The Cleveland Indians Are Winning, And It's Because They're Good

Here are three ways of looking at the Cleveland Indians, from somewhere near the middle of 1989's classic baseball/stalker drama, Major League:

MAN IN BAR: You know, they could be a lot worse.

WORKER: Ya know, these guys ain't so fuckin' bad.

GROUNDSKEEPER (IN JAPANESE): They're still shitty.

In terms of this year's model, the man in the middle is the closest to right; it's still fairly early, but it seems safe to say that these Indians aren't shitty at all. It's just that, despite their 39-30 record, season-long contention for first place, and resident Cy Young winner (Corey Kluber), nobody this side of Cuyahoga County seems to be paying even the slightest whit of attention to them. Obviously there is, uh, some other sports news out of Cleveland, but what will it take for the Indians to get a little respect?

The joy and the curse of this year's Indians, with the exceptions of Kluber and their young and brilliant shortstop, Francisco Lindor, is that they are almost totally bereft of traditional stars—the kind of guys who'll do a photoshoot for Sports Illustrated in the morning, a commercial for DraftKings in the afternoon, and light up Sunday Night Baseball in the evening. One of their would be stars, outfielder Michael Brantley, has missed most of the season with a shoulder injury. In place of stars, the Indians have a whole roster of guys who, for lack of a better phrase, just ain't so fuckin' bad.

That's a great way to win ballgames, as it turns out, but it's a bad way to get press. So maybe the way to talk about the 25-odd men who together constitute the Cleveland Indians is to focus on the fact that the Indians, as presently constructed, have no bad players. That's rare, and it's working.

Consider this: according to Baseball Prospectus, a website which traffics in all manner of baseball ephemera (and where I also work, on occasion), the Indians have gotten at least 1.2 wins worth of value out of every single position on the diamond—including their top two starting pitchers—with the exception of center field, which is manned by the rather depressing combination of Rajai Davis and Tyler Naquin. (Both nice gentlemen, I'm sure. Just not notably good at baseball, lately.) That's a remarkable degree of balance, and it's a large part of what's made Cleveland successful this year.

Here is a complete list of the other AL teams whose lineups are similarly well-balanced—in other words, those whose eighth-best position is as good as the Indians' eight-best: the Boston Red Sox. That's the whole list. And while the Red Sox, like the Indians, have spent most of the year at or near the top of their division, the Red Sox, unlike the Indians, have seen the broader baseball media write glowing profiles of their stars; they also seem to spend half of their schedule playing ESPN's Game of the Week. Such is life when David Ortiz, who's leading the league in slugging percentage at age 40, is maybe the fifth-most interesting player on your team.

The fifth-most interesting player on the Indians is probably someone like Yan Gomes—a talented catcher and underrated performer who's probably also the fifth-best known backstop in his own division. Gomes doesn't really stack up to Ortiz, as far as charisma or production go. But the brilliance of the Indians is such that the gap between Gomes and the worst player on his team is quite a bit smaller than the gap between Ortiz and the worst player on his. And when you compare the Indians to other, less-balanced teams, it's no contest.

Everywhere you look, something good (or at least not terrible) is happening. There's Jason Kipnis playing a mean second base. There's Juan Uribe, when he's not getting contused in some horrible-sounding way, going balls to the wall at third. Mike Napoli is trucking along at first base, and Lonnie Chisenhall isn't playing half-badly in the outfield, either. Behind Kluber, Danny Salazar is pitching just fine, and Carlos Carrasco, Trevor Bauer, and Josh Tomlin aren't the worst guys you could possibly have at the back end of the rotation, when they get out there. Nobody is, anywhere on the roster.

So, yeah: the Indians, outside of the rightly heralded Lindor and the forgotten-but-not-gone Kluber, don't have a lot of stars to write home about, although Kipnis deserves quite a bit more love than he's ever gotten. What they do have is a young core, much of it homegrown, that most any team in baseball would envy; the rest of the roster is aging, imported, but still solid enough that it doesn't really have a weak point. It's the Cubs model, if we're looking at it fairly, except that the Cubs can play stars at every position instead of merely good players. Which, obviously, is kind of a crucial difference.

Still, as team-building approaches go, this is one that makes sense and delivers results. Every man pulling his weight in equal measure isn't exactly sexy. It isn't easy to cover, either, because you have to keep introducing new characters that your audience has never heard of. It isn't always the most exciting to watch as a fan, either, because no single player stands out enough to truly shine. But look up at the scoreboard at the end of the night—and, perhaps, the standings at the end of the season—and somehow, somewhere in the infinite accretion of comings and goings and moving-the-runner-overs, good things happened. It's not the story that usually gets sold but, you know, it could be a lot worse.