The Indians have been taking me on an emotional roller coaster again. They lost the series in Minnesota and then won the series in Chicago complete with a three-hit complete game shutout from Carl Pavano. Pavano has been amazing recently and I love it. 

Fausto Carmona, however, has not been amazing unless you mean amazingly bad. He has been sent to rookie ball in Arizona after the Minnesota series to work things out down there. I really hope he figures it out and makes it back up sometime. I do not think we will be seeing him in the near future, or even this season, however.

Another starter who has been getting better and better every start is David Huff who is up in the Majors for the first time in his career and just got his first Major League victory on Sunday. 

The bullpen is still concerning me. They have managed to get out of bad situations with minimal damage recently but for the most part they have put themselves in those situations. It is so bad that when we are leading 8-4 and Kerry Wood walks someone with two outs I assume that the other team just won the game. 

Next up the Indians have the Royals who are in the midst of a bit of a free fall. The Royals have lost  nine of their last ten and are now only a half game ahead of the Indians in the standings. Whoever loses this series is in last place in the AL Central. This is a key series for the Tribe. I am to the point where if they lose this series I may say the season’s over for them. They need to beat the struggling Royals. A sweep would be great but I’ll take two out of three. The pitching matchup for tonight is Bannister and Lee. If Cliff can pitch like he has been recently and the offense can score runs for him like last time we should win this game. However the offense seems to not care that much when Cliff pitches and decide that he can win even if they do not score. They have been scoring a little more recently so hopefully they can keep that up. Wednesday’s matchup is Meche versus Pavano. As I said Carl has been pitching very well recently and he leads the team in wins with six. Again we should probably win this game on paper but as everyone knows things do not always turn out that way especially for the Indians. Thursday is when Carmona’s spot in the rotation would come up normally but because of the offday mlb.com is saying that Sowers is the likely pitcher for Thursday night’s game against Grienke. Grienke was far from impressive his last outing but maybe that was just a fluke. If it was the Indians need to do their best to work Grienke hard. Sowers has been much better recently and hopefully he can continue that. He does not have an easy opponent to try to continue that with though. Overall this series is very interesting and very important for both teams.