Pronk Needs You!

There’s a great scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grailwhere, after Arthur selects his knights, he decides they should all go to Camelot.  There’s a song and dance number with a triumphant picture of the glorious facade of Camelot.  The knights, in awestruck tones, say ”Camelot!”, “Camelot!” after which one of the lackeys says, “It’s only a model.”

That’s kind of where I stand on the Indians sweep of the Royals.  Sure, it’s a sweep of a major league team and it lengthens the distance between the Indians and last place in the division and shortens the distance between the Indians and the third-place Motor City Kitties, but most of me wants to say, “It’s only the Royals.” 

The good news:

• Cliff Lee is now 18-2, after getting a little help from Grady Sizemore (7 RBI) in yesterdays 10-3 series clinching smackdown.
• Gil Meche, right now, is really good.  The Royals bullpen, however, is not.  Their usually reliable closer, Joakim Soria, got plowed in the 8th inning to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the Royals in Game 2 of the series.
• Victor, Pronk and Josh Barfield all continue to rehab in Buffalo
• David Dellucci is looking suspiciously like a major league ballplayer.   In August he has a line of 390 / .457 / .707 .  There might yet be some hope of moving him at the August deadline next week to make room for the younguns.  Because, really, once Pronk and V-Mart are back, he’s going to have to vacate the DH spot and play dominoes with whichever one of our young outfielders is benched that day (Francisco, Gutierrez, Choo).  He’s a liability in the field, and Hafner has to hit when he gets back.  Martinez will probably split time DH-ing and 1b-ing and not C-ing, so that leaves very few at-bats for The Looch.  It will be much better to move him while he’s hot if Shapiro can find a contender in need of a left-handed bat off the bench.

The Indians are now just 2.5 games behind the MCK for third place.  Yesterday’s blowout gives the Indians a +20 in run differential on the season, despite the fact that they are 8 games under .500.  Given that run differential, their expected (Pythagorean) record would be 65-61, instead of the 59-67 they are.  How come?  I blame bullpen implosions.  However, even if they were playing up to their Pythagorean record, they would still be ten games back.  An unscientific survey of PyR indicates, to me at least, that the teams underperforming their PyR generally have bad bullpens and the ones overperforming have excellent bullpens.  A more scientific study looking at other factors (record in close games, BABIP, playing in a dome or some other wacked out home field advantage, number of comeback wins, batting avg, with RISP, etc.) might well prove me wrong.

So, now it’s off to Texas.  We’ll see if the jet stream is still blowing out.