Cleveland Indians: 3 takeaways from the comeback win over the White Sox

All of a sudden the Cleveland Indians are the Kardiac Kids as they completed their second huge comeback in a row Monday afternoon.

Beating the Chicago White Sox should be a natural thing to do in 2018. Unfortunately, nothing comes easy for these Cleveland Indians. The bullpen is a mess and the starters are pushed to their limits at times. But thankfully, they aren’t playing the Houston Astros anymore. They’re facing Chicago White Sox.

You might have heard that the White Sox are bad. That’s because they are. Their three errors and blown four-run lead allude to that. The Indians bullpen has been hard to watch, but if any team has pitching that is harder to watch, it’s the White Sox.

I feel kind of bad for ever complaining about the Indians after watching how bad the Sox were in this game. Know that we understand the pain White Sox fans feel.

White Sox errors saved Plutko’s struggles

Adam Plutko‘s start today certainly didn’t resemble that of his outing against the Cubs. It’s strange how just a week can change one’s performance. Today Plutko worked five innings and allowed five runs on six hits.

It was a bad outing from the young starter to say the least. But thanks to the White Sox error-filled woes, he still got the win. This goes to show that pitcher records are a pretty dumb stat sometimes.

Plutko pitched a bad game and the team trailed for five innings because of his lack of control. But because the offense came alive at the right time and the White Sox are really bad at catching balls, he is now 3-0.

The Indians offense is finding other ways to score

So maybe relying on errors from the defense isn’t the best offensive strategy. That being said, the Indians found ways to get hits outside of the White Sox woes. The Tribe hit five doubles and had four two-out RBIs.

On top of that they only hit one home run. For the longest time it felt like the long ball was the only way the Indians could score runs. Now they’re finding every other way possible to score.

The bullpen was pretty damn effective

Strong outings from the Tribe bullpen have been few and far between this year. I’ve gone on and on about how bad the bullpen has been in recent games. Instead we can talk about how good they were.

The Indians used four relief pitchers in today’s game. Only Ben Taylor allowed an earned run in one inning of work.

Aside from that, Tyler Olson, Evan Marshall and Neil Ramirez allowed a combined three hits with no runs. Closer Cody Allen wasn’t available after he was used a good bit against the Astros.

But the lack of him and Andrew Miller didn’t kill the overused and abysmal Indians bullpen today. It’s hard to grade them after one outing against a bad team. But it may be a shot in the arm for a bullpen that desperately needs one.

Next: Shane Bieber to be called up for start on Thursday

The Indians will take on the White Sox again tomorrow. This time it will be a 6:10 pm night start. Hopefully the team won’t have to rally due to poor starting pitching this time.