A Quest Called Tribe

As far as major league debuts go, it could have gone better.  Cord Phelps went 0-for-4 with a striekout in his much anticipated coming out party on the lake.  Phelps, who was added to the active roster at the expense of Shelley Duncan (Alex White was transfered to the 60 day-DL to make room on the 40-man, will platoon with Orlando Cabrera for the foreseeable future.  The fact Adam Everett did not get the axe flat out flabbergasting.  The only explanation is that the Indians' brass must regard Everett as a significantly better defender at third than Phelps.  So why not Austin Kearns?  Oh wait, he's a big money free-agent.  Do not ask me to explain it.  I do not understand it either.  It seems like an awful lot of infielders.



Speaking of third basemen, this happened...

Otherwise, the offense still looks like shite.  Justin Masterson still has not won since April.  And the Tribe dropped two of three to the lowly Twins.  Ugh.

O-Cab is said to be handling his new platoon role "like a professional." Thank goodness, because what does that man have to gripe about.  After all, his OPS (.589) is the 7th worst in baseball for qualifying players.  Veteran leadership only goes so far and can be provided from the bench.

Still, the triumphant return of Jack Motherfuckin' Hannahan (sorry, kids) almost makes it worthwhile.

Cheers.

P.s. MLB.com has yet to post the metafile so I can embed the Manahan's dinger, so let me take a minute to pimp for a new site that I came across today, Dougstats.com.  Doug's page includes plain text MLB statistics through the previous day's games.  For legal reasons, he has to describe them as "un-official," but they are dead on.  This becomes useful as they can be directly imported into Excel and, for a stathead like me, hours of good-time manipulation ensues.  Today, I learned that Orlando Cabrera is actual worse than his raw OPS shows.  If you look at (OPS-(2*AVG)) or what I will call QAB (I dunno if there is already a fancy name), O-Cab is the 4th worst in the game.  QAB can stand for Quality At Bats.  Ideally, it is a measure of whether the batter is making the pitcher work (taking a lot of pitches and drawing walks) and driving the ball for extra base hits or simply slapping the ball for weak singles.  If you cannot follow all of that, it means that Orlando ain't so good with the stick.  Thanks, Doug.

P.p.s  Still waiting, so I will dig into more Tribe draft picks.  At pick #67 (believe it or not, that is the top of the 2nd round as there were a ridonkulous 28 compensatory picks this year), the Indians grabbed Dillon Howard, RHP, Searcy HS, Arkansas.  In a nutshell, he is a beast with mid-first round talent that slipped to the Tribe due to signability issues.  As a Scott Boras client, he will demand a lot of coin and has a commitment to the U of Arkansas as a safety net.

Check out the IPI dissertation here for the whole spiel, but here is some video from MLB because they are a-pissin' me off right now.

Got it. What a project. ;-j