LGFT: 2018 Indians in the 2019 Postseason
The Indians' pseudo-rebuild in 2019 has given the organization an unusual distinction for a club coming off of four consecutive 90-plus win seasons: of the eight teams remaining in the postseason, six of them have members of the 2018 Indians on their playoff roster—and, of course, none of those teams are the Indians. In total, seven men are playing postseason baseball for other organizations in 2019 after failing pretty terribly at postseason baseball in Cleveland in 2018. Three were free agents after 2018 who signed with new teams, three were traded as part of the Indians' offseason cost-cutting measures, and one was designated for assignment early in the 2018 season. Within this crew of seven, you have everything from surprise breakout performers to veterans clinging to the fringes of the roster. Some have already been at the center of Indians postseason lore. Although I don't have a way of researching this, it's probably unusual for a team with the Indians' level of success in both 2018 and 2019 to have so many former players occupying playoff roster spots for so many different teams. It's not as though the team performed a major selloff in the 2018-19 offseason. Compare them to the Mariners, who did perform that kind of selloff: they parted ways with almost every productive player on their roster, yet only three players on three 2019 postseason teams played in Seattle in 2018. This concentration of recently former Indians in the 2019 playoffs is just another quirk in an already strange season for the Cleveland organization—a product of a good team choosing to retool and trade away veterans, an unwillingness to resign free agents, and plain old coincidence.
This is part playoff retrospective, part "where are they now?" for those seven 2018 Indians in the 2019 postseason: their exploits in 2019, their stories as members of the Tribe, and the good wishes and regrets that come with having parted ways with them. If you're still looking for a team to cheer for this October, take a look at this list. If the 2019 Indians won't be getting rings, then maybe the next best thing would be one of the guys from the good old days winning it all.
The "If Onlys"
Yandy Diaz
2019 Stats: 79 games, .267/.340/.476, .816 OPS, 116 wRC+, 1.5 fWAR
This one hurts. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it. The man with the biceps of legend hit more home runs in the AL Wild Card Game (two) than he did in parts of two seasons with the Indians (one). After being traded to Tampa Bay, he finally got the ball off the ground, upping his flyball rate from 23.3% to 32.0% and crushing 14 home runs in less than half a season's worth of games. Injuries kept him off the field for much of 2019, but a healthy Diaz would have been a three-win player for the Rays over 162 games. We'll never know what went on behind the scenes that compelled the Indians to trade him for Jake Bauers (aside from omnipresent financial pressures), but of all the 2018 offseason trades, this one may be the one that gets away. Here's hoping he unleashes some of that monster bicep power on Justin Verlander in the ALDS.
Michael Brantley
2019 Stats: 148 games, .311/.372/.503, .875 OPS, 133 wRC+, 4.2 fWAR
I don't buy the narrative that the Indians front office's decision to give Danny Salazar a one-year, $4.5 million contract while he was still under team control prevented them from having the financial flexibility to resign Brantley. Brantley signed a two-year, $32 million deal with the Astros; non-tendering Salazar still would have left them about twenty-eight million short in a year when ownership gave the front office the financial flexibility of a five-year-old's lemonade stand. Still, this signing, fresh off the beating the Indians took from Houston in the ALDS, was its own kind of shock, and the fact that Brantley proceeded to turn in his best performance since his MVP-candidate year in 2014 twisted the knife just the tiniest little bit. As a hitter, he kept on doing Michael Brantley things, spraying line drives all over the field and walking nearly as much as he struck out. His hard contact rate ticked up to 41.7%, the highest of his career, and he enjoyed a corresponding power surge, hitting a career-best 22 home runs (then again, who didn't?). Interestingly, he also had what may be one of his better years ever on defense in 2019, possibly due to the Astros' heavy use of shifting. Single-season defensive metrics should always be taken with several grains of salt, but he turned in a fairly respectable 8 DRS and 1.1 UZR on the season. He hasn't morphed into Kenny Lofton or anything (although seriously, I wouldn't put anything past Houston at this point), but it was only the second time in his career that he's had positive ratings in both metrics.
As meh as it would be to see the Houston juggernaut win another World Series, getting Michael Brantley a ring after so many years of a quietly excellent career would definitely be a silver lining, especially after he missed out on most of the 2016 season and the Indians' entire October run to the World Series. His homecoming to Progressive Field in the All-Star Game (including—what else?—a line drive RBI single to his old stomping grounds in left) was one of the many fun moments of an excellent weekend in Cleveland. Maybe he'll be so happy after winning the World Series that he'll retire on the spot and come back with his dad to be the Indians' hitting coach!
The Veterans
Edwin Encarnacion
2019 Stats: 109 games, .244/.344/ .531, 0.875 OPS, 129 wRC+, 2.5 fWAR
No offense to Edwin, but I think that, in 20 years, he's going to be the player that I see when I look back on the 2017-2018 seasons and think "Oh yeah, he was on the team!" As good of a player as Encarnacion is, his time on the Indians was less about what he did on the field and more about what he represented about the position of the organization in the competitive landscape. Encarnacion's three-year, $60 million deal remains the largest free-agent contract ever given out by the Cleveland Indians. With the organization newly flush with playoff revenue post-World Series in December of 2016, the Encarnacion signing was the team's way of announcing that they were going for it. It's somewhat fitting, then, that he was one of the first players traded in the 2018-19 retool.
Since he was flipped to Seattle in The Trade That Brought Back OBP Demigod Carlos Santana, Encarnacion had a resurgent season split between the Mariners and Yankees after a down 2018. His hard contact rate actually went down slightly from last year (though still in line with his career numbers), but he embraced the flyball revolution, hitting a whopping 50.6% of balls in the air. As a result, he enjoyed a career-high ISO of .287 (thank you, juiced ball and Yankee Stadium short porch) and his highest slugging percentage since his days as a Blue Jay. In a particularly weird twist, he also reversed the early slump that used to plague him for the first month of the season—he was an above-average hitter in March and April for the first time since 2014; perhaps Seattle's dome and playing in generally temperate stadiums in the AL West really did help.
Andrew Miller
2019 Stats: 4.45 ERA, 5.19 FIP, 4.43 xFIP, 11.52 K/9, 4.45 BB/9, 1.81 HR/9, -0.4 fWAR
The mighty have fallen, and they have fallen pretty hard.
Andrew Miller is still striking out almost everyone in sight, but the control issues that plagued him in his last year in Cleveland have returned to haunt him with the St. Louis Cardinals. He's also giving up home runs at a rate beyond even his worst years as a starter. During the first half, he pitched to a respectable 3.81 ERA (4.73 FIP), but he's seen his strikeout rate drop and walk rate rise since the All-Star break. A quick look at his pitch breakdowns suggests that he's lost some velocity on the fastball (averaging 92.4 mph this year, down from 94.0 in 2017) and has been leaving it over the plate more than he used to. That, along with poorer location of his slider, added up to a failed resurgence for the 2016 ALCS MVP.
On the surface of Miller's story, there's a lot of the usual bullpen clichés: relief pitching results are rife with small sample size caveats, bullpens are unpredictable, physical decline often hits relievers more quickly, and sometimes pitchers just break. Maybe Miller's decline is just Father Time taking its toll. There's no denying, however, that Miller pitched a historic number of innings in the 2016 postseason to incredible success. For about three weeks, when the Indians desperately needed any semblance of consistency, he was unperturbable, undefeatable. Given the injuries and inconsistency that started to emerge the next season, there's a narrative that starts to emerge here. Though the Indians came up short in 2016, Miller gave everything he had, putting his health and his livelihood on the line, for a chance at that World Series championship. After coming so close once, I'd love to see him win one.
Josh Tomlin
2019 Stats: 79.1 IP, 3.74 ERA, 4.49 FIP, 4.95 xFIP, 5.79 K/9, 0.79 BB/9, 1.59 HR/9, 0.2 fWAR
Here's my extremely biased take: if you truly, in your heart of hearts, have nothing but contempt for Josh Tomlin and his soft-tossing ways, then there is something wrong with you. On the contrary, I submit that Josh Tomlin was the best non-curse-related story of the 2016 postseason. He's a guy who, on paper, has absolutely no business succeeding in major league baseball in this day and age. He's not even a stereotypical soft-tossing lefty—he's right-handed. In 2016, he was booted out of the starting rotation after posting a double-digit ERA in the month of August, then brought back after injuries depleted the rotation in September. So, of course, Josh "Nerves of Steel" Tomlin, King of the Surrendered Solo Home Run, pitched the Indians to a win in three of the four postseason games he started, one of which was the final game of David Ortiz's career, at Fenway Park. Plus, he kept it together and pitched two shutout innings in extras out of the bullpen in the Indians' last glorious postseason moment, their 10-inning 8-7 comeback win in Game 2 of the 2017 ALDS.
Of course, he was finally relegated to the bullpen in 2018 after losing one too many ticks off of his 3rd-percentile fastball velocity; after hitting free agency, he landed at the low-leverage end of Atlanta's relief corps in 2019. (Confession time: despite the fact that he opened 2019 in a major league bullpen, I was completely convinced that before the season was over, he would be pitching in Columbus on one of the Indians' patented good-faith minor-league deals while he waited for another opportunity.) He proceeded to pull together a surprisingly respectable year with the Braves: he still strikes out absolutely no one and walks absolutely no one, and he's still prone to surrendering solo homers. Still, in an Atlanta bullpen marked by instability, he was a reliable replacement-level innings eater and pitched well enough to stay in the majors even after his team acquired three relievers at the trade deadline. That may say more about Atlanta's bullpen than it does about Tomlin, but after having one of the highest home runs per 9 totals of literally any player in history in 2018, I think that still counts as a win.
The Highway Robbery
Yan Gomes
2019 Stats: 112 games, .223/.316/.389, .704 OPS, 79 wRC+, 0.8 fWAR
Whether or not any of the three prospects that the Washington Nationals shipped to Cleveland for Yan Gomes last November actually pan out (and Daniel Johnson is looking pretty darn good down in Triple-A), it's clear that the Cleveland front office pulled off another one of their famous trade heists here based on 2019 alone. After 2018, Gomes was coming off of his best offensive season since his Silver Slugger years, and the front office sensed an opportunity to sell high. The Nationals came calling, and the rest is history. In 2019, his defense was still excellent, but his offense cratered. The problem appears to have been a drop of nearly ten percentage points in his hard-hit rate and a corresponding power outage, as the rest of his underlying number appear to be consistent with or even better than previous years. But hey, he posted a double-digit walk rate for the first time in his career!
Baseball is Weird, Man
Gio Urshela
2019 Stats: 132 games, .314/.355/.534, .889 OPS, 132 wRC+, 3.1 fWAR
I don't know what to tell you. I really don't. Except that in 2019, Gio Urshela nearly doubled his hard-hit rate from his previous career high, started pulling the ball more, and hit twenty-one home runs for the New York Yankees as a replacement for one of the Yankees' seventeen thousand injured players. He was thirty-two percent better than league average on offense. In limited action last year, he was thirty-three percent worse than league average on offense. Chalk it up to the juiced ball, the short porch in right field at Yankee Stadium, a .356 batting average on balls in play, or Yankees devil magic, but Gio Urshela was a three-win player in 2019. Oh, and he was a net negative on defense at third base. Because baseball.
So there you have it, the seven 2018 Indians who could still win a ring in 2019. It's an odd collection of players—two breakout third basemen, two fringy veteran relievers, and everything in between. The odds are pretty good that one of them will come away from 2019 as a World Series champion, while the odds that any 2019 Indians will are exactly zero. So, until next spring, let's go (former) Tribe!