Best of Burning River Baseball 2016

As another year draws to a close, we can look back at the last 365 day and see that there were certainly a lot of positives. For the first time since 2007 the Indians were Central Division Champions and for the first time since 1997 they won the AL Pennant. As for the website itself, we (along with the rest of TheSportsDaily) had a big move as we joined up with NESN to provide you with a smoother site experience and to interconnect with the other sites in the network better. One of those sites being our newest venture, Burning River Basketball, which features the work of former Burning River Baseball writer Danny Cunningham as well as Ben Belden, Jordan Greynolds, Jared Donnely and Kyle Kelly.

The purpose of this particular article, however, isn’t just a cheap plug for our sister site, but to relive the experience of 2016 through some of the best articles to come out throughout the year. Each author picked a few of their favorites, and we’ll run down them below.

John Hutchison

John does a great job creating all of our weekly previews and match-up pieces, but he’s had his more memorable pieces as well. Back in March, he started off with an argument against Carlos Santana in the lead-off spot (something most Indians fans would disagree with at this point, but something I changed my mind on towards the end of the season), before looking at why Mike Clevinger should have been included in the bullpen from day one (he was almost certainly right with this one). Finally, on a more sentimental note, John looked at the emotional distinction between the 1997 extra inning, game seven World Series loss and the 2016 extra inning, game seven World Series loss.

Kevin Gall

For the first from Kevin, we go back to April when things weren’t going particularly well and he compared April of 2015 to April of 2015, coming up with some positive results for the rest of the year. Moving to the end of the regular season, he broke down the race, picking the correct top three, but not the order as he agreed with Kate Upton that Justin Verlander was robbed. Finally, Kevin continued in his yearly attempt to explain why the Indians should lock up Danny Salazar long term right now and why maybe, this will be the year it finally happens.

Justin Lada

Capturing the moment that only lasted a moment, one of the most read articles on BurningRiverBaseball all year was Justin’s write up of the Jonathan Lucroy trade that wasn’t. It shall remain a historical marker for those trying to remember what pieces were supposed to be involved ten years from now.

Justin considers himself to be something of a humorist as well and would like to remind everyone that the season wasn’t over back in April when many were claiming it was and he took a comedic look at how poor the Indians bullpen depth was prior to Andrew Miller back in June.

Gavin Potter

In a somewhat prescient performance, Gavin recently extolled the reasons why the Indians should let Mike Napoli go rather than try to catch lightning in the bottle twice. Once we knew for sure that he wouldn’t be joining the club, Gavin wrote about Yandy Diaz being left off the roster in September, something that was definitely felt by the Indians later on in the year as Michael Martinez saw playing time in multiple play-off games including making the final out of the World Series.

Caitlin Boron

Contrary to John’s selection, Cait espowsed a point she has been making for years that Santana was not only well suited for the lead-off role, but was one he flourished in.  In her normal role covering Mahoning Valley, she looked at one outfielder we’ve known about for a little while in Gabriel Mejia and another we are just finding out about in Andrew Calica.

Mike Melaragno

Mike’s best pieces all focused on the most important time of year for the Indians, as they were competing in the post-season. First, he argued that Ryan Merritt should have started game two against Chicago. He then looked back at Corey Kluber’s performance in game one and finally, did a retrospective look after the fact at Terry Francona’s managing in the World Series.

Joseph Coblitz

To start my section, I’d like to recognize the achievements of the staff as a whole. There were only a few collaborative articles in 2016 and those primarily focused on the minor leagues, where each individual’s location and speciality allowed us to provide a more thorough and accurate look than any one person could. This started with position by position lists during the season and ended with a top 50 overall ranking. While the list there is just the names, you can read about each player on the pages from the days before (1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50).

For my solo work, there was this piece looking at how much the Indians defense has improved since I looked at how terrible the defense was just a few years prior. For some humor, one of the most read articles of 2016 was this April Fools Day piece on the Indians resigning Nick Swisher.