Bad Weather, Sad Twins, Resilient Cubs: This Particular Week in Baseball

The arrival of the baseball season is like downshifting into first gear on the interstate. It makes a ton of noise and everything shakes, but the ultimate result, aside from your transmission popping off like a Third World dictator's birthday celebration, is that you slow way the heck down. That is the baseball season. It's here, it barely matters for months, and you can still get whiplash from it.

The weather is the thing we talk about with complete strangers while counting along with the light-up numbers in an elevator, because it's boring and safe. But it's also an integral part of a seven-month baseball season, which stretches from the last gasp of winter in April through the back-sweats of August and then back into the frigid embrace of October. It makes for a nice metaphor and all, but the problem with this is you can't play baseball in bad weather. It's a far more specific sport than football and far less indoors than hockey or basketball. As a result, eight days into the baseball season, we've already had seven games postponed due to bad weather.

The Cleveland Indians, as is the organizational custom, have been hit the hardest. As Jordan Bastian of MLB.com tweeted, Cleveland has enjoyed three postponements, a game played during a snowstorm, and two others played in sub-freezing temperatures—all in a week. That's because MLB has seen fit to schedule the Indians at home, and because Cleveland in early April is about as hospitable to baseball as Brazil in mid-summer is to ice hockey.

Some argue that there are too many cold-weather cities for baseball to avoid the bad weather, and that might be true. They say the season is too long and playing in Cleveland in mid-April is as bad as playing in Cleveland in early April. Again, probably true. And yet, why fly into the face of that storm? The perfect need not be the enemy of the merely good. The chances of a snowstorm in Cleveland in July are far less than they are in early April, so it stands to reason that each day closer to July—and thus, as you calendar fans have already noticed, away from early April—in Cleveland is a day with a slightly decreased chance of snow-baseball, which is less fun than it sounds.

So, yes, maybe it is impossible to avoid all the cold-weather cities in April entirely, but the Blue Jays and the Rays, two teams with domed stadiums, started the season playing against one another while the Red Sox and the Indians spent the week in Cleveland hotel rooms repeatedly checking the weather app on their phones. Perfection is an impossible standard, but worrying about that seems like worrying what we'll all do with all our money and free time after we've solved global warming and cured all disease. Let's make an effort first and see where that puts us. Just a guess, but it will probably be somewhere far from Cleveland.

I received some pushback on last week's rankings. That's not surprising as they were and are rankings. Rankings are a quantitative list of a qualitative subject, and especially so early in the season. There's no real way to know which teams are best by now in any real way. About the only way is to combine projections with more subjective criteria, cook down over high heat, add a splash of hope, and serve after several hours cooling in the fridge. In other words, yes, these are probably wrong, as much as anything this subjective can be binary enough to achieve wrong. And no, that ain't gonna stop me.

5. Cleveland Indians

Quick Comment: The Indians will play their next series in Tampa, which will be the first recorded time when anyone was ever happy to see the space dungeon of a baseball dome known as Tropicana Field.

Less Quick Comment: It's hard to get much in the way of solid conclusions from the past week. The Indians have played sparsely and when they have played, it has been in sub-optimal conditions. Sure, the same goes for their opponents, but you have to think that a bit in the way of normalcy would do the Indians good. So far, the Indians are mostly what you'd expect. Their outfield is a mess, but their pitching should be good enough to hold down the fort until Michael Brantley and Lonnie Chisenhall return. Another mediocre week and you could see the Royals in this space next Monday.

4. Boston Red Sox

Quick Comment: It shouldn't be surprising that Pablo Sandoval's belt broke mid-swing because when is Pablo Sandoval not in mid-swing?

Less Quick Comment: After David Price, the Red Sox rotation looks about as we'd all expected—namely, like this:

mostly I just wanted to tweet out this — Matthew Kory (@mattymatty2000)April 6, 2016

As awful as that is, the bullpen has looked fantastic. The Red Sox have allowed 23 runs in five games (43 innings) and the starters have given up 20 of those runs in 60 percent of the innings, meaning that the bullpen has given up just three runs in 17.1 innings. And the offense has scored 28 runs. That's second to the Yankees on a per-game basis. And yet…

mostly I just wanted to tweet out this — Matthew Kory (@mattymatty2000)April 6, 2016

3. San Francisco Giants

Quick Comment: Now that the Giants have Belt signed up for five more seasons, maybe they can help Pablo Sandoval out and—oh, I just can't do it.

Less Quick Comment: The Giants spent a ton of money on pitching last off-season, so it makes total sense that they're winning by clubbing the ball over the fence. If you leave off Trevor Story, who is by himself tied with the Cubs for 12th among MLB teams in homers, the Giants are baseball's leading power source. What's more, they've been doing it and not striking out, which is also weird in a totally Giants sort of way. The whole thing about even-number years is bunk, but the Giants are good and maybe getting better.

2. Los Angeles Dodgers

Quick Comment: Everyone is hurt. Somehow this doesn't matter at all.

Less Quick Comment: Ross Stripling—the pitcher, not the floor wax—was throwing a no-hitter. This is usually cause for celebration and/or anxiety, but never in the history of baseball has it been reason to take someone out of a game. And it wasn't the reason Dodgers manager Dave Roberts yanked Stripling with one out in the eighth, either. But ignore that Stripling was giving up loud contact, walking guys, was at 100 pitches, and has recently returned from Tommy John surgery. Ignore all that and Roberts was taking Stripling out when he was throwing a no-hitter. AAAHHH!!! That might have been forgivable by the old-school hordes, but Chris Hatcher allowed the first batter he saw to hit one into the stands and then the Dodgers lost in extra innings. This used to be the kind of gaffe a new manager didn't recover from. Maybe it still is. Except it's actually not a gaffe at all, just a smart manager protecting his players. That this seems recognized perhaps speaks to where we are as a baseball community.

Oh, and the Dodgers are also good.

1. Chicago Cubs

Quick Comment: Can a baseball team really be hex-proof? Leading scientists are in Chicago doing an innovative study!

Less Quick Comment: Losing Kyle Schwarber, as the Cubs did this past week, is tough, except maybe it really isn't. You see, the Cubs have Jorge Soler, an incredibly talented player if not one with quite so honed a skill set. But suppose Soler doesn't hit. So what? The Cubs still have a lineup with Anthony Rizzo, Ben Zobrist, Addison Russell, Kris Bryant, Dexter Fowler, and Jason Heyward. That's why the Cubs have scored 42 runs, just one less than the NL-leading Giants. Also, they've given up 10 fewer runs than the Giants, because they have Jake Arrieta, Jon Lester, John Lackey, Jason Hammel, and Kyle Hendricks, not to mention a pretty decent bullpen. It's a shame, because Yung Schwarbs is fun to watch, but if any team can withstand any injury, it's the Cubs.

3. Colorado Rockies

Quick Comment: Trevor Story has seven homers in six games but only one walk. I don't know about this guy.

Less Quick Comment: Story is the story of baseball, which is as it should be because wow. But it is also nice of Story to give us something to look at beyond the Rockies pitching staff, which has given up an average of 8.5 runs per game so far this season. Rockies starters are 26th out of 30 in ERA, which is quite bad, but not as bad as the Rockies relievers, who are 30th. This is after trading for Jake McGee and signing free agent relievers Chad Qualls and Jason Motte. Colorado's batting is something to behold, but it's their pitching that's really offensive.

2. Minnesota Twins

Quick Comment: Everyone's sleeper pick to do some damage has done a whole lot of damage to themselves already.

Less Quick Comment: The Twins boast an impressive group of youngsters and perhaps it was us pundits leaning a bit too hard on their reputations. Or maybe it was the feeling that, good gosh, it's been forever, they're due. Or maybe we just weren't paying close enough attention—Twins fans probably wish they weren't.

The Twins are 0-6, which makes sense when you consider that they have scored 12 runs in those six games. That's the fewest in baseball, and a little more than a third of what the Padres—who were scoreless for the first 30 innings of the season—have put up on the season. Can the Twins turn this around? Sure, it's only six games. But it's all we have to go on for now so maybe Twins fans should flip over to Food Network's "Chopped" marathon until the games are safe to watch again.

1. Atlanta Braves

Quick Comment: The Braves are the Twins but without hope.

Less Quick Comment: The Braves have lost by one, two, three, 10, and five runs. They have won by—huh, my fault, they haven't won yet. This isn't progress, but that's kind of the point. When I came up with the Top Five of the Moment, I thought it would be interesting to chronicle the bottom three as well. My thought wasn't much deeper than, "Huh, I bet that would be an interesting juxtaposition." And maybe it is, I don't know. But good gosh, following this team every week is going to be depressing. They just got swept by the Cardinals. One of their pitchers, Daniel Winkler, broke his elbow mid-pitch. There is no sunlight, only darkness. Sadness is all around us, life is unfair, and then we die—but just before that we watch another Braves game.

The Indians travel to Tampa to play baseball games, which they may have forgotten how to do at this point. But if they should remember, this is an interesting match-up. Both teams are favorites of famous projection systems to compete for their respective division titles, and both are off to mediocre-at-best starts. For the Rays, Chris Archer has been especially atrocious, and he'll get a chance to right the ship in the series finale on Thursday. The Indians, for their part, are going to throw their top three of Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, and Danny Salazar. One of these projection darlings is going to be far worse off than they expected by Thursday. Here's hoping it's not your team. Happy weathering!