Without the Indians choking? The White Sox won their last 5 regular season games.
And 3 of them were against the Indians. All the Indians had to do was sweep TB, and take KC in their last game there, and take maybe 1 out of 3 from the White Sox and the Sox are gone.
4 games against last place teams, 3 vs. the Sox. One win. If that's not a choke job, I don't know what is.
19-8 in August. 18-4 in September going into the final week, including taking 2 out of 3 from the White Sox IN CHICAGO.
Then 1-6 the final week, dropping 2 out of 3 to TAMPA BAY and getting swept by Chicago IN CLEVELAND. Home Field for the last 6 games, and what do they get? They go out and shit the bed against Scott Kazmir, Seth McClung, and a half-assed Sox lineup.
The White Sox were 28-28 from August 1 going into the series against the Tribe. They tried to hand the division to them on a silver platter, but the Indians walked past it, stepped in the dogshit, and slid face first into the fence.
Congrats Chicago. You've fucked up this Cleveland fan's psyche for yet another year.
More choke evidence? Read this one...
Hard to deny choke job by Indians
by Ron Musselman
Toledo Blade
CLEVELAND - The Cleveland Indians issued a self-imposed gag order after choking away their season yesterday.
Not even the Heimlich maneuver could have saved this team, and kept it from suffocating in its own 11th-hour futility.
Despite the Tribe's sizzling second half, the Wigwamers went out with barely a whimper.
The Indians were 1-6 over their final seven games, including yesterday's 3-1 setback to the Chicago White Sox at Jacobs Field.
Call it a collapse.
Call it a choke job.
Call it whatever you want.
Very few will remember that the Indians won 93 games in the regular season, or that they experienced a 13-game improvement over a year ago.
All the fans will remember is the team's free-fall at the end.
Don't forget, Cleveland had a 1 1/2-game lead in the American League wild-card race and trailed the stumbling White Sox by 1 1/2 games in the Central Division chase.
The Indians seemed like a virtual lock to make the playoffs.
But over the final week, they got thrown under the bus and served as road kill.
"I don't think there was too much pressure, we just didn't play well at the end," manager Eric Wedge said. "A lot of it had to do with the opposition."
Ah, really?
Let's see, the Indians went 0-1 against the last-place Kansas City Royals after Grady Sizemore lost a ninth-inning fly ball in the Missouri sun on a Sunday afternoon, 1-2 against the last-place Tampa Bay Devil Rays at home, and 0-3 against a watered-down White Sox team that already had wrapped up the division title before coming to town and had absolutely nothing at stake.
That qualifies as a major meltdown any way you look at it.
The Indians spit the bit.
They looked more like a church league softball team than a major league team chasing a playoff spot.
They delivered very few clutch hits in the final seven games, as evidenced by their .125 batting average (7-for-56) with runners in scoring position.
The only clutching the Indians did was to their own throats.
"We don't want to feel like this again at the end of next year," pitcher C.C. Sabathia said. "It's not a good feeling."
It might not be the collapse of the century, but it's not very far off, and this is a young century.
It ranks right up there with some of the greatest choke jobs ever.
The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies led the National League by 6 1/2 games with 12 to play, and buckled down the stretch.
So did Jean Van de Velde at the 1999 British Open, and Greg Norman at the 1996 Masters.
The only ones who had a worse week than the Indians were the fans in this cursed city, who haven't celebrated a major championship of any kind since 1964, or a World Series title since 1948.
"We played so well for so long, you knew we were bound to hit a tough stretch," Sabathia said. "Unfortunately, for us, it happened the last week. I know a lot of people around here are sad, but we've still got a lot to be happy about this season."
Even so, it's going to take months, or perhaps years, before the Indians are fully resuscitated from their latest thrust to the throat.
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