Part of life as a small-market, low-revenue team like the Cleveland Indians is experimentation. Papering over mistakes with more cash simply isn’t an option, so it forces creativity, ingenuity and, most important, unanimity. No organization in baseball embraces and applies new ideas quite like the Indians, and what’s already the richest starting staff in the game is bound to get better because of it.

With Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, Danny Salazar and Trevor Bauer, who starts Thursday night in a series-wrapping game against Kansas City, the Indians have four of the most desirable – and rarest – commodities in baseball: hard-throwing, strikeout-producing, young, under-control starting pitchers. The single most misleading statistic of the 2015 season is the ERA of Indians starting pitchers.

Trevor Bauer thinks the Indians' rotation can rival some of history's best. (Getty) More

Take that alone, and the Indians’ staff is downright awful: 4.42, which ranks 20th in baseball. Strip away the Indians’ mediocre gloves, though, and use what pitchers can control – home runs, walks and strikeouts – and it’s a different story. From those three numbers you can get a Fielding Independent Pitching number – and Tribe starters are at 3.30, second best in baseball and tops in the American League. Cleveland’s starters lead baseball in strikeouts with 348 and rank ninth in walks for nearly a 4-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio.



It’s what makes the next half-decade so exciting for Cleveland: Not only are Kluber, Carrasco, Salazar and Bauer under team control through the end of the 2020 season, they recognize that what Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz were to the 1990s, and Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder were to the 2000s, they can be to the 2010s.





“You’ve got at least four guys who are capable of putting up crazy numbers,” Bauer said. “You look at the staffs like Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz and the kinds of numbers they were able to put up. They’re considered one of the best staffs of all time. And the A’s staff, with Zito and Hudson and Mulder and [Rich] Harden. You start looking at those numbers and say, ‘Is that within the realm of what we can do?’ Yeah. Probably so. If everyone stays healthy, I would expect over the next four or five years, we have a chance.”

Cleveland’s devotion to pitching runs deep in the organization, where it has hired and unleashed player-development personnel whose philosophies don’t exactly run parallel to baseball’s deeply ingrained thinking on how to grow pitchers. Assistant director of player development Eric Binder came from the Texas Baseball Ranch, the pitching think tank run by independent coach Ron Wolforth, who helped fix Scott Kazmir and has grown more mainstream in recent years.

Binder’s use of weighted baseballs – regular-sized balls made with heavier material, up to 21 ounces – is pervasive among the Indians’ minor league affiliates. The idea behind weighted-ball use is to force the arm to pattern itself properly using heavier balls and build up additional arm strength and velocity along the way. Some programs include underweight balls, too – Bauer throws some as light as two ounces – to help pitchers emphasize deceleration of the arm.

Carter Hawkins, who started as an intern in the scouting department, oversees all player development and has allowed Binder to institute a full weighted-ball program among young pitchers. Ruben Niebla, the Indians’ minor league pitching coordinator, has made sure it’s being used across the affiliates. And Derek Falvey, the Indians’ director of baseball operations and, in the eyes of many, a future general manager, oversees the Indians’ whole pitching program.

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