As Good As It Gets?

After spending a weekend away from Cleveland and only seeing the Tribe slip to 4 ½ games out of the lead from afar, The DiaBride and I lined up the babysitter and headed down for some good old fashioned American fun on Memorial Day – a baseball game with dollar dogs and fireworks. With the Indians scuffling as they had and with answers at a premium, I thought I’d just sit and enjoy the game, regardless of the outcome and revel in a beautiful night at the ballpark.

The game started innocently enough with Byrd working his way out of a jam, giving up only one run early after loading the bases with no outs and Dellucci evening the score with a 1st inning bomb. The Indians were hitting and playing good defense (thankfully, I was out of town for the Francisco “through the wickets play”, though being the glutton for punishment that I am I watched it on the replayed game on Monday afternoon) as the Tribe mounted scoring opportunity after scoring opportunity, only to come up that ONE hit short from breaking the game open. It would come, though, right? The law of averages almost dictated that somebody (ANYBODY) had to poke a seeing-eye single at some point to plate some runs.

But, alas, they didn’t…and as the frustration mounted over the amount of runners being left on base (they finished with 13 team LOB after stranding 11 runners on Sunday), an awful feeling crept into my head – the one I’ve been trying to avoid for about three weeks now. That nagging thought that I’ve buried in the deep recesses of my brain kept popping back again and again as the Indians squandered chance after chance and the crowd of 31,006 sat quietly, waiting to erupt.

After the 8th inning though, with runners on 2nd and 3rd and one out when Cabrera then Sizemore whiffed to go meekly into the night, the thought finally passed through my lips:
“What if this is as good as it gets?”

What if these players aren’t going to trend back to their career numbers?
What if platooning is not the answer to get some of these guys back into the groove?
What if the offensive deficiencies on the ballclub are just that – deficiencies, and not aberrations?
What if Pronk simply doesn’t exist anymore and Garko and Peralta never take that next step as hitters?
What if Grady is what he is, and doesn’t have that “next level” in him?
What if the toll on Victor’s body after years of catching have robbed him of his power, leaving him only with the quick hands of the OBP machine he seems to be?
What if the youngsters that we had high hopes for (Cabrera and Gutierrez) are nothing more than defensive specialists?
What if Francisco and Aubrey arrived from the minors hot, something that won’t last forever?

My head was spinning as the Tribe stranded two more in the 10th…all the analysis that this offense would perform at a league average level (which is all they need to do), all of the patience that I’ve been preaching that this team is built on pitching and a marginal offense was going to be undone by an offense that would struggle to be characterized as “marginal” on their best day…with no obvious answers or easy fixes.

The DiaBride saw my bewildered look, reminded me of the time (it was a school night for the sitter and it was creeping up on 11:00 PM) and convinced me to hit the road…which surprisingly didn’t take much convincing given the pit in my stomach. As we exited the park (around the area cordoned off for fireworks), the groans emanating from the park told us all we needed to know. Back at the car, Hamilton laid out the ugly turn of events and we drove home in a much more somber tone than we would have liked.

While I’m not ready to throw in the towel (did I mention my affinity for punishment and disappointment?), this team wide offensive mediocrity (if it can even be called mediocre) has reached the breaking point. The Indians began what looked like a favorable stretch of their schedule a few Fridays ago in Cincinnati, playing the Reds, the White Sox, and the Rangers to start it…and have responded by going 1-9 in their first 10 games of that stretch? Now they find themselves in the middle of the White Sox series, looking as helpless and toothless as they have for weeks, if not months, now offensively.

That nagging question that is now out there, like a word balloon in a comic strip, continues to hang in the air – what if this IS the Indians’ offense and that the in-house players are simply incapable of “grinding” through this or mounting any kind of semblance of an offense on a nightly basis? The question is a scary one, that’s growing sharper teeth with each passing day.

If this truly is “as good as it gets”, the Indians are going to find themselves buried in a hurry in an AL Central, regardless of what the calendar says, where the White Sox look ready for a run (thanks to continually playing the Tribe) and the Indians’ hitters looking more pathetic by the day.