Category Archives: Indians

Indians

Whoever runs the Indians Facebook page is having themself a day

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I know, I don’t really go on Facebook anymore either, so s/o to our friend @JL_Baseball for (unintentionally) tipping us off to this via Twitter.

It started when the team posted an article from MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince. In it, he lists 5 teams who have quietly had good winters so far, and the Indians are numero uno. The comments section….did not agree.

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They cite this article more than a few times, though I’m sure none of these scholars clicked it. The whole headline is, “MLB teams continue to spend, despite evidence that it does not help them win.”

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I make this argument all the time too. There are multiple ways to improve your chances of winning a baseball game. Score more runs, or prevent the other team from scoring more runs. Sure, power bats help one of those strategies. But that’s not the strategy this particular team implements. And neither have any of the recent teams that have made it to the World Series.fb2

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Boom. Roasted.

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This this THIS, times one thousand million. Challenge yourself to get past the accepted narrative about our team. There’s not a lazier group of fans in the city of Cleveland, maybe in professional sports, than the “Dolans are cheap” crowd. Have a thought process, back it up with facts, I’ll listen to you all day. I love having those conversations. But I throw up in my mouth every time someone complains about the Dolans not opening their wallets, period, end of argument. Put some work into forming an actual informed opinion. Bet it ends up being a different one.

 

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Browns, Cavs, Cleveland, Indians

Which Cleveland Professional Sports Team Has The Most Fake Twitter Followers?

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So yesterday as I was perusing through the ol’ Twitter timeline I noticed an article from Next Impulse Sports claiming that half of the Carolina Panthers Twitter followers were fake. 500,000 accounts out of 1 million. Sheesh. Team accounts buying Twitter followers just seems kinda scummy. But apparently that’s pretty standard stuff for big companies/pro teams/celebrities trying to build their brand? I imagine in the early days of Twitter people probably did this shit all of the time.

Well, that got me to thinking about our favorite professional teams in Cleveland and their Twitter accounts and how many of their followers were real and how many were fake. Ya know, the real hard hitting, investigative stuff you’ve come to expect from this site.

I used Twitter Audit because that seems to be the go to site/app to expose these accounts. I’m not sure if it’s 100% accurate but there has to be some truth to it.

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First up:

The Cleveland Indians

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102,000+ fake accounts follow the Indians. So basically the capacity of The Horseshoe at Ohio State.

Cleveland Browns

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Almost 152,000. I definitely thought the Browns would be close to around 300K. Just seems like a Scheiner or Farmer move to buy hundreds of thousands of fake followers while Scheiner was busy raising season ticket prices so he could afford to pay Swagger’s appearance fee.

Cleveland Cavaliers

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What? The Cavs with 366K fake followers? Arguably the most popular team in town needed to buy all those followers? C’mon now… No doubt in my mind that this happened in 2010 right after Dan Gilbert wrote the Comic Sans letter. Truth be told I might consider losing LeBron again if that meant 100,000 + followers on the @Bottlegate Twitter account.

So there’s that. Hope you enjoyed this pointless “study.”

PS- Check that 98%, bitches

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Indians

Mike Napoli facts: Grows a good beard. Likes drinking. Is an Indian.

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Todd Frazier facts: plays 4 of the 5 positions the Indians could upgrade at. Hits the ball out of the park. Will play in the AL Central.

For the Chicago White Sox.

Nice.

About an hour after it was announced Frazier would be playing his home games at The Cell next season, the Tribe countered with a move of their own: veteran first baseman Mike Napoli on a 1-year, $7 million deal.

The timing was awful. Guys like Yasiel Puig and Carlos Gonzalez seem like pipe dreams most of the time, but the Indians making a move for the publicly available Frazier seemed incredibly realistic for whatever reason. I usually don’t get my hopes up with rumors like this but I can definitely say losing out on this one stings.

The Napoli signing itself is a fine one, dare I say smart. First of all, he’s a solid upgrade defensively over Carlos Santana at first base.

Psssst. You can win games by trying to score more runs than the other team. OR you can win games by trying to hold the other team to the fewest runs possible. We all want to win games, and Napoli helps a substantial amount with the latter strategy.

As far as his bat goes, yes he’s been trending downward since his shirtless days in Boston. His splits have grown further and further apart. He slashed an abysmal .191/.283/.320 against right handed pitching last season. He hasn’t hit 20 home runs since 2013. He’s been alive for 34 years.

Still, he’s a useful piece for the Indians. His BABIP was .268 last year, well below his career average. So a little unlucky, and a little unhealthy. He’s got this winter to change that. He was a 2.4 WAR player in 2014 with the Sox. That would have been tied for 4th on the team last year. Even if that drops to 2.0 (the second lowest WAR he’s posted in 10 years) in 2016, he would have been 6th.

There’s no argument to be made that this signing doesn’t help the team. It’s disappointing to miss out on Todd Frazier, and I’ll definitely be disappointed if this closes the book on their off season, but signing Mike Napoli is a good thing. It’s December 16th. 63 days until pitchers & catchers. The winter is young, people.

 

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