Yeah, about that Indians prediction
Well the Indians didn’t waste any time lowering expectations for the 2011 season, falling behind the White Sox 10-0 before rallying but falling short in a 15-10 loss.
“I can’t promise a win every day, but I can promise a team that is going to battle and fight for every out,” Indians manager Manny Acta said in published reports. “It was a weird game. All we could think of at first was there’s not many opening day games that are 14-0 right off, but we battled back. Unfortunately, we had to play catch-up baseball (but) we went down fighting.”
First the bad part. Indians No. 1 starter Fausto Carmona threw 82 pitches in just three innings of work, leaving after facing four batters in the fourth inning. The White Sox hit .555 against Carmona, with home runs from Adam Dunn and Carlos Quentin.
Carmona reminds us of Paul Shuey – you can almost tell from the first two batters if the good Carmona or the bad Carmona showed up. Once Carmona gave up hits to three of the first four batters we had the feeling it was going to be a long day for the Tribe.
Now for the good part.
The Indians never gave up. After falling behind 10-0, the Tribe outscored the Sox 10-1 and pounded the Chicago bullpen for six runs in just three innings.
The Tribe pitchers also struck out 14 White Sox, with Frank Herrmann notching five strikeouts in two innings of work and Vinnie Pestano striking out the side – and looking good doing it – in the ninth inning.
Carlos Santana had three hits, including a home run, and Jack Hannahan did the same as the Indians pounded out 17 hits.
If the Tribe can keep hitting like that, a lot of our worries will be eased.
The good thing is, there’s another game today. Carlos Carrasco takes the hill as the Indians start working toward those 81 wins we were talking about.
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The Wall Street Journal came up with an interesting idea, creating a 64-team basketball to football “conversion bracket.”
They used this year’s basketball tournament results to create a football bracket, coming up with a final four of Oklahoma State, Air Force, Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois.
According to the article:
Beyond producing matchups that only the most hard-core fan would want to watch, the exercise exposed another downside of tournaments: that the most-deserving teams, the ones that had the best seasons, often don’t get anywhere near the championship – and this can affect the quality of the final games.
So teams that had the best seasons don’t get near the championship – like TCU this past season? And the quality of the final games would be affected with a tournament? Wow, that never happens under the current system.
Look, we’re not as opposed to the BCS as some people, and picking a year where the basketball tournament featured so many upsets doesn’t mean the same thing would happen in a football version of the tournament.
But we just don’t see any downside to having the national champion in football actually decided in a playoff like every other college sport.
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With just eight games to go, the race in the English Premier League to stay out of the regulation zone is reaching historic proportions.
Of the 20 teams in the top division, a dozen are still short of the 40 points typically considered a minimum for survival. Among that group are teams normally in the safety zone by this part of the season, like Aston Villa (oh Randy!) and Blackburn Rovers – one of just four teams to even win the championship in the modern era.
Any of eight different teams could wind up in the relegation places after this weekend’s matches and just six points currently separate the entire bottom half of the table, the smallest margin since the Premier League was cut to 20 teams in 1995.
Relegation means big bucks, as teams dropping down a spot can lose an estimated $80 million or more per year in revenue. And even with Randy Lerner’s deep pockets, that’s a big number.
In addition, most players have contract clauses that will halve their salaries overnight in the event their team is relegated, while coaches rarely survive the experience of guiding a team that goes down.
Should be an interesting last month of the season.
Red Right 88 