Fans May Feel Otherwise, But Don’t Tell the Indians They Have Taken a Step Back This Offseason

CLEVELAND – The doom and gloom that many Indians fans and even some media have spun this offseason isn’t being felt by the team that won 102 games last season.

Inside the clubhouse at Progressive Field, the players and coaches of the Cleveland Indians don’t want to hear about those that are no longer with the team, instead they feel they are more than capable of another World Series run in 2018.

Losing Carlos Santana, Jay Bruce, Bryan Shaw and even Joe Smith hasn’t given fans much confidence that the Indians are doing enough to challenge the best in baseball this season, but don’t tell the players that this team doens’t have enough and is heading backwards.

“Backwards? No, I don’t think so,” Indians shortstop Francisco Lindor said Friday. “We have a great group of guys, everybody here works as hard as they can, the guys that we lost are definitely going to be missed, but the guys that came in, I am pretty positive they are going to do their job and help up win.

“At the end of the day it’s not about what you have, it’s about what you have in front of you, and what you are going to do with it.”

It’s amazing that some of the same fans that tend to give leeway to a team that went 0-16 this season don’t want to give that same to a baseball team that has won the most amount of games in the American League the last five seasons.

“I don’t think anybody should be pessimistic right now, my goodness we’ve had the best record in the American League the last five years,” Indians manager Terry Francona said. “This has been a good run of baseball, and I don’t see that going anywhere.

“We’ve kept our core together, we’ve had very little movement on our team, you’re going to lose guys, we can’t be the team that signs guys to their second and third contract, we need to be the team that gets guys years one through eight, maybe give them that second contract but that’s not where we are at right now.”

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