Mike Napoli is the best horrendous baserunner OF ALL TIME

If you skip past the #TebowCrap in Ken Rosenthal's most recent column, you get some interesting quotes about the Indians' baserunning, which as we all know, has been great:

As a follow-up, I asked Francona who deserves the credit for the Indians' prowess on the bases.

His answer: Mike Napoli.

Wait, what? We all know this is insane. Napoli has had a number of miscues on the bases this season. Ken checks FG and agrees:

Napoli actually ranks last on the team in the BsR metric

So you're thinking "Antonetti certainly wouldn't agree with Francona!"

"We have a group of guys who take pride in running the bases," Antonetti said. "Nap is into every pitch and always looking to advance on balls in the dirt or take the extra base when he can even though he's not that fast. His focus and effort definitely has impacted other guys.

So I think what we have here is essentially "Mike Napoli is terrible on the bases—but because he's slow, not because he doesn't know what he's doing! And by following his example, guys who can run have been succeeding!"

Anyways...

• In other news, SHAWN ARMSTRONG IS BACK, BABY! He pitched in last night;s 4-3 loss. Scoreless, of course. You may have noticed how casually I just referred to that loss... that's because Detroit lost too.

• Yan Gomes will catch in a minor league game on Thursday. This news doesn't appear to be on the interwebz yet, but it was mentioned twice on the broadcast last night. So link to that, redacteds.

Around baseball

• Ken Rosenthal reports that Alex Anthopoulos is a candidate for Minnesota's GM opening. Anthopoulos left Toronto after being upset that Mark Shapiro was going to run a smarter franchise than he was.

• You'll never guess who one of the AL MVP candidates is!

• Giancarlo Stanton returned from the disabled list. Luckily, we just missed him. But he has fewer home runs than...

• Brian Dozier homered again. He's been doing a lot of that lately.