Pronk Needs You!

One of the great clichés in all of sports is that sometimes the best trades are the ones you don’t make.  Cliff Lee, whom many Tribe fans would have traded in the off-season for a Charlie Spikes baseball card, a bag of balls and a couple good fungo bats, won his twentieth game last night  5-0, pitching a complete game shutout against the first-place Chicago White Sox.

The victory put the Tribe back into third place, a half-game ahead of the Tigers and ending a three-game losing streak.  After winning 10 in a row, the Indians could not come up with any clutch hitting pretty much the entire series against the lowly Seattle Mariners:  

• Friday, Jeremy Sowers could not solve Raul Ibanez and Felix Hernandez induced enough ground ball double plays to get himself out of trouble as the Indians lost 3-2 and ending the streak.  Ibanez, a long-time Tribe nemesis, drove in all three runs, the final two on a two-run homer.
• Saturday: Jarrod Washburn and Anthony Reyes engaged in a pitching duel.  Reyes gave up 1 run in 7 innings.  Washburn gave up 0 in 6.2 innings.  Shin-Soo Choo tied the game in the 9th with a two-run homer off Seattle closer JJ Putz, but then the game was pretty much given to the Mariners on a controversial call in the 10th inning.  Adrian Beltre deliberately allowed himself to get hit with a batted ball and, instead of awarding a double play, which would have been the correct call and ending the inning, the umpire only called Beltre out, prolonging the inning.  Jensen Lewis, rattled by the atrocious and hard-to-defend or fathom call, allowed another run to score.  The Indians added what should have been the tying run in the bottom of the 10th, but it wasn’t enough and the umpires awarded Seattle a 4-3 victory.
• Sunday, Zachson gave up 5 runs in the fifth, blowing up a tightly-fought 1-1 game into a 6-1 deficit which the Indians could not crawl out of.  Final score – 6-4.

In other news, Victor Martinez is back.  Friday night, he scored from first on a double, indicating that his hamstring is probably healed.  Andy Gonzalez was let go to make roster room.

Word from Cleveland is that Pronk may not be back when roster call-ups from Buffalo occur later today.  Barfield will likely be back, and probably Laffey, and the team may experiment with a 6-man rotation through September.  We will probably also see just about everyone else on the 40 who isn’t hurt, including new reliever John Meloan and relievers Brian Slocum, Rich Rundles, and Tom Mastny, as well as first-baseman Michael Aubrey as the auditions for next year’s team continue into September.

Andy Marte’s hit streak has now extended to 8 games, and he has raised his batting average from .186 to .207 during this time period.