NEW YORK — Usually, it is October when you can point to a bad stretch of baseball and understand why, in this sport, that greatness is achieved over the course of 162 games and the playoffs are as much a test of who’s hot at the right time as anything else.
Or, you could take a look at Cleveland in August. In five games this month, the latest being Friday night’s 13-7 loss to the Yankees, a team built to contend on a foundation of elite starting pitching has gotten boatraced four times by the not-so-mighty lineups of Minnesota and New York. No starting pitcher has made it out of the fifth inning, and the rotation’s ERA for the first 16 percent of the month is 15.58.
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Josh Tomlin almost made it through five innings Friday, but was driven from the game by Gary Sanchez’s double that plated Starlin Castro with New York’s seventh run of the night, four of which had come on Castro’s grand slam in the third.
“Too many pitches over the plate,” Tomlin said. “Just didn’t execute when I needed to, then left a pitch over the plate to Castro, he put a good swing on it and changed the game. … When our offense is putting up the kind of numbers we’re putting up, it’s a tough pill to swallow because that’s our job, is to keep us in the game as long as we can. When they’re putting up seven runs like that, swinging the bat, we should win a lot of those games.”
Cleveland has scored 32 runs in five August games, which you would generally think would have the American League Central leaders on a five-game winning streak. Instead, the Tigers have closed the gap in the division to two games, quite a turnaround in a week that started with Andrew Miller’s arrival in a trade from the Yankees seeming to serve as a coronation for the division.
“We can control our own destiny,” Tomlin said. “We’ve got to get back to playing baseball the way we know how to play it, pitch the way we know how to pitch and try to win ballgames. … We’re in first place, so we’ve got to keep playing good baseball, period. We’ve got to win games. We can’t look over our back and see who’s trying to catch us or whatever. We’ve got to keep moving forward and try to win as many games as we can. If we win the games, no one can catch us.”
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It’s probably too early to think about the division race earnestly anyway, especially with seven Cleveland-Detroit games in September. It’s also too early to think that Cleveland’s rotation is crumbling.
“It’s been one bad turn through, that’s for sure,” manager Terry Francona said. “They’re all healthy. They’ve all kind of had these back-to-back fights. Hopefully (Corey) Kluber didn’t catch whatever everybody else has and we’ll be OK tomorrow. They’re all healthy. They’ll be OK.”
It’s not entirely true that Cleveland’s starters are all healthy, as Danny Salazar went on the disabled list Tuesday with elbow inflammation. Still, the point about having Kluber on the mound for Saturday’s game is valid and can be applied for the rest of the rotation, too. Carlos Carrasco starts Sunday’s game, then Trevor Bauer’s turn comes around after a day off, then it’s Mike Clevinger, then Tomlin again.
That’s the reason Cleveland really has little worry about extended slumps — because this level of starting pitching talent generally prevents that from happening. You can have a bad week, but rarely does it go much beyond that. Then, when the pitching is at its best, things like a 22-6 month of June happen — the month that propelled Cleveland into first place despite being 39-40 the rest of the season.
That middling record is generally because of struggles to score runs and a shaky bullpen. Cleveland addressed the latter by adding Miller. The runs have been coming. It’s hard to believe that this will be a slump that goes on for long.