JR reviewed all posts since Jan 1 dont see that I waived the white flag at all this year. You must be confusing this year with the last 10!

kenm wrote:

loufla wrote:Russo of High Heat on MLB-TV picks Indians to win the Central, the playoffs and the Series. Another jinx for the Tribe?

That guy has a long history of being a bozo. I am getting the white flag ready to wave strong and true.

This is from April 1, so I guess you waited until after ST this year.
OK, it must have been an April Fool's Day joke, right?

The front office obviously finally remembered some of the lessons of the 1990's. When you are a cheap team like the Indians and you invest in scouting, latin american and draft signing you are paying pennies on the dollar and it manifests with success at the big league level. Somewhere about the time they made the infamous signability pick Danny Peoples the organization forgot that. Additionally you dont crow about a trade for years (Dumping Bartolo Colon) and then dump the best player-Phillips-you got in that trade because the idiot manager Wedgeee didnt like him. Credibility and attendance suffered for a decade!

getting was the operative word

Civ

Another thing the Front Office did was get rid of the stiffs. No more waiting for guys to perform up to their career norms.
Produce or you're gone.

Agreed, I think we can date the beginning of the Surge to the dumping of Bourn and Swisher contracts in 2015 followed soon after the season by the dumping of Johnson who we were forced to take off the Braves hands.

Hillbilly wrote:
But he and Davis are awesome locker room guys though, and in baseball you can't put a stat on chemistry. It's meant a lot I will say that.

But HB - you pretty much answered your own question right there, at least in my book. They made adds, the team took off.

How those guys happened to add to this team I don't care. Power, stolen bases, defense or.....chemistry. Bottom line is they made certain moves and the team won 94.

One more thing, we will NEVER know what moves they didn't make. Sometimes those are the best - but we do suspect that teams wanted one of the young starting pitchers. Good move not dealing any of those for offense which we THOUGHT we needed. But we ended up not needing. So I deal out credit there too.

But yeah, chemistry counts. And they do their homework on that issue.

TFIR, we can speculate how much Napoli's presence helped. But we don't have to speculate on what he did inside the lines. His .800 OPS ranked 67th in MLB this year.

For a while this year I thought we might rename the team the Cleveland Naps again. It's nUtS.

I think this team scored runs because we have some guys who get on base and get clutch hits. Not because some guy hits a few homers in between his 0-20 with 15 K stretches.

Give me Ramirez over Napoli any day.

(I haven't bashed him for a while. I'm gonna lay it on thick and see if the ole HB KIss of Life still has any juice. If he gets hot next series you can make fun of me all you want)

I bought the shirt, so he better produce!

Napoli is playing for his next contract on a big stage. Might have a mild case of sphincter puckeritis.

Could be, but he's always been streaky. We'll see.

The crazy thing about this team is that neither Santana nor Napoli hit a lick, yet they swept. Oh yeah, without Carrasco and Salazar either. Never mind Brantley.

Predictions are useless

The Cleveland Naps. LOL, that's a great one! I like it.

Can't remember a Cleveland team that had so few automatic outs. Different guys produce every game.
In addition, they finally realized speed on the baselines is much better than the slugs they used to have.

Win or lose, I can't bitch about this season......and that might be a first for me.

seagull wrote:
Win or lose, I can't bitch about this season......and that might be a first for me.

Say it ain't so!

I said before "this team owes me nothing". I absolutely wish them the best and will root for them until whatever the end is, but at this point they are already past "an amazing performance". And worked their butts off doing it.