The Cleveland Indians’ pitchers and catchers have reported to the team’s winter home in Goodyear, Arizona, for the start of spring training, which will fully get underway next week when the full team reports on Monday, February 22.
“Every year, when it gets close to that time where Spring Training is coming, there’s definitely that excitement,” Indians starter Corey Kluber told WKYC.com at TribeFest last month. “All of the work you’ve done in the offseason, it’s finally a chance to go out there and actually play baseball, which is a relief.
“I have different markers throughout the offseason where I know I take this long and about a week before I start throwing, it’s like, ‘Okay, I need to start throwing.’ Your body knows when it’s that time and stuff, so the closer and closer you get to Spring Training, the more you want to get out there and be on a baseball field, not just play catch, but actually play the game.”
CUES FROM KLUBER
After posting an 18-9 record and winning the American League Cy Young Award in 2014, Kluber won just nine of his 32 starts and came up on the losing end 16 times for an Indians team that was just one game over the .500 mark (81-80) and finished in third place in the A.L. Central Division last year.
Along with the aforementioned 9-16 record, Kluber posted a 3.49 earned run average, set a career high with an American League-best four complete games, tallied 245 strikeouts and allowed just 48 total walks in 222.0 innings of work.
While Kluber’s record and earned run average were well off the pace he set for himself in 2014, there was no finger-pointing at his teammates.
“I think that it goes back to, first and foremost, being a good teammate,” Kluber said. The second you throw somebody else under the bus, it’s hard to recover from, so I think you’ve got to keep that approach. If things go your way or don’t go your way, just know everybody’s out there giving it their best and it’s not for a lack of effort. Sometimes, things turn out well. Sometimes, they don’t, but all you can control is going out there and doing your job to the best of your ability.”
FOCUSING ON THE PRESENT
Less than two weeks into the 2015 season, the Indians lost starting catcher Yan Gomes, a 2014 Silver Slugger Award winner, to a sprained knee. With Gomes out of the lineup for nearly two months, Kluber had to help bring along second-year backstop Roberto Perez, who caught 70 games in relief of the ailing starter.
“I think that’s a big part of it,” Kluber said. “The more a pitcher and catcher can be on the same page and feel comfortable with each other, it makes everybody’s job easier. You’re not out there second-guessing the fingers they’re putting down. They’re not trying to think along with you. If you can be on the same page, the game just flows and it’s a lot easier to go worry about executing a pitch not about all the stuff that goes with it.
“I think that we have two great guys. I think people wanted to say Roberto and I had trouble last year, but it’s nothing on him. It’s about me going out there and executing pitches. The more he accepted that too, he realized, ‘Hey, I don’t need to give into him. We’re doing this as a team.’ That’s what I was trying to get him to see all along. It makes it that much easier.”
When Perez recognized a struggle between him and Kluber, he attended the Cy Young winner’s bullpen sessions and did the extra work necessary to make sure he was on the same page as his top-of-the-rotation starter.
“It’s something that if we had a perfect world, it would’ve clicked from the start,” Kluber said. “It took us a few to get into it, and after that, the results were pretty good. It just took a little bit of work on our part to get it where we were both comfortable with it.”
DETHRONING THE CHAMPS
Kluber is hoping that extra work in 2015 pays off for everybody in the rotation and the lineup this year as the Indians look to chase down the reigning World Series Champion Kansas City Royals, who have won two straight American League pennants.
“If you look at it as comparing yourself to another team, everybody in baseball is so close,” Kluber said. “Anybody can beat anybody on any given day. I think that throughout the course of the year, there’s things that they did, that they executed better than us more often, but I don’t think it’s one of those things where they’re leaps and bounds ahead of what we are as a team.
“I think that roles could very easily be reversed. I know they’re doing everything within their power to make sure that doesn’t happen, and we’re doing everything in our power to get where they’re at.”
