It’s Not Early Anymore

Breaking news: the baseball season is long. And not just Lord-of-the-Rings-marathon long. Even the Chilean miners give up on the day-to-day baseball scores at times.

But at the beginning of the year, when our interest is pulled out of the winter hibernation cave, every team has a chance. Nobody really sweats over the score on Opening Day; after all, there are 161 more coming. That's where the real season lies.

Then somewhere around tax day, the first whispers of panic and breaths of optimism echo in the corners of a small sample. But it's still early. It still doesn't mean anything.

Inevitably, April showers lead to May homestands, and the anxiety and hope starts to grow roots. The leaders and chasers start to view the rest of season in terms of how well they will have to play to get to a benchmark win total. And yet it's only one month; it's still early.

But somewhere between May Day and Memorial Day, the baseball zeitgeist accepts the new season's shuffling of the hierarchy. By June first, suddenly, it's no longer early.

All of this brings us to the Cleveland Indians. Every baseball season there are surprises, but those are typically of the ten-bucks-in-your-pocket variety. No, the 2011 Indians, poised to lead the AL Central on the last day of school, are baseball's answer to Alexander Fleming discovering the medicinal power of penicillin.

Remember, this is a team whose second baseman had dipped one foot into retirement until the Indians called just before spring training. It is a team whose highest profile holdovers from the brink of the 2007 World Series, Grady Sizemore and Travis Hafner, only seemed to resemble their former selves on the payroll. Its brightest rising star, catcher Carlos Santana, was last seen collecting the remnants of his left knee structure after a season-ending collision at home plate. Its Opening Day starter was a year removed from needing the street level view of Google Maps to find the strike zone.

No, the Indians haven't just crawled ashore from a pool of mediocrity; they have swum upstream past nearly every other team in the majors against any reasonable expectations. For example:

"If they stay healthy and get some surprises in the rotation, they have a chance at .500. But that's if everything goes right." (An unnamed scout in SI.com's MLB preview)

"Barring a bevy of wildly unforeseen circumstances, 2011 is not likely to be a kind year for the Indians." (Corey Ettinger in Baseball Digest's Indians Preview)

Well, in the era of the rise of Sabermetrics, certainly the computers had a better read on this team than the humans, right? Nope. Baseball Think Factory's ZiPS projections had the Indians good enough for just 71 wins, gloriously squeaking ahead of the Royals.

But these are the Yanks/Sox-loving national writers. Certainly the Cleveland Plain Dealer's panel played the homer card and caught on to some of this. Hardly. The PD writers all picked the Indians to finish fourth and win fewer than 80 games.

Now, to be fair, nobody thought much of the 2011 Indians (this writer included). And before we finish the inventory count on these unhatched eggs, it is worth acknowledging summer has not even dawned yet. But at this point, this much is true: the Indians will have to play markedly worse the rest of the season than they have through two months to drop out of contention.

But for a team that only a month ago was gazing more lustfully at 2012 and 2013 than 2011, mere relevance is a win. Like most small market teams, the Indians have to try to win by surge. Lame duck free agents get rolled over into prospects and resources have to conserved for "contention years."

Whatever the standings say, the development of young players and additional ticket revenues are the best measures of success for this team. And it is those exploits, should the Tribe regress back to reality as every predictive measure seems to demand they will, that the franchise can celebrate as the legacy of a positive 2011.

However their season ends, the Indians at this point are past being dismissed as a fluke. It might not be late yet, but it certainly isn't early.

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