Baseball and the Cleveland Indians

Yet another win for the Cleveland Indians though as seems to be their habit of late they had to take the slightly difficult route to success.

Playing away to the Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park Detroit the Tigers took the early lead with one run in the first innings. Cleveland replied with two runs one each in the 2nd and 3rd to take the lead 2-1. Detroit then scored again with one run in the 5th and again in the 7th at the Indians scored one in the 8th, the score was tied at 3-3.

Into overtime and the 9th innings produced no runs for either team. The Indians take the batting for the start of the 10th and after a pitching change by the Tigers from Fernando Rodney to Casey Fossum; Grady Sizemore comes into bat and is caught at short stop by Edgar Renteria. The Tigers change pitcher again and Gary Glover replaces Casey Fossum. Cleveland’s second bat for the 10th is Franklin Gutierrez who then promptly hits a home run to make the score 4-3. It then takes on an air of excitement to see if the Indians can improve and score again or if not hold off the Tigers.

Of the remaining Indian bats, Ben Francisco is caught at centre field by Curtis Granderson, Jhonny Peralta takes a single on a line drive to left field and then Shin-Soo Choo gets it all wrong again by grounding out and allowing second base to throw to first base and its three out. Luckily for Cleveland and thanks to some accurate fielding Detroit is unable to score and the final score is Cleveland Indians 4 Detroit Tigers 3, another close match and an exciting finish.

This win over Detroit now give the Cleveland Indians their 8th straight win in a row however due to their very poor overall performance during most of this season they still remain in fourth place behind Detroit and above Kansas City in the American League Central Division.

However a report on this game cannot pass without mention of the hero of the team Grady Sizemore. Grady hit two home runs during the game and in doing so became only the fourteenth man in the American League history to put together a 30-30 season, that is to say 30 Home Runs and 30 Stolen Bases in a season, the last to do it was Alfonso Soriano in 2005 playing for the Texas Rangers. In fact Sizemore hit his second home run during the 3rd innings to give him a total of 31 home runs and he had before starting the game already scored on 34 stolen bases. Grady is only the second Cleveland Indians player to reach this milestone the first being Joe Carter in 1987.