DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Cleveland Indians Opening Day and Assorted Stuff

AND we have tomorrow off...

Well that's that...

J/C...

General gripe about the MLB schedule. What's the friggin deal with the schedule, as a whole, this year? You get the random/irrelevant A's vs. Mariners "opener" in Japan, Miami has a one game homestand to open their ugly half filled ballpark against the World Series champs, half the league starts today and has tomorrow off, half the league starts tomorrow. Who thought this was a great way to kick off a national holiday for baseball fans?

Every single team in baseball should have "Opening Day" on the same day (other than maybe take the NFL route with the previous champ and have them in primetime the night before - at home).

/end gripe.

FYI, our batting average leaders are Shelly Duncan and Jack Hannahan. Go Tribe!

Good work Tribe, besides the second, four hits in 15 innings!

Hats off to the pitching staff, but that lineup is laughable. Sorry, it is.

Longest opener in MLB history.

Yipee . . .

*Sigh*

Rough way to open the year.

how the heck did we top our worst opener from the past 6 years?

We are Cleveland sports fans. No failure should be surprising to us by now.

It was a microcosm of the entire 2011 season: jump out to a lead early on, don't do anything, watch the lead dwindle down the stretch and eventually get blown away.

Yup... we've seen this movie before and I don't like how it ends.

Nonetheless, its only game 1 of 162. Hopefully, we'll shake this one off and play more like we did in th first half of last season going forward.

Geez.. Chris Perez goes to the mound with a lead, decides to take a gas can with him and proceeds to play with matches.

Someone mentioned this Cunningham guy before. I wasn't able to follow the Indians really closely this spring, did he play lights out or something? I actually wasn't totally aware he was on the team. Maybe I just need to catch up with current lineup I guess. Does anyone know if we acquired him from a trade, free agency, call up,or what? Because he looks a little over matched right now. But then again it's just one game so maybe he will surprise us.

Quote:

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I wasn't able to follow the Indians really closely this spring, did he play lights out or something?

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As opposed to most of the Indians players, who just play like they are in the dark.

j/c

Listening to the radio and Les Levine asked a rhetorical question I really didn't think about before. It is basically, why do manager's have a "book" that goes righty / lefty matchups in the 7th & 8th innings, but then the book gets tossed in the 9th and it doesn't matter what is the match up for your closer?

Also, he asked why do starters have a 100 throw pitch count when its just a number, but Perez didn't (citing Perez's 33 pitches when he obviously had little spring training work and it was in 1 inning).

He also had a stat I found pretty neat.

Back in the days of Goose Gossage , "closers" sometimes closed for 2 innings or even more when they were needed. Once Tony LaRussa used Eckersley in the 1 and done closer roll, the 2 inning one closer games went from something like 125 a year to 25 a year.

BTW, I hate pitch counts for starters.

Pitch counts are only useful when considering them in conjunction with performance on the field. For example, if Masterson looked like he might be losing steam, or struggled with the last batter or two, you might want to know how many pitches he's thrown to know if he's likely to get back on track or if his arm is probably finished. however, if someone is pitching great, there is no need to check the count.

Bob Feller use to pitch complete games all the time, he pitched a game every four days and batting practice in between starts.

Yeah but Feller didn't have to face guys on steroids.

Its a gift, but thats not the whole story. Feller conditioned his legs constantly; I read that he ran every day to keep his legs strong because the legs and butt, along with good mechanics, provide the drive for a power pitcher to have the leverage to reduce the stress of a violent motion on the shoulder and elbow. Likewise, Nolan Ryan. I read that the term "pitch count" is not even in the lexicon for assessing pitchers with the Texas Rangers. Texas has decided to stress conditioning over pitch count, and Ryan has said he wants ALL their pitchers to be in shape enough to throw 150 innings or more. Steve Carlton and Roger Clemens were both renowned for their workout regime between starts, and both of them were good for 200-250 innings a year, at least. Carlton actually exceeded 250 innings 10 times, with a year at 346 innings. Clemens exceeded 250 innings 6 times with a best of 281 innings.
So yeah, its genetic; but its also the by-product of a lot of hard work.

Jimenez has a NO HITTER GOING!

Check it out everyone!

It's ok, we're building through the draft, right?

I sure didn't expect them to tie it up in the 9th... Going into extra innings, again.

Jimenez pitched one hell of a great game today. That's really encouraging.

If we could only hit the damn ball ...........

We're in extras today.

*Sigh* Looks like a loss in the 12 in the making ....... Tony Sipp, of all pitchers, allowing a pair of runs.

I don't think that he allowed 2 runs in any month last year. lol

Back to back extra inning losses to start the year. Crazy stuff.

Our new 1st baseman is 0-12.. Only the Indians could have their starters open the year with 1 and 2 hitters, in back-to-back games, and lose both of them. I thought the front office made a huge mistake not getting Beltran or Pena.. I know they would've needed to overpay, with both players, but they are much more proven hitters than Kotchman and Shelly Duncan.. Plus Grady was a waste of money, plus Fausto as well.. This team had about the worst offseason you could think of.. We still can't hit a lick, pitching is still good, but what's the point??

It's a good thing we didn't lock ourselves into any long term deals with good hitters, otherwise we'd have to subject ourself to bad offensive baseball.

Whoops.

Third great start for our pitching staff today. How will we blow it this time?

Maybe we'll split the difference and only go 14 Innings today...

How come we only played 9 innings today?

Nice win for the Tribe today after giving away games 1 and 2 late.

Starts currently averaging 7.3 Innings and 1 Earned Run a game...

So I assume Tomlin will go like 5 innings, give up 6 runs, and we'll somehow win?

3 games in and I'm already sick of this lineup not getting the ball out of the infield.

This team will be in a lot of games with starting pitching like that, but what a fail by the organization to do nothing to make the lineup better.