Cleveland Indians: 3 storylines to follow during the 2020 season

Will the team get off to a slow start?

The Indians have a nasty habit of starting off slow, have you ever noticed that? Doom and gloom hover over the fanbase until about June or so when all of a sudden a burst of talent and energy erupts and the team all of a sudden gets their collective heads out of their collective butts.

Under Terry Francona the Indians have had, shall we say, a sleepy spring? The team routinely starts off slow throughout March (when applicable), April and May, resulting in a record of 190-183 over Francona’s past seven seasons as club skipper. That’s barely a 51% winning percentage in the first two months of the season. How many games are usually in the first two months? Glad you asked; 52 games on average.

That means if the Indians are going to follow suit like the last seven years under Francona, and start off slow, then this team won’t be seeing the postseason this year. Now maybe, it’s only a percentage of games and not necessarily a totality. Meaning that the Tribe would only struggle for 32% of the games played. That gives the team about 40 games to turn things around.

It’s also entirely possible that the Indians’ future Hall of Fame manager Francona does all sorts of things differently in 2020 and the slow start ends up being an irrelevant piece of interesting trivia. Maybe this team goes 50-10 or 55-5 throughout the shortened season because Francona opts not to play it safe.

The team is going to have to come out swinging, regardless of the spring-time usuals. The club can’t afford to fall behind fast and early, because the odds this team puts together another 22-game winning streak isn’t very likely.