While Burning River Baseball has been around since 2011, the past year has been a breakthrough one for us. For the first time, we have expanded our full time writers to six, with John Hutchison and Kevin Gall joining late in 2014, Danny Cunningham in early 2015 and Caitlin Boron coming on late in the 2015 baseball season to join myself, Joseph Coblitz and Mike Melaragno. This was also the first year that we had dedicated, credentialed writers for every minor league level (excluding Lynchburg) allowing us to bring you more thorough first hand information about the Tribe’s future.
In addition, the days of Burning River Radio are gone (although the episodes are still up if you want to go back in listen) with our inclusion in the Tribe Time Now podcast. Joining with Indians Baseball Insider, It’s Pronounced Lajaway, Did the Tribe Win Last Night, Everybody Hates Cleveland and More than a Fan has been an excellent experience and hopefully provided hours of entertainment for everyone and will continue to do so into the future.
All that being said, there is no better time than now to look back at some of our best from the past year. While most articles are time sensitive, there is value in looking back and listed below with brief descriptions are some of the most interesting from the past year.
Mike
June 13th: Long before the Winter Meetings rumors of Todd Frazier coming to Cleveland came into existence, Mike discussed how the two teams would be great trading partners and how well Frazier would fit in Cleveland.
July 10th: Little appreciated outside of Cleveland, Mike looked at the combined production of David Murphy and Ryan Raburn as of mid-July, shortly before Murphy was traded.
Danny
July 26th: Danny covered the Rubberducks for us this year for the first time and was lucky enough to get up close access to many stars including Nick Swisher (from July 24th) and Gavin Floyd (from October 30th) while they were rehabbing. The best of these and most relevant today was his look at Bradley Zimmer making his AA debut.
John
July 14th: John was responsible for our previews and reviews this year and if you’d like to see how his predictions went on a week to week basis, all the previews are still available under the Ahead in the Count tab. On a more individual note, he graded the Indians by position at the All-Star break and it’s worth seeing how much the team improved from then through the end of the season when he gave them their end of the year report card.
Cait
August 26th: Our most recent addition, Cait covered some of the Indians most recent additions in Mahoning Valley in 2015. One of the biggest she interviewed and wrote about was the Scrappers’ switch pitcher, Ryan Perez.
September 18th: At the Major League level, Cait covered Trevor Bauer’s transition from rotation to bullpen and discussed the importance and possible permanence of the move.
Kevin
May 12th: When Corey Kluber started the season off poorly and his record did not reflect his ability, Kevin wrote this to assuage the doomsayers. After describing the situation, he explained a probable reason for the change in results and predicted a change in the future. In his next start Kluber would start to turn things around and by the end of the season he would again be one of the best pitchers in all of baseball.
May 31st: In addition to writing about the Majors, Kevin also covered the Columbus Clippers in person and the Hillcats and DSL Indians from afar (he was also the host of the Tribe Time Now Minor League Reports). One problem that consistently plagued the Indians minor leagues this year was the existance of too many veteran players holding minor league roster spots and Kevin discussed that in detail. It was a problem that was alleviated some by trades throughout the season, but looks to still exist going into 2016.
Joe
Since I write on Burning River Baseball almost every single day (multiple times a day during the regular season), it’s hard to pick just one or two for the year, but a couple of my favorites were the compilations of the Indians top ten offensive and defensive plays from the 2015 season.
July 23rd: On an individual note, my favorite articles to write are about my minor league assignment, the Arizona League Indians and this year in particular it was all about Gabriel Mejia. If you don’t know him yet, read about him now and get ready to hear a lot more in the near future.
September 23rd: I made this plea to Indians ownership to lower ticket prices on the cusp of the Clippers International League championship run. I would still love someone to read this and refute that the Indians would be better off selling more tickets for a lower price.
I’ll also use this space to refute many common misconceptions like:
Response Runs (June 18th)
Quality Starts (August 28th)
Right Handed Power Bats (June 12th) &
Dolanz Cheap (November 12th)
Staff
As a staff, we put together a few things including pre-season predictions (which will be done again next year) and the Burning River Awards, but the biggest and best of these were the minor league rankings. Since we had eyes at every level, I relinquished the responsibility of doing them all by myself and left it up to a vote, creating our most accurate and in depth rankings yet. Check out the top 10, 11th through 20th and 21st through 30th best.
That’s a lot, but it’s still just a small representation of our total writings from 2015. Thanks for reading and I hope you will all continue to do so throughout the next year as we will continue to provide you with daily, in-depth Indians analysis and commentary.
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