Cleveland Indians: A quick look at the rest of the AL Central

The Cleveland Indians are off to an inconsistent start, but the rest of the division is doing much worse as April comes to a close.

Cleveland Indians fans expected the American League Central to be a weak division in 2018, but perhaps not this weak.

The Indians entered the season as overwhelming favorites to win the division and are already sitting four games ahead of the next closest team, the Detroit Tigers.

Here are the standings entering play today:

1. Indians: 14-10
2. Tigers: 10-14
3. Twins: 8-13
4. White Sox: 7-16
5. Royals: 5-19

Wow. This is the only division in baseball that only has one team above the .500 mark and the Indians are tied with the Diamondbacks for the largest division lead as of today.

Within the Central, the Tigers enter today losers of three straight, while the Twins have lost eight straight. So much for the Twins being top competitors for the division crown.

The crazy thing about this is that the Indians aren’t exactly off to a great start on offense. If the team was playing at a normal level of production, the lead may be even bigger.

Baseball is a crazy game where a team can follow-up eight straight losses with a similar stretch of wins, but I’m not sure any of the other four teams in the Central are capable of making any runs of success in 2018. I don’t expect any of the four teams to have much success against the Indians rotation either. The Indians are already 7-2 against division opponents.

Next: Tyler Naquin making the most of current opportunity

As I said, the season is so long that one of the other four teams could piece together a nice run of baseball. But with all the rebuilding going on, the Indians should coast to another division title.