Good morning and welcome to episode 850 of Effectively Wildly Daily Podcast from Baseball

Respect This, presented by our Patreon supporters and the play index at baseballreference.com.

I'm Ben Lindbergh of 538, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus.

Hello.

We are talking about the Cleveland Indians today, our last American lead team to preview.

Later on in this episode, George Bissell will be talking to Jordan Bastion, who covers the Indians for MLB.com.

We will be talking to a writer and editor and a writer of the BP Annual essay about the Indians.

Hey, how's it going?

Alright, so as you pointed out in your essay, the sports illustrated prediction that the Indians would win the World Series only really looks bad if you look at the actual standings which to be fair a lot of people do because they kind of count.

But there are ways in which the Indians were really good.

By third order record, they should have won the A.O. Central.

So why did they not do what the numbers said that they should have done?

For the first, I was actually in Cleveland last year and I had a season ticket.

And I can tell you, the first half of the season, their defense was hilariously bad. They're really, really bad.

There's just some bad luck too. Their hit sequencing was not great.

They didn't have a great sort of batting average or bad bet with guys on base.

And in general, I think they just sort of, they didn't put their best team on a field for a big chunk of this season.

They also have a sort of an incipient tradition of playing terribly in April, which is a bad idea.

It turns out it's a bad idea to play badly at any point during the regular season.

When you say that the defense was terrible, I want to know how it was terrible and partly I mean like, how was it terrible?

Like, why was it so bad? But more, I kind of want to know, like, why was it so bad?

Like, do you get the feeling that that was part of the strategy? Was it like part of their aim to prioritize other things over defense?

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