Cleveland Indians Season Win Total Odds 93.5 Wins (+115 over / -110 under)
The Cleveland Indians set the all-time record for consecutive wins with 22 during the 2017 season. They won 102 games and finished with the best record in the American League.
They had one of the, if not the best pitching staff in history per Fangraphs. They also blew a 2-0 lead to the New York Yankees in the American League Division series and extended their World Series drought to a not-so-nice 69 years.
The MLB playoffs winds up defining a team’s season. It is one of my greatest dilemmas because a 19-game sprint to a World Championship doesn’t always go to the best team. But, what happens over 162 games is often more impressive.
The team that gets hot for four weeks wins the World Series. The team that wins 102 games was hot for most of the six months of the regular season.
A 22-game win streak is special, and nobody had ever done it before. There have been 112 World Series champions but only one team that has ever won 22 straight games.
And, yet, the bigger takeaway for most fans from the 2017 season is that the Indians blew a 2-0 lead in the American League Division series and went home before they should have.
Cleveland Indians Outlook
As we head into 2018, the Indians have basically already won the Central Division. Sorry to Twins, Tigers, Royals, and White Sox fans, but those are the facts.
Barring the worst run of injuries imaginable, the Indians are punching their postseason tickets sometime in the month of September. They finished 17 games clear of the Twins last season.
By Pythagorean Win-Loss, the Indians were more like a 108-54 team, and by BaseRuns, they were more like a 107-55 team. Those two marks were easily the best in MLB.
Expectations are certainly high and they should be. Nearly 47 percent of the schedule will be played within the division, where the Indians were 50-26. The Indians were 44-13 over the final 57 games of the season and 55-20 after the All-Star Break.
They had a .654 winning percentage on the road, and their division hasn’t gotten any better.
The division is a formality, but the season win total is not. This is a high number with a slim margin for error. After all, the Indians were 47-40 at the All-Star Break last year.
A .540 win percentage in the second half would have been 87-88 wins. The schedule was backloaded with AL Central doormats, so .540 was a low expectation, but still.
This was a team that used a 22-game win streak to put distance in the AL Central and to pole vault to the top of the AL. Those type of stats don’t come around every day.
The optics of this offseason for the Indians have not been good. It isn’t the type of offseason that you want to see from a World Series contender that was one-and-done in the playoffs.
To be fair, the Indians had no way of knowing how the market would crater this winter and had to make a snap call on Brantley’s option just days after the World Series.
That still doesn’t excuse the team’s inability to strengthen the bullpen with relievers going for some really affordable deals.
Speculation seems to be that the Indians are tapped out financially, but then they’ve been in until the end on Lorenzo Cain and continue to sniff around on Manny Machado.
Pick & Prediction Over 93.5 Wins +115 over
Cleveland is a team on a mission. There was very little sulking about the final out of Game 7. Many Indians told reporters after the game that they would go to Spring Training right now if they could.
To get that close, to get that taste, to captivate a city that has been a bad baseball town for 15 years, has meant something. We often see a hangover from teams that made a deep run, especially if they aren’t used to it, but we don’t see that from the Indians.
Ownership made a commitment and they made it loud and clear by signing Edwin Encarnacion and Boone Logan. The players feed off of that because some of them have been through the dog days of Cleveland baseball when money was hard to come by.
Terry Francona perhaps has not been the best decision maker, but he has been an inspiring leader of men. The players love him, and free agents want to play for him.
That is where the Cleveland Indians deviate from the metrics, and what makes them a great ball club. That means something in the dog days of the season, even if winning is the ultimate clubhouse elixir.
The Indians are no longer a team of good guys looking to overachieve. They’re a legitimate contender to win the World Series.
Let’s take the narratives out of the equation and simply look at the personnel. This is the best bullpen in baseball, with the second or third-best lineup in the American League.
This might be the best rotation in the American League, though Boston has a very strong case. This is a team that excels in a lot of areas, including an elite defensive infield.
Furthermore, this is a team that should dominate within the division. If the Indians simply go 50-26 against the Central, which is basically what they did last season, they only need to go 43-43 against the rest of baseball.
To me, this team is better than last year’s version that went 94-67, so the sky’s the limit for the Indians.
