What’s the Damage?

Things they don’t teach you in school:

1) How to grocery shop

2) That everything in life connects back to Call of Duty

You’ll play that game for hours and hours and hours and get absolutely manhandled. Shot in the kisser immediately after spawning, lit up from behind, things like that. This is, after all, the most accurate graph ever created:

But then you’ll have that one round, the 24-3 round, and you instantly forget about the hours of getting slaughtered. That seven minutes keeps your sanity in check and causes you to go right back to the well the next day. The same thing happens with a good round of golf, a good episode of a TV show, a good week in fantasy sports.

And the same thing happens with the Cleveland Indians. Their 25 kill round came down in St. Pete against the then-first-place Rays, where they took all four games thanks to gunships called in by Cody Anderson, Danny Salazar and Corey Kluber. Carlos Carrasco, as we all know, was one out away from a nuke. I don’t know what’s more Cleveland: Carrasco giving up a no-no with two outs and an 0-2 count in the bottom of the 9th inning, or Indians twitter complaining when their starting pitcher just went 8.2 innings, struck out 13 and the team won their fourth game in a row.

The Tribe went and took the first of three in Pittsburgh against the smoking hot Pirates on Friday. Then Jeff Locke threw his best game of the year, Gerrit Cole was Gerrit Cole and the Astros came into last night’s opener like their bats were going to expire. Another one step forward, two steps back. And we’re running out of real estate behind us.

The Royals remain a whopping 13 games over .500 and sport the second best record in the AL. They were two games over .500 at the end of the first half last year when they made it to the World Series. All-Star outfielder Lorenzo Cain tweaked a hammy on Sunday and won’t play in their doubleheader scheduled for today. It’d surprise me if he didn’t just rest through the break. Yordano Ventura returns from the DL on Thursday to face the Rays.

Thanks to the good folks out in Missouri, Twins second baseman Brian Dozier has to rely on the final fan vote if he’s going to make the trip to Cincinnati next week, despite using his bat to make solid contact with baseballs on multiple occasions this year.

The Twinkies are still treading above water though, and will close out the first half with four games at home against the team in the next paragraph.

Miggy Miggy Miggy’s, calf you see. Tigers first baseman and known Indian beater Miguel Cabrera is set to miss around 6 weeks with a grade 3 strain in his left calf. That puts him out until mid-August-ish. Naturally, the Tribe has seven games in the second half against the Kitties, and all of them come in the month of September. The good news is there’s a chance that J.D. Martinez has cooled off by then. Dude’s hit 11 dingers in the past 16 days.

Chris Sale’s streak of 8 straight games with double digit strikeouts ended last night in Toronto, where he whiffed a mere six. In nine innings. And it was his first win in 5 starts. What a time to not be a Cubs fan in Chicago.

In Other News

• In the least shocking news of this week, your league leader in WAR Jason Kipnis was not elected as the starting second baseman for All-Star game. He took to Twitter to emoji off a little steam, and had some pretty candid comments both before and after the announcement (he was obviously selected as a reserve).

Kip’s always been a pretty straight shooter so I have zero problem with him opening up a little bit about what’s clearly a sore subject. The people who are knocking him about showing his disappointment when baseball is a team sport have definitely not won any sort of award in their entire lives. You can say all the cookie cutter, politically correct answers until you’re blue in the face but at the end of the day it’s gonna sting when your fans don’t vote for you to represent their city. There’s absolutely no denying he’s been the best second basemen in the American League in 2015. It’s as black and white as it gets. He hits the nail on the head with “If I don’t win it this year, I’m not going to win it.” And that’s a GD shame. At least his peers recognize real.

• Speaking of snubs, here’s Corey Kluber’s ranks among AL pitchers this season:
  • Strikeouts: T-2nd
  • K%: 3rd
  • FIP: 2nd
  • WAR: 2nd
• And since the start of 2014:

That’ssssssss pretty crazy. Goes to show that baseball still hasn’t completely adopted sabermetrics.

• I personally had a pretty interesting night in the bleachers on Monday….

I gotta stop actually sitting in my seats. I think the last time my butt hit that metal was when Section 180 ruined our season and my life:

 

 

KEEP THE CHIEF