I found a website that speaks to me as an Indians fan—nay, as a human being: ketchupcheats.com. Here is a site dedicated to exposing Ketchup for ruining the very integrity of the Progressive Field Hot Dog Race. And this site has been around since at least mid-2007. How did I not know about this?

My disdain for Ketchup goes back to 1988, when thugs working for the Evil Pittsburgh Ketchup Lobby (EPKL) kidnapped my family and held them hostage (don't worry, I saved them, Harrison Ford-style). But since the rights to tell that story are currently owned by Paramount (they are trying to option it into a film starring Harrison Ford), the oldest proof on record of my ketchup-disdain is this post from the early days of the Mistake by the Lake Sporting Times (June 2005). If I may quote myself:

"Ketchup has no business at the top of these standings (what are we, Pittsburgh?) and is clearly doping. That's right, I said it."

Since then, I have written at great length about Ketchup and his questionable tactics/affiliations. Meanwhile, Ketchup has gone on to dominate the Hot Dog Derby, in what can only be called the greatest conspiracy of our generation. And so, while I suspect the EPKL's goons have already erased the creators of ketchupcheats.com from the face of the Earth, I applaud ketchupcheats.com for standing up for the truth!

Go Mustard!

Sports curses get too much airtime around Cleveland. The Curse of Rocky Colavito or whatever you call it doesn't have the same cache as the Curse of the Bambino or the the Billy Goat Curse, but it's floating around out there. And after a particularly crushing (often season-ending) loss, it's on the tip of the tongue of the Cleveland sports media collective. Before I get started, I want to say that I reject all possible curse arguments, as a rational fan. But I'm not interested in debating whether curses are real or self-fulfilling or whatever. I'm interested in, as usual, numbers.

Essential to a good sports curse is that the teams in question haven't won a championship in a long time. And this fact has inspired plenty of people to try to measure which city or team is the most "tortured" or "cursed". These exercises are uniformly pointless and stupid. Ashamedly, I'd like to throw in my two cents.

The usual leaderboards are calculated pretty haphazardly and arbitrarily, with stuff like a bad weather adjustment, since life in a northern city is so painful and dull that losing just hurts that much more. Thankfully, Official Friend of the Mistake by the Lake Sporting Times Daniel introduced me to what I call the "season model". He's likely not the first to think it up, but the idea is simple. Count the number of seasons played by that city's professional teams since the last championship. It avoids the ESPNian problem of arbitrariness and is easy to calculate. By Daniel's count, Cleveland is up to 123 seasons now since the Browns' 1964 championship—that includes the Indians, Browns, Cavaliers, and short-lived N.H.L. Barons.

My contribution was to observe that not all seasons are created equal. A team was more likely to win the N.B.A. Finals in 1976 than in 2006. In 1976, the league had eighteen teams, leaving each franchise a 6% chance of being champion (without adjusting for team quality). By 2006, twelve new teams had been added. Each team then had a 3% shot.

Without getting too technical, for every year since a city's last championship, I calculated the odds for each of that city's M.L.B., N.B.A., and N.F.L. teams winning a championship for each season. These odds are based solely on the number of teams in that league in that year. I then combined all those years to get the probability a city wouldn't have a won a championship in that time, based only on luck.

This methodology wasn't easily automated; I had to hand calculate the numbers for each city I was interested in. Obviously, I started with Cleveland. From the aforementioned 123 seasons, I found that there was a 3.6% chance that not one of our teams would've won it all since 1964, or one in twenty eight. Actually, my original spreadsheet had a pretty stupid error on it that's now corrected. Cleveland's odds were 0.6%, or one in 148.

I then moved onto the other big names in sports curses. Philadelphia had a 2.6% chance of neither the Phillies, 76ers, Eagles, or Flyers winning a championship since 1983—that's one in thirty nine. There was a 2.8%, or one in thirty six, chance that neither of Buffalo's teams would've ever won a major championship. (I don't count the A.F.L. because then, where do I draw the line? The A.B.A? The A.A.F.L? The M.I.S.L?) Neither the Padres, the Chargers, nor the short-lived San Diego Clippers or Rockets ever won, so San Diego clocks in at 3.3%, or one in thirty. Since the Sonics' championship in 1979, Seattle had a 4.4%, or one in twenty three, shot of going championship-less to now.

I'd bet you're surprised that both Buffalo and Philadelphia out-unlucky Cleveland here, especially since we lap the competition in the season model: 123 to Buffalo's 84 and Philadelphia's 98. I was, and checked some more obscure choices to make sure my numbers were right. The closest I found was Washington D.C., which had a 9.8% of not winning a championship since 1991, or one in ten. I don't have a great explanation, but I think that Cleveland is barely edged out since we didn't have an N.H.L. franchise for most of that time. Remember, failing to be champion in a league with fewer teams is more difficult than losing in a bigger league. And the N.H.L. has consistently had the fewest number of teams of the four major sports. So, Buffalo has had the Sabres and Philadelphia the Flyers pulling their numbers down (or up?). And, as the years go by, Philadelphia will only increase it's lead; they've got four teams to Cleveland's three and Buffalo's two. If you're into bragging about being miserable and statistics, then that's pretty bad news. As for San Diego, just remember that the leagues have expanded as time goes on. One losing season in the '70s hurts a more than losing today.

Actually, conventional wisdom--at least a Clevelander's conventional wisdom--holds up. Due to our tremendous lead in the season model (123 to Philadelphia's 98), Cleveland definitely was the unluckiest of any of the cities I checked. Although, as the years accumulate, and as long as neither city wins a championship obviously, Philadelphia will eventually pass us. They have four major professional teams to our three. Unless, of course, the Monster make their long-anticipated leap to the N.H.L.

Here is a smattering of cities I checked. The second column in the last time a team from that city won the championship; the third column in the odds that luck dictates the city would go trophy-less this long; the fourth is the same odds translated into "one in x" .

              Last   Odds  One in...
Cleveland     1965   0.6%   148
Philadelphia  1983   2.6%    39
Buffalo              2.8%    36
San Diego            3.3%    30
Seattle       1979   4.4%    23
D.C.          1991   9.8%    10
Minneapolis   1991  12.8%     8
New Orleans         13.5%     7
Vancouver           13.6%     7
Kansas City   1985  21.3%     5
Milwaukee     1996  31.7%     3

So what do we have here? I'm not going to call it a measure of torturedness or cursedness. It is what it is: a measure of which city's have been the unluckiest in winning championships up to the present. No more, no less. So, the next time someone wants to discuss which city had endured the most losing or whatever, you can at least cite something objective. Although, in a completely subjective argument, there's probably not much use to that.

We at the Mistake by the Lake Sporting Times are nothing if not sensitive to the rigorous demands of your daily schedule, which is why we've made the conscious decision not to overwhelm you with content these last few weeks (okay, months).

Truth is, Alex and I are both really busy; between my touring with the American National Ballet and Alex's new job at Kruger Industrial Smoothing, we've been forced to let the blog take a back seat for a while. But fear not: we have every intention of keeping this blog going until the bitter end of the universe, or until LeBron transforms into a being of pure energy and ascends to the heavens, whichever comes first.

Anyway, it's been a while since we've talked about the Indians, so let's talk about the Indians. This post will be about the offense, which has been pretty bad. Currently, the Indians' team EqA of .251 ties them with Seattle for 24th in the majors (11th in the AL). More to the point, PECOTA projected the Indians to score 5.148 runs per game in 2008. Through 59 games, however, they have scored only 4.424 runs per game. In that sense, only 5 teams (Rockies, Nationals, Yankees, Royals, Angels) are underachieveing more than the Indians, offensively.

Here's a graph showing each Indians hitter (excluding those with only a couple of plate appearances) in terms of his current performance (measured in EqA for convenience's sake) vs. his PECOTA-projected performance (click to enlarge):



The diagonal line is the break-even point; in other words, only one Indians hitter (Ben Francisco) has met—let alone exceeded—our most reasonable expectations thus far.

What to make of this? Most people want to see the offensive woes as epidemic; that is, some external factor—like a crappy bench coach or too much fluorine in the clubhouse drinking water—is acting on the Indians. A person's sense of how things "should" go often precludes the possibility that 11 men could, by random chance, underachieve for 2 months, all at the same time. The same type of thing happens when you ask people to predict a sequence of coin-flip results: in their minds, "randomness" precludes the possibility of landing on heads 10 times in a row. But flip a coin 200 times in a row; you'll find there are more long streaks of all-heads or all-tails than you expected. In other words, 11 Indians hitters can all be bad for a stretch of 2 months. It doesn't necessarily mean Something Is Wrong.

The consensus around town is that the Indians need to do something drastic. Problem is, drastic roster moves are hard to orchestrate (and don't always result in drastic change, to boot). I would be more inclined to leave the roster alone and watch as the Indians regress to the mean. That is unless...

...Mark Shapiro wants to sign Barry Bonds. If he does, I am all for it. Try to contain your vitriol for a second; I'm not interested in the argument that Bonds hurts his team because of his "baggage" or whatever you want to call it, because I don't believe (nor is there any evidence) that on-field success correlates positively or negatively to clubhouse chemistry, steroid allegation-itude, or media circus-ness. Even if Barry Bonds, as a Cleveland Indian, could somehow cause David Dellucci to draw slightly fewer walks, or Rafael Perez to strike out slightly fewer batters, he would be very, very likely to make up for that effect (and then some) by getting on base himself. The Indians clubhouse might turn into a solemn fortress of spite and anger, yes, and The Plain Dealer might have to change its name to The Hate Barry Bonds Dealer, but the Indians would score more runs than otherwise. And with Hafner hitting the DL, it would actually be easy (for the time being) to find playing time for everyone who deserved it. Sorry for the tangent, but if no one else was going to throw it out there, I figured I would.

Anyway, point is, short of signing Barry Bonds, I'm not sure the Indians should make any roster move they wouldn't otherwise make (if they were performing in line with our expectations, that is).

In conclusion: