Indians Players Don't Take Kindly To Beat Writer Losing Faith

The Cleveland Indians lost starting pitcher Carlos Carrasco for the season on Saturday after a line drive broke a bone in Carrasco’s pitching hand. He will miss the rest of the season, and that’s bad news for an Indians team that also just lost starting pitcher Danny Salazar for the remainder of the year. Indians beat writer Paul Hoynes reacted to this development with doom and gloom in his game story:

Write it down. On Sept. 17, the Indians were eliminated from serious postseason advancement before they even got there.

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Headed into the best-of-five AL Division Series it’s going to be Kluber and Trevor Bauer. The other two starters are Josh Tomlin and rookie Mike Clevinger. That’s reality and that means a quick exit in the postseason.

That’s a harsh assessment of a team that still has a true ace in Corey Kluber and an offense that has scored the second-most runs in the American League, and we’ve seen teams much worse than this diminished Indians squad steal away a five-game series. Then again, Cleveland is where sports optimism goes to die, and sometimes it’s hard for a beat writer not to lean into the “The sky is falling and we’re fucked!” take after a rash of bad news.

Hoynes’s gamer caught the attention of Indians second baseman Jason Kipnis and starter Trevor Bauer, and they were not pleased with what they read:

Bauer and Kipnis were calling Hoynes out for not showing up at the stadium on Sunday, but Hoynes later clarified that Sunday was a scheduled day off, and that he was only writing what he believed:

It’s sort of hard to pick a side here. Hoynes’s take was overwrought and wrong, but baseball players throwing a mini-fit over a writer expressing his opinion, glum as it is, doesn’t exactly make them sympathetic figures. Let’s just chalk this up to the long drag of the season making everyone a little grumpy.

[ Cleveland.com]