From my email...

Your Indians are in the race, but you need to vote for them to keep them there!

The 2008 All-Star Game is in New York, and the only way to send Indians designated hitter Travis Hafner is to vote him in as the American League's first baseman. Competition is tough - Pronk and the rest of the Indians need your help!

As of today's American League ballot update, Pronk is in fifth place among designated hitters - behind Gary Sheffield of the Tigers. VOTE PRONK. Victor Martinez is in fifth place among catchers. VOTE VICTOR. Grady Sizemore is still in the running among outfielders, in eighth place. VOTE GRADY.

5th place?  Are you serious?  What reason would I have to vote Pronk for all-star?  Have I been on Jupiter or something?

My wife is a wonderful person.  I came home from work on Friday to find her taping the Indians-Mets game for me even though I hadn't even thought to ask her to do so.  The poor woman knows she's about to become a baseball widow and she's still willingly contributing to my habit.

Anyway, I was watching last night and was listening to Mark Shapiro talk to Ravech and Kruk and they were talking about just bringing in Carroll and Kobayashi and not making a splash more akin to those guys in Detroit.  Mark was eloquent in his talking with Karl and the fat man about how it's rare to be able to return a team intact after a deep run into the playoffs.  And it got me thinking about former division champs and how much turnover one might expect following a division championship and whether there is a rough percentage of playoff roster turnover from year to year on teams the proceed from division champ to pennant winner/world series champ.  So I decided to take a look at an example from our own past, the case of turnover from playoff roster to playoff roster for the 96 and 97 Indians, where we went from division winner to pennant winner.

So let's start by taking a look at who we went to battle with in the 1996 playoffs.  

1996 Indians (playoff roster vs. Baltimore in ALDS)
C       Sandy Alomar
1B      Julio Franco
2B     Jeff Kent
3B     Jim Thome
SS     Omar Vizquel
LF      Albert Belle
CF     Kenny Lofton
RF      Manny Ramirez
DH     Kevin Seitzer

OF      Brian Giles
IF      Jose Vizcaino
IF/OF    Casey Candaele
IF    Nigel Wilson
C       Tony Pena

SP      Orel Hershiser
SP      Charles Nagy
SP      Jack McDowell
SP      Chad Ogea
SP      Dennis Martinez

CL      Jose Mesa
RP     Paul Assenmacher
RP      Eric Plunk
RP      Julian Tavarez
RP      Alan Embree
RP      Paul Shuey

Long story short, as everyone knows, we won the division, but fell short of the pennant to Baltimore, which almost sounds funny as I type it when I think of the shambles that that once proud franchise has fallen into.  

So some changes were in order, but not totally owing to a desire by the front office. Belle was a free agent, and even if the guy was an adjective compound noun, it's safe to say that we would not have sought to dump him.  Dennis Martinez was only 2 years away from retirement and was the only guy on the 25-man playoff roster to not appear in the series vs. Baltimore, so perhaps it wasn't a huge surprise to see him part ways with us.  

So a huge hole in left field, and a smaller hole in the rotation.  For Shapiro, that would be a small shopping list and one that likely wouldn't result in a ton of roster turnover.

Who else did we lose off of the 96 division winners?  Let's have an abbreviated look at the subtraction list (off of the major league roster)

Subtractions (Starters in Bold)
Lost as Free Agents
Belle, Martinez, Pena, Nigel Wilson
Again, a limited list lost off the playoff roster with Belle the only major loss, and we had an in house replacement for Pena (Einar Diaz) and Wilson, well, does it matter? Really?

What is worth noting is that we had Giles who could have potentially stepped into Belle's spot in the field.  Clearly, wholesale changes weren't required to field a very good team.

Hart did make some big changes though.  Let's peruse his trades in between the 96 and 97 playoff rosters and his list of signed free agents.

Trades:
Alan Embree and Kenny Lofton to Atlanta for Marquis Grisson and David Justice
Jeff Kent, Julian Tavarez and Jose Vizcaino to San Francisco for Matt Williams

Signed as Free Agents
Mike Jackson, Pat Borders, Kevin Mitchell, Tony Fernandez, Robby Thompson

Not everyone worked out, but some certainly did and the 1997 playoff roster eventually looked like this:

1997 Indians (playoff roster vs. some team from NY, Baltimore and Florida)
C       Sandy Alomar
1B      Jim Thome
2B     Tony Fernandez
3B     Matt Williams
SS     Omar Vizquel
LF      Brian Giles
CF     Marquis Grissom
RF      Manny Ramirez
DH     David Justice

OF      Jeff Branson
IF      Kevin Seitzer
IF/OF    Bip Roberts
IF    Casey Candaele (?)
C       Einar Diaz or Pat Borders (?)

SP      Orel Hershiser
SP      Charles Nagy
SP      Brian Anderson
SP      Chad Ogea
SP      Jaret Wright

CL      Jose Mesa
RP     Paul Assenmacher
RP      Eric Plunk
RP      Mike Jackson
RP      Alvin Morman
RP      Jeff Juden

My two question marks here are on Candaele and Diaz as they didn't appear in the playoffs, however, I am certain that Tony Pena did not return so my calculations would still be correct concerning the backup catcher on the playoff roster.  If someone can confirm Candaele, I'd be much obliged.

Bottom line, if you calculate the turnover from one playoff roster to the next, you find that in this instance, a 48%(!) change led to the team going deeper into the playoffs and falling just short of the WS ring, 52% if Candaele wasn't on the 97 playoff roster.  

In Part II of this posting, I hope to look at other squads who have followed this trend, i.e., got to a certain level of the playoffs one year, made some changes (or not) and returned and went deeper into the playoffs to see if there is any trend.  Part III (comparing our own 2007 and 208 squads) could be looked at on opening day, but would definitely be more relevant if I would come back and do it once we make the playoff and set the roster for 2008.

We usually do this on a yearly basis, so I'm posting the diary.  Feel free to weigh in with your ballot.  You know the drill, vote for as many as you feel are worthy of the hall.

The list of eligible candidates:

Bert Blyleven
Alan Trammell

It's that time again, we've ended another month and here is your opportunity to list the finest moments of the month.  

Did you know that there is a minimum character limit for diary posts?  I did.  And yet I still tried to post a one-line diary with fewer than 300 characters.  Silly me.

Wait, that still wasn't enough?  How about this...blah, de-blah, de-blah.

Does it seem like some of the other typical AL contenders are just having freak occurrences repeatedly knock them down this season or what?  

With all of the random injuries floating around kicking the Yankees (while they're down no less), who would have possibly expected Giambi to wind up  out for three weeks and possibly the season after a HR trot.  

And then Sheff, who has always been something of a powder keg, totally loses his temper and chucks the shards of a bat at the ump last night.  

Did Delmon Young teach you nothing Sheff?  Your team was already pinched by the injury bug.  How long do you think they can afford to have you out of action for?  Dumb ass.  

You just can't make this stuff up.  Anyway, just thought I'd open a diary to for LGT'ers to post how long they think Sheff will be suspended for (if at all), and also as a place where we can list the other freak injuries of the year.

Remember, we aren't allow to laugh at our opponents over this.  This would ultimately anger the baseball Gods, who would be forced to smite us for our cheek.

I realized this morning that I know where Pronk's MoJo, or Pronkness if you will, currently resides.  He has clearly loaned it to LeBron for the Cavs playoff run.  Pronk's slump seems to coincide with the Cavs beginning their second round series with the Nets and has continued pretty much through May.

With May closing however, an unexpected thing has happened.  Because of the Pronk's great sacrifice, his MoJo and LeBron's have been combined now and each has MoJo equal to the sum of the whole.  Hence in the last two games Pronk has been, mostly Pronk again, but he's still learning to handle the doubled MoJo.  LeBron has had an easier adjustment to the doubling of his MoJo, since he's been carrying around Pronk's Pronkness, in addition to his inherent MoJo, for the last month.

Problem solved.

For those of us lamenting the lack of an obvious platoon partner for Trot...

Franklin Gutierrez has been recalled from Buffalo and Mike Koplove has been optioned back to make room for him on the roster.

It does not appear that Koplove had to go through waivers to return to Buffalo, a point that had been briefly mentioned.

Here's the link.

We're winding down the month here and I wanted to go ahead and open up the Best of May thread while acknowledging that we still have a couple of games to play and countless posts to weed through before we wave so long to May.

So let's hear it LGT'ers, my people have now declared the Best of May diary open.

I put it to you fellow LGT kinspeople.  We've had a pretty good month, but what do you see as our finest moment of the month.  They did something like this on XM this morning and I thought it might be fun.  I'll post mine later in the thread.  If this catches on, I'll do it again in May through, hopefully, October. I would propose that we expand the thread to capture the best LGT comments of April as well.

So I was only following the game online and I'm happy to be contradicted here, but here goes anyway.  Why not lift Victor for Shoppach going to the bottom of the 8th?  With two outs in the 9th,Posada "stole" second on defensive indifference to get into scoring position.  I have to wonder if the game wouldn't have ended on a Shoppach throw to second in that case.  We were up 6 to 2.  This seems like the time to make defensive substitutions.  Maybe Posada got a great jump.  Maybe Shoppach would've thrown the ball to Grady.  Or maybe Shoppach would've bailed us out of that horrible, horrible ending.

Just thought it was worth noting that Tom Hamilton and Mike Hegan contracts were re-upped.  Hamilton will continue to do radio play-by-play through 2011.  Hegan's contract locks him up to do color through 2009.  I would have thought that the current nature of the baseball this off-season would've allowed Ham to get a longer deal, maybe out to 2023 or something.  All kidding aside, thank God for Ham.

http://cleveland.indians.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070131&content_id=1791000&vkey=news_ cle&fext=.jsp&c_id=cle

Did anyone else see Anthony Castrovince's latest mailbag?  I was rolling when he noted that he plans to singlehandedly put a stop to any female groups that threaten "Grady's Ladies".  So no Hafner's Honeys, no Barfield's Beauties and no Dellucci's Hoochies.  I don't care who ya'are, that's funny right there.

http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=olney_buster&action=login&appRedirect=http%3 a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dolney_buster#20061207

I'm not an insider, so I'll have to count on others to take a look at this article.  We are described as quietly having a very nice offseason, just to prep you for the reading.

Hi all,

I have two kids that NEED some Indians gear for Christmas.  I've tried purchasing from the online store at Indians.com before and have had a really hard time getting the sizes right for gear there in the past.  Wondering if anyone could share other good sites for Indians gear.  Thanks everybody.

Anyone know how long this ad is going to last on the sidebar?  The picture of the thonged butt is making it harder to keep LGT open on the desktop at work.  I realize that Ryan and Jay probably have no control over the daily/weekly sponsor, but it's just not the image that I like to have open when someone walks into the old office.

ESPN.com is reporting that we have formally picked up the options on both of these two.  So that's out of the way.

Westbrook was noted to have pitched 216, 211 and 211 innings in the last 3 seasons.  By getting past 210 innings this year, he got a nice 500K bonus.  He stands to make 6.1 mil next year.

It's been noted in other diaries, but Blake is set to make 3.75 mil next year.

I would classify both moves as total no brainers.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2611528

Press Release

Indians official website is reporting this as a done deal.  I'm very ambivalent about this particular deal, but it does allow Gutierrez to log some more time on the big club.  Hollandsworth hasn't been the complete disaster that some have alleged.  I think he's served about the role that the FO intended when they signed him.  It will be difficult to evaluate this deal until the PTBNL is worked out.  Any other feelings on this move?

[editor's note, by Ryan] Press Release Added

CNNSI has posted a list of the best all time yankees lineup.  While I couldn't care less about the best all time yankees lineup, I thought it might be fun for us to propose our own best all time Indians lineup.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/0605/gallery.bestyanks/content.1.html?cnn= yes

Here's the yankees list.  It's hard to argue with what they have, Mantle is stuck behind DiMaggio in center.  I might have chosen Rizzuto over Jeter, but I'd have to look at the numbers, and I don't care enough about Yankees numbers to do that.

C Berra
1B Gehrig
2B Lazzeri
SS Jeter
3B Nettles
LF Winfield
CF DiMaggio
RF Ruth
DH Baylor

I'll repost later with my own list, but feel free to go crazy everyone!

-Erik