Saturday, May 24, 2008
CLEVELAND (AP) — Back in the dugout after another frustrating at-bat in Chicago the other night, Indians catcher Victor Martinez vented by kicking a white plastic bucket filled with packets of sunflower seeds. He put a hole in its side — and got his foot stuck.
“I heard it,” Cleveland manager Eric Wedge said. “It was good contact.”
Finally.
The Indians rarely hit anything hard anymore.
They’re baseball’s worst hitting team, stuck in a deep, unforgiving slump that has wasted excellent starting pitching and solid defense and is threatening to sabotage a season they thought would go much differently than it has for the first two months.
Cleveland entered Friday night’s series opener against the Texas Rangers with a season-high, six-game losing streak and a .231 team batting average. That’s six points behind Washington, the poorest-hitting team in the NL, and a whopping 64 points behind the Boston Red Sox, whom the Indians pushed to a Game 7 in the ALCS last October.
With the exception of Martinez (.300), a cleanup hitter who has yet to homer in 140 at-bats and needed Cleveland’s trainer to free his foot from the bucket, the Indians have seemingly forgotten how to hit. It’s been a group effort.
From leadoff hitter Grady Sizemore (.254) all the way down to Asdrubal Cabrera (.172) in the No. 9 hole, Cleveland’s bats are broken.
They hit just .192 in a six-game swing through Cincinnati and Chicago and scored just 13 runs. On Thursday, the Indians managed two hits — one a bunt single — in a 3-1 loss to the White Sox.
“It’s tough, said Martinez, who was the AL’s leading hitter a few weeks back but was in a 6-for-36 (.167) slide with one RBI in his last 10 games. “But the only good thing is that we’ve been here before. We know we have the talent and we’ve all been through this before.”
Just not to this degree.
Like all teams, the Indians had their share of hitting futility last season. This year, though, they’re in a rut that appears to be widening.
Through 47 games, they’ve scored 79 fewer runs than last season. Also, they’d scored three runs or less 26 times, compared to 12 times at the identical juncture in 2007.
What’s making the offensive woes worse is that the Indians have been getting exceptional starting pitching. Cleveland’s rotation recently pitched 44 1/3 consecutive scoreless innings and since April 17, the Indians have four of the five lowest ERAs in the AL.