pitching
The Tigers have Justin Verlander. Thus endeth the nice things you can say about the Tigers' starting pitching.
Well, that's not completely fair. Max Scherzer has been pitching much better since getting shellacked by the Giants (?!) on July 2nd, dropping his ERA by almost a run. His peripherals are still quite nice, so it's possible that he's been the victim of some bad luck this season.
The Indians built a lot of that April lead on their starting pitching, and their midseason slide came as pitchers like Josh Tomlin and Justin Masterson regressed a little bit. But Masterson has been fantastic over the last two months, and while it's an open debate whether or not the Indians gave up too much for Ubaldo Jimenez, he is a fantastic fit for the Indians over the next month-and-a-half, at least.
So which team is better? That’s the urgent question, after all. And the answer is: dunno.
The Indians are better than you thought in March, worse than you might have thought in April, but better still than you might have thought when they dropped to .500 in early August. The Tigers are about as good as expected. Both teams are pretty evenly matched (and the White Sox are still around, too). No one is running away with the AL Central, which considering the other two divisions in the AL, is a good thing for baseball fans looking for a good race.
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