Early Bill James On The Cleveland Indians

Pretty apt description

Early Bill James On The Cleveland Indians

As you probably remember, I’ve been posting snippets from summaries of old version of The Bill James Baseball Abstract every now and then. We’re up to the 1978 edition. I came across this great line:

“Perpetual mediocrity” is a really good description here. Take a look at how the Indians had been doing up to the 1978 season:

Those of you who have replayed 1959 know how much fun that Cleveland team is. However, the Indians then faced a real frustrating yo-yo effect, bouncing back and forth between being just under .500 and just over .500, and never really getting closer than 10 games away from first place.

The crazy thing about this is that it continued until the division structure change in 1994:

Despite Len Barker’s perfect game, the 1981 Indians really weren’t all that close: the 7 game deficit is completely because of the strike.

The 1986 Indians were really the only exciting team of the bunch - and even they gave up more runs than they scored.

But then things changed, starting in 1994:

Note that this isn’t really because of a change in schedule. Interleague play and the crazy impact it’s had on competitive balance didn’t start until 1997. The Indians literally jumped from decades of being pathetic to suddenly being a contender in 1994 — and then again to the 1995 World Series.

In fact, the 1995 Cleveland Indians are almost certainly one of the greatest teams of all time. But we’ll talk about them later.