Are You Kidding Me? A Look back at BurningRiverBaseball’s 2017 Indians Predictions

As the saying goes, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Before the start of every season, the Burning River Baseball crew gets together to make a pack of outlandish predictions. These predictions would be meaningless, however, if they were never brought to light once the actual results of the season were known. With that in mind, here are how we came out with the team predictions. The results of the league wide predictions will be posted following MLB award season. The predictions this year came from Joseph Coblitz, Mike Melaragno, John Hutchison, Caitlin Boron, Justin Lada and Gavin Potter from Burning River Baseball and Brad Wojdyla from Cleveland Baseball & Brews.

Offensive Triple Crown Stats

We’ll start off with an easy category, the triple crown stats for hitters. In power production, no one came close to the newly added Edwin Encarnacion, leading the team in home runs and RBI. This was a common prediction going into the season as excitement reigned for the incoming free agent and only Mike and Cait went with Carlos Santana for RBI leader and John went with the same as the top home run hitter. Santana was a fair pick given his recent history, but this year he finished 4th in RBI and home runs behind Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez in both categories. As should be expected, no one predicted Lindor to be one of the Indians top two power hitters.

As for average, the consensus was Lindor or Ramirez with Brad hoping for a great comeback season from Brantley. Brantley did have a great offensive season when he was around and his .299 average would be third on the team if he qualified, however, his ankle injury kept him out of the race entirely. Instead, it was Ramirez coming in first for the second year in a row, making Mike and Gavin the winners this time around. For the rest of us, Lindor did finish second among qualifiers at .273, but only four Indians hitters qualified for the batting title. Among those with at least 200 at bats, he finished fifth behind Austin Jackson (2) and Lonnie Chisenhall (4) in addition to Ramirez and Brantley.

Pitching Triple Crown Stats

This one may have been just as easy if we had all taken the route John, Justin and Gavin did by voting a straight Kluber ballot. Not only did he win the team pitching triple crown, but he almost won the AL triple crown, only falling behind Chris Sale in total K’s. If he had pitched a full season, he may have surpassed him in that stat as well.

As far as our predictions, only Mike and Cait strayed with ERA and they picked the only other two pitchers to qualify for the ERA title. Of those, Carlos Carrasco finished well behind Kluber with a 3.29 ERA, but well ahead of Trevor Bauer at 4.19. It would have been safe to vote any of the three for top win total as even Bauer won 18, but instead everyone went to Kluber except Mike who picked Danny Salazar. Salazar won just five games in an injury shortened season.

As far as strike outs are concerned, the picks for Salazar from myself and Cait weren’t too far off as he did lead all starters in K/9, but didn’t pitch enough innings to catch Kluber. Despite making three more starts, Carrasco (Brad’s pick) pitched fewer innings than Kluber and struck out 39 fewer batters while Bauer (Mike’s pick) didn’t reach 200 in either stat despite making 31 starts.

Award Predictions

More meaningful than the triple crown stats are the awards that we give out as a staff at the end of each season. These are also much harder to predict.

The first two awards, for most improved player and rookie of the year should be the easiest. To be most improved, you have to be coming off a bad season and everyone who received a vote pre-season qualified for sure. Bauer, Brantley and Yan Gomes also improved significantly and deserved consideration for the award. However, it went to Mike Clevinger, who had an amazing season in the rotation. Tyler Naquin never really got a chance to prove himself with the introduction of Bradley Zimmer and Michael Martinez was just a really silly pick.

For rookie of the year, we were split between Yandy Diaz and Zimmer and there’s no question that those were the top options when the season ended with Nick Goody deserving some credit as well. Zimmer was the more popular pick going into the season, however, and the ultimate winner.

Always the contrarian, Mike went with Zach McAllister for reliever of the year while everyone else went with the more conventional Andrew Miller or Cody Allen choices. That pair made up the only options for this award at the end of the season and Miller won in a shut out.

Nearly everyone thought Francisco Lindor would be the Indians top defender this year, but it was the rookie centerfielder who grabbed the team’s top defender award. There was no way to predict this one as Lindor won best defender in all of baseball last year, but probably won’t even win a Gold Glove in 2017.

All the picks for top hitter were solid choices, but here it was only Mike who correctly chose Jose Ramirez. Arguably, Encarnacion was the second best hitter and he received four predictive votes before the season started.

As with the pitching triple crown stats, picking pitcher of the year and MVP should have been as easy as putting Kluber’s name down twice, but no one did it and two of us didn’t even pick him for pitcher of the year. Mike’s pick of Bauer for both top pitcher and MVP looks particularly bad although he did have a solid season.

The final prediction is the easiest because the Indians ended up having four All-Stars so all we had to do is pick one of about 10 players who had the potential of making it to the mid-summer classic. We all took the easy way out by choosing Lindor to go to his second straight and we were all right. If there was one correct answer, however, of most deserving All-Star it would have been Jose Ramirez who started the game at third base.