INDIANS OWNED APRIL : Team Records Fall as Cleveland Starts Out Fast in the Marathon to October

The Cleveland Indians will collapse, sooner or later. History requires it. The Indians’ fans know it. Deep down, the Indians probably know it themselves.

But they owned April, shattering the club record for victories in that month with 16, four more than they’d ever won before. They bettered a series of long-standing team records every step along the way, and their starting pitchers, who were awful a year ago, were impressive.

“Well, I’m glad you noticed,” says Manager Doc Edwards. “We’ve been serious about this since Feb. 17. If we just take it one at a time, we’ll get it. Remember, the baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Too bad. Had it been a sprint, the Indians would have won. At month’s end, they led the AL East with a 16-6 record, and they were in the midst of a string of 17 straight days in first place, their longest stay at the top since 1981.

Yet they’ve had trouble drawing crowds much bigger than 5,000, because Cleveland fans know better than to take this at face value.

These are the fans who haven’t seen a pennant since 1954--the longest any major league team has gone without a title of some sort. They haven’t seen so much as a pennant race since 1959.

And they all know that the single biggest reason for the Indians’ fast start in 1988 can be summed up in three words: the Baltimore Orioles.

“The schedule’s been tough from day one,” Edwards says defensively, preferring to ignore that seven Cleveland victories came as the Orioles were setting an American League record for consecutive losses last month.

“We’ve been playing major league clubs,” Edwards said. “There are 26 major league clubs in the world. We haven’t been playing ‘jubbip’--that’s a word my son says.”

The Indians also numbered Texas, Minnesota and Seattle among their early victims. Although the Twins are the defending World Series champions, their pitching staff ranked with Baltimore’s at the bottom of the league during April. For that month, at least, they were, indeed, jubbip.

Edwards bristles at such talk.

“Somebody said at the start of the year that playing Minnesota would be our first test,” he said. “Then they said playing on the road at Minnesota was the first test. Then playing Oakland was the first test.”

The Indians passed them all until Oakland came to town and beat them in two straight last Saturday and Sunday, giving the Indians a three-game losing streak that Greg Swindell finally halted with a two-hit shutout Monday night against Seattle.

Edwards, who has found no one he can count on in the bullpen, has great confidence that starters Swindell, Tom Candiotti, John Farrell, Scott Bailes and Rich Yett will keep the Indians from drifting into any lengthy slides.

“You’re going to hit a streak where all five of them might lose,” Edwards said. “You could go back and look through the years when Bob Feller, Bob Lemon and Mike Garcia pitched here, and you’d find times where all of them might have lost. But the second time through, one of them is going to stop it. That’s what we’d like to feel about this staff.”

Cleveland’s pitchers finished April with a 3.14 earned-run average, a remarkable improvement over the 5.28 mark they compiled last season.

“People around me in January knew I was going to take these five kids and put them in the starting rotation,” Edwards said. “Everybody knew his role.”

Cleveland’s hitting, meanwhile, has been as good as advertised, with Joe Carter’s .379 average, seven homers and 21 runs batted in leading the way through the team’s first 25 games. Cory Snyder had five homers and 16 RBI, and Willie Upshaw, Mel Hall, Brook Jacoby and Andy Allanson have also reached double figures in RBI.

The losses to the Athletics last weekend, though, awakened some of the Indians to the task ahead of them.

“If we’re going to win our division, it’s not going to be by winning against just one section of teams,” Candiotti said. “We’re going to have to beat teams like Oakland, too.”

Upshaw, who came to Cleveland from Toronto in a late spring deal, says he hasn’t been surprised by the Indians’ early success.

“I think it’s important we got going this way,” he said. “In the last few years in our division, whoever got hot early was tough to catch. You had Detroit in 1984, Toronto in 1985 and Boston in 1986. We’ve got to keep this thing rolling.”