Keri: Cleveland’s band of worm burners

In adding Lowe to a rotation that also includes Justin Masterson and Fausto Carmona, the Indians will feature three of this year’s top eight ground-ball-inducing starters. Throw in Ubaldo Jimenez and his above-average ground-ball rate and the Indians will field a staff unlike any other in the game. In a perennially weak division where little edges can mean a lot, the Indians may have found a new path to success, and just maybe a 2012 playoff berth.

To understand how extreme the Indians’ staff figures to be, let’s dive into some numbers. Lowe triggered grounders on 59 percent of the balls in play hit against him in 2011, Masterson 55.1 percent, and Carmona 54.8 percent. Over the past three seasons, Lowe, Masterson, and Carmona put up composite ground-ball rates of 58 percent, 56 percent, and 55 percent, respectively, three of the four highest marks in baseball. With apologies to some of the Tommy John-led staffs and other grounder-heavy rotations of the past, publicly available ground-ball data goes back just a decade. In that time, only five other teams have deployed three starters with GB rates of 50 percent or higher — four of them Cardinals staffs led by sinkerball fetishist/guru Dave Duncan. None had a higher aggregate ground-ball rate among its top three starters than what Lowe, Masterson, and Carmona put up this year.

Any way of getting more innings per start per starter sounds like a good idea to me.