Indians Preview

The Indians are not a good baseball team. Not this season, anyway.

In baseball, numbers largely speak for themselves. So here is how they stack up compared to the rest of the majors:
23rd in batting average
26th in home runs
25th in RBI
25th in hits

That's their offense. The pitching is even worse. Remember, these numbers are out of 30 teams:
24th in ERA
30th in strikeouts
29th in saves
28th in WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched)

Although the number could speak for themselves, these may say more than they should. Home runs are not necessarily a big deal for an offense to be successful. The Blue Jays lead the majors in home runs yet sit 4th in their own division. The Diamondbacks are 4th in home runs and are dead last in the NL West. But group no home runs with a low batting average, not many RBI, and a team that struggles to get hits, and things don't look good for the Indians.

Pitching numbers can be deceiving too. ERA and WHIP will generally speak for itself, but strikeouts and saves don't necessarily mean too much for a team's success. The Phillies are toward the bottom in each of those categories as well. Still, the combination of bad stats for the Indians adds up to an overall poor outlook for the team this season.

It seems like this is exactly the team that the Phillies need to be playing right now to help make sure the ship is completely righted. However, all of those numbers can only say so much when talking about an individual series. We know Jamie Moyer, Kyle Kendrick, and Joe Blanton all too well this season. Although all 3 have had moments of greatness (some more than others), Phillies fans have suffered numerous times with any one of these 3 men on the mound.

A statistic that is not kept in baseball (although it definitely is, it just isn't readily available), is games in which pitchers give up an unreasonable amount of runs and really make their offense and bullpen work to win a game. Let's call that number of runs 5. Can we all agree on 5? Ok, 5 it is. So...
In 35 combined starts this season, Moyer, Kendrick, and Blanton have given up 5 or more runs in 15 of them. That's about 43% of the time they pitch, they completely screw over the rest of the team.
In 41 starts by Mitch Talbot, Jake Westbrook, and Fausto Carmona (the Indians' starters this series), they have done this just 9 times. That's about 22% of the time.

These numbers obviously depend on who those players are playing against and things like that, but a disparity like this one would show that a series featuring these pitching match-ups is not one that we should necessarily feel comfortable about. In a way, it's like our pitchers are twice as likely to completely melt down in these 3 games as their pitchers are. I know that Jamie Moyer can go out and throw 7 innings giving up 2 runs. I also know he can throw 4 innings giving up 7. Same with Kyle Kendrick. And same with Joe Blanton.

This is a series that, by the numbers (or at least the numbers everyone sees), we should win. We should sweep it really. But, unfortunately for the Phillies this season, baseball is not played on paper. Let's hope that we can have the good versions of our starters show up along with the offense that we know and love.

I could give a prediction for this series, but these pitchers and our offense have been far too unpredictable for me to do anything that stupid.

(But I think we sweep it, average 8 runs a game. Don't quote me on that)