CLEVELAND, Ohio (92.3 The Fan) – The Cleveland Guardians begin their longest homestand of the season Friday night against the AL Central leading Minnesota Twins in a bit of a funk.
Cleveland has dropped five consecutive series and seen the offense stuck in the ditch, yet they trail Minnesota by just 3.5 games in the standings.
When it comes to the everyday lineup, there’s not much manager Terry Francona can do right now to provide a spark other than to be patient and hope his hitters warm up with the weather.
“As our position players go, I mean they're here,” Francona said. “Sometimes if you’re supposed to be patient or if you need to be patient, you better be patient or you’re going to mess up. If we thought we had something better to serve our team, we would do it. But I mean, again, we've called up a lot of young guys. You’re not just going to keep calling guys up.”
Cleveland is tied with the Twins for 25th in team batting average and the Guardians rank 27th in runs scored, are tied for 26th in hits and 30th in total bases. There hasn’t been much pop either – they’re 30th in home runs and slugging percentage.
Jose Ramirez and Steven Kwan are the two closest Guardians to .300 with Ramirez batting .286 and Kwan .274 entering play Friday night. As a team, they are hitting a paltry .228.
The Guardians, who have lost 11 of 16, have been shut out three times and are 7-9 in one-run games.
Will patience pay off?
“Well, I hope it ends with us swinging the bats really well,” Francona said. “The best thing I know is to work hard and then try to take what you work on into the game. Sometimes you start trying to do more. That usually gets you in trouble at times. Now we're trying to hit everything, and I get it, but it's too hard.
“So we're going to have to be at times patient enough to earn pitches to hit and not try to hit every speed in every location because that's just too hard.”
Fixing Plesac – Starter Zach Plesac, who was originally scheduled to start Friday night’s opener with the Twins, was optioned to AAA Columbus on Thursday.
“We're not given up [on him] by any means,” Francona said. “We just didn't see it happening here and we felt like if he goes to AAA and he can work on trying to sustain his delivery, all things he'd been trying to do here without the results so important at a major league game, maybe he'll be able to kind of rediscover who he is because it was tough. I mean there's any way you look at it just wasn't getting, wasn't happening the way we needed it to and we just felt like this was probably the best step to do it. It's never fun. I know I don't blame him for not liking it and we don't particularly enjoy it, but we think it was necessary.”
Plesac was 1-1 with a 7.59 ERA in five starts this season after going 3-12 with a 4.31 ERA in 24 starts last season.
“In the bullpen, Carl [Willis] said he is been very good then whether it's the stress or the emotion of a game, whatever it is, he's trying to do more and then you see less command,” Francona said. “He’s got to figure it out.”
Rookie Peyton Battenfield, who is 0-2 with a 4.67 ERA in three starts, takes Plesac’s spot in the rotation for now
“With Zach, we felt like this was the appropriate time to do something,” Francona said. “But saying that it also gave us a chance to see Battenfield who we're still learning about. So in the meantime, while Zack's working on what he does, we can get a look at Battenfield, which we need to do.”
Plesac is scheduled to pitch tomorrow for Columbus.
Good first impression – Logan Allen is scheduled to make his third start for the Guardians Saturday evening after making his big league debut last month.
The left-hander, who has made a positive first impression, is 1-1 with a 2.45 ERA.
“Good poise, which is always welcome,” Francona said. “He spins it. He's got three pitches. He throws strikes I think to think that he and Bobby are going to be perfect or they won't have hiccups. That's not fair, but it's been enjoyable and you kind of feel like the more they pitch, the more they're going to learn, the better they're going to get.”
Running wild – The Guardians lead the American League with 33 stolen bases this season. Only the Pittsburgh Pirates have swiped more bags in the big leagues to date. The Buccos have stolen 44 bases.
Bob Feller bricks – The Guardians are in the process of loading all of the remaining bricks on Gateway plaza that originally surrounded the Bob Feller statue on to pallets instead of discarding them, which was the original plan.
Nearly 6,000 bricks were purchased to finance the Bob Feller statue in 1994 when the ballpark opened but the project was handled by Gateway and there were no original records available to the organization.
The team will catalog the remaining bricks and store them until they are ready to distribute later this year. Fans who would like to claim their bricks can email fanservices@cleguardians.com or call 216-420-HITS.
