Tribe a potent match for Boston as ALCS begins tonight at Fenway

It may have come as a minor shock to many Boston Red Sox fans to learn that their opponent in the American League Championship Series that begins tonight at Fenway Park would be the Cleveland Indians instead of the thoroughly detested New York Yankees they had expected to face.

But when the Indians had finally put the Yankees out of their misery Monday night to win the preliminary round of the American League’s post-season playoffs, loyal Indians fans were not surprised at all. Least of all this one, who has diligently followed the Indians for the past 60 years, through good times and bad, from Bob Feller and Lou Boudreau on down through the Rocky Colavito, Sam McDowell, Dennis Eckersley and Joe Carter eras and the Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez and Omar Vizquel years to the present stalwarts.

If there is any surprise to come for Indians fans it will be that the Tribe does not win the pending seven-game series with the Red Sox.

Granted, Boston is said to be favored to win everything left on the table, and I suppose that if things should fall their way, maybe they will do so. But on the other hand, maybe they won’t. “There are two maybes to that,” a late County acquaintance was fond of saying, and in this instance you may place me squarely in the “maybe-not” school of thought. Here’s why I like my guys to take this series, in however many games required to steal four wins.

For openers, let the record show that, although the vast Red Sox media conspiracy insists on implying that the Red Sox alone had “the best record in baseball,” the two teams had identical regular-season records: 96 wins, 66 losses. Both had excellent pitching, including their bullpens, timely hitting, good power, great team chemistry and managers who did not exceed their seasonal quota of bonehead moves.

Boston’s 20-game winner, Josh Beckett, the probable American League Cy Young Award recipient, is a bona fide stud. No doubt about it. I’d love to have him on my ball club. Knuckleballer Tim Wakefield had a fine year, as well, with 17 wins. And Curt Schilling, who had to have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle at a tender age, considering how the man carries on so at the slightest prompt, finished strong.

But Cleveland’s starting pitching isn’t exactly of bush-league caliber, as perhaps Sox fans have noticed. With two 19-game winners in lefthander C.C. Sabathia (he of the chronically askew cap), and sinker-ball specialist Fausto Carmona, plus a playoff-experienced 15-game winner in Monday night’s Yankee killer, Paul Byrd, I’ll take my chances with the Indians pitching, thank you very much. Honesty compels me to admit, though, that Jake Westbrook as the Game Four starter matched against Wakefield is a frightening prospect, especially if Wakefield has his ball floating like a butterfly on Valium.

But you never can tell about these things. Perhaps the Cleveland groundskeepers will again let loose the locusts to attack the enemy pitcher at a key point in the proceedings, allowing the team to snatch last-minute victory from the jaws of defeat, as in Game Two of the Yankee series.

The Indians bullpen has a bunch of strong young arms to match Boston’s bullpen, allegedly the best in the league. Plus they have the league’s leading closer, Joe Borowski, who had 45 saves on the season. The relief crew allowed only one run in 10 innings against the explosive Yankee lineup while striking out 13.

Cleveland’s regular lineup is every bit as potent at Boston’s. It includes one of the better leadoff men in baseball in young Grady Sizemore, who covers more ground in centerfield than a door-to-door salesman working the unorganized territories, has impressive power (20-something homeruns on the season) and steals bases.

The meat of the batting order is designated hitter Travis Hafner, catcher Victor Martinez, first baseman Ryan Garko and a trimmed-down Jhonny Peralta, a shortstop whose first name looks like such a blatant typographical error that copy editors often cannot resist “correcting” it. This crowd can do anything that Big Papi, Manny being Manny, Mike Lowell, J.D. Drew and the rest of the Sox starters can in a seven-game series. It is a lineup that can cause a pitcher to mumble to himself, punch out the water cooler in disgust and wonder what the hell just happened to his three-run lead of a moment ago.

The Indians defeated the Sox in the preliminary playoff round in 1995 and 1998. The Sox won the matchup between the two teams in 1999 and then lost to the Yanks in the ALCS. The Red Sox won five of the seven games they played against the Indians during the season that just ended. But the Yankees had won all six regular-season games they played against Cleveland before the Indians frog-marched them offstage, too. So there you are.

Two things may generally be said for statistics in such matters: They may be boring, but they sure are irrelevant. It’s not their stats, it’s how the ballplayers play the game at hand that counts. In the playoffs, history is vastly overrated as a barometer portending things to come.

That’s not to say that it can’t be used to drive home the point that if Red Sox fans thought that Yankee shortstop Bucky (Bleeping) Dent was their worst-ever nightmare in that infamous train wreck of a Yankees-Red Sox divisional playoff game back in 1978, wait until they get a load of the horror show that lies in store for them this time around.

My advice to Red Sox Nation is sincere: Be afraid, my paranoid friends. Be very afraid.

Kent Ward is a retired BDN editor whose column appears Saturday on the editorial pages. He can be reached at olddawg@bangordailynews.net