Well that awesome feeling that the return of Kenny Lofton brought to the club on Friday disappeared as the Indians squandered two great outings by Jake Westbrook and C. C. Sabathia to lose 2 of 3 to the Twins and let them hang around the wild card race. It also is another failure to capitalize on a slumping Tigers team that has lost 7 of their last 10. Once again the Tribe fails to come through in the clutch, in more ways than one.
The main problem again is situational hitting with runners on base. The Indians struck out 12 times on Saturday AND Sunday. Combine that with 9 strikeouts in Friday's win and that's 33 strikeouts in 3 games!!! That is ridiculous. They also grounded into 5 double plays in the series. Listen, in baseball if you fail 7/10 times you are pretty f'n good. But of those 7 times you need to advance runners and stay out of the double play. The Indians flat out don't or can't do it. It is very frustrating to watch. After seeing Sizemore and Lofton get on to start today's game and then have Martinez, Hafner and Garko strike out in rapid succession was extremely debilitating.
The defense reared its ugly head as Josh Barfield's double error and Trot Nixon's horrible misplay of a fly ball led to the demise of C. C. Sabathia's attempt to win game #14. I believe that the Tribe has now squandered 4 superb outings by C. C. that would have him at 17 wins and by far the #1 Cy Young Candidate. But worse that that it cost them a game today. Just embarrassing.
The Indians need to get their heads out of their collective asses if they want to stay in this thing. They just let the Twins back in while the Yankees continue to charge hard. Seattle lingers as well. Detroit is not going to stay cold forever. The Tribe just can not seem to get all phases of their game to align at the same time for an extended period of time.
I don't know what's wrong with these guys but in the immortal words of Lou Brown... "We just need something to bring it all together."
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