The Tribe used the most pinch hitters in the AL Central last year

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In order to cover all of the plate appearances for the Tribe in 2014, we still have to look in two places, pitchers and pinch hitters. We won't delve into any minutia for the pitchers as they received a grand total of 20 PAs while pitching in NL parks last year. Corey Kluber led the way with 5 PA, Justin Masterson got 4, while Zach McAllister, Trevor Bauer, Carlos Carrasco, T.J. House and Danny Salazar netted 2 apiece. McAllister and Kluber garnered the only two singles by the staff.

Nothing too exciting here. Only six teams netted an extra base hot, none better than a double. Both the A's and Mariners went hitless, although the Mariners did lead the AL in 5 sacrifice bunts. The Rangers had the best hitting staff with a 38 wRC+.

As for the pinch hitters, Terry Francona was fairly active in using them, leading the Central with 123 plate appearances, tied for fourth overall. And he used 21 different players as pinch hitters. I'll highlight the guys who had 10 or more appearances:

With extremely small sample sizes, the only surprise here is that Murphy did much better than his regular playing numbers. Others with high numbers were Yan Gomes (1417 OPS in 4 PA) and Michael Brantley (2500 in 2 PA). The only pinch homer was by Chisenhall. Veteran Jason Giambi could not repeat his 2013 magic as he was 000/375/000.

Obviously, more is not necessarily better. The Tribe led the Central, but the White Sox, with 36% of the plate appearances going to Paul Konerko, were the most efficient team. But the best team in the AL was the Blue Jays, who slashed 205/279/398 with 9 homers in 197 plate appearances. Well, technically, the Orioles were the best with a 313/395/522 slash and 156 wRC+ in 77 plate appearances. The Royals, who had arguably the weakest AL Central lineup, used the fewest pinch hitters as Ned Yost obviously didn't think his bench was any better than his starters. The Orioles, White Sox and Royals were the only teams to have a positive wRC+ (>100).

That leaves just one last specialization to review, pinch running. After using the pinch runner a massive 45 times in 2013, Francona opted to use a pinch runner just 14 times in 2014. J.B. Shuck led the team with 4 tries, Mike Aviles had 2, and Asdrubal Cabrera, David Murphy, Ryan Raburn, Chris Dickerson, Zach Walters, Tyler Holt, Nyjer Morgan and Justin Sellers 1 apiece. After a fairly decent conversion rate in 2013, the Tribe netted just 3 runs scored and one lone stolen base in those 14 tries. The Royals and Mariners both outpaced that easily with Jarrod Dyson and James Jones doing most of the damage respectively.