Yonder Alonso blasted a grand slam on Friday, helping to propel the Indians to a 10-0 victory over the Tigers.

His towering blast came off of Johnny Barbato in the seventh inning, increasing the Indians' lead to 9-0. He also singled in the ballgame, finishing the night 2-for-4. The 31-year-old is finally starting to show signs of life at the plate and is now hitting .255/.327/.456 with 12 homers and 43 RBI.

Nothing awesome but we are not at the halfway point yet so you can potentially at least double those. Considering his REALLY slow start it really is encouraging.

He is not the fielder Santana is though.

Wow! No posts at all today!

Yikes, we're melting!!!!!!!

Everyone's busy enjoying the summer. And beating the Tigers so matter of fact it's hardly worth noticing.
Glad to see they got the margin up to 10 today, so Josh Tomlin was allowed into the game. He's allowed only 1 run, which means only 1 homer, in June. Much improved.

Any chance they could revise the schedule and give us a series every weekend with Detroit?

or Chicago?

or Kansas City?

I really do wonder if Bauer and Clevinger would rank about the top 10 in the league in ERA if they had to face major league competition more often. I like them both a lot but their stats may be inflated by the ineptitude of their competition

I agree although I think this is the case for Clevinger much more than Bauer actually. Bauer has been around a long time now and he clearly has added to his arsenal.

As for Clevinger I think he has benefited from an extra layer of development. Pitchers usually go from AAA to the big leagues - but in a sense he went from AAA to AAAA then to the bigs and with Bauer coaching him while Kluber role models how it's done.

(Remember though even Detroit has some veteran quality hitters as well, and Chicago has Abreu etc - that's why I call it AAAA because it's a clear level above AAA in the Central)

So kind of a perfect storm for Clevinger - he has had somewhat of a safety net while he develops. BTW I can totally see the same exact benefit coming to Bieber!

When you look at American League team hitting, 3 of the bottom 5 teams are AL Central. And the next to last team is Baltimore, who we played in a 4 game series already. We've also played the Brewers twice, and they are in bottom 3rd of NL in hitting.

We do get around to playing good times before October I guess? St. Louis this week is quality; do they hit?

St. Louis has a VERY veteran lineup. Definitely a real test.

Well Clevinger did OK. Our hitters not so.

He did but they ran up his pitch count which was a problem for him prior to this year. Be interesting to see if he learned from it.

They say he had muscle cramps that bothered him throughout so I think he gets an excuse.

To the best of my knowledge the Indians played the Cardinals again last night, although no one seems to have been watching, which was probably a good idea.

St, Louis is using a peculiar tactic to screw with our starting pitchers, seeding the clouds to create artificial rain delays. Sure worked with Kluber. He has lost his team lead in ERA to Bauer. Trevor already had surged way ahead in strikeouts. Now just a few points behind in BAA.