KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Inside the Cleveland Indians clubhouse, they talk in the future tense. The past is too tender and the present, after the latest indignity Sunday, too sad.

For the second straight day, the Indians lost to the Kansas City Royals, this time 6-1. The same Royals who, the prior evening, had snapped a 12-game losing streak. Only six teams this decade had suffered through worse funks, though if the offensively enfeebled Royals were to get right against anyone, the equally impotent Indians fit like a batting glove.

So there is a lot of will in the Indians. Literally.

"You've just got to believe we will get it going," first baseman Ryan Garko said. "We will."

"We will find it," manager Eric Wedge said.

"At some point, it will turn around," catcher Victor Martinez said. "You will see. It will happen."

The baseball season is nearly at its one-third pole, and though disappointment abounds – from Seattle to both of New York's baseball boroughs to Colorado to Detroit – the

The bat swung by Todd Helton at Dodger Stadium that exploded and hit Susan Rhodes.

(Image courtesy Susan Rhodes)

The wire came out of Susan Rhodes' mouth this week. Doctors replaced it with rubber bands, so now people can understand her when she tells the story of how a maple baseball bat shattered her jaw.

"Your whole life changes," Rhodes says over the phone, and she's not looking for sympathy. Just an explanation as to how Major League Baseball continues to allow maple bats when their danger becomes more obvious by the injurious incident.

The Rockies' Todd Helton breaks his bat on a base hit off Dodgers reliever Cory Wade on April 25 at Dodger Stadium.

(AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

First came Pittsburgh Pirates hitting coach Don Long getting sliced along the cheek with the splintered end of a bat that snapped at the handle. Ten days later, on April 25, sitting four rows behind the visitor's dugout at Dodger Stadium where Long was hit, Rhodes took the barrel end of a flying

The Minnesota Twins play the fastest games in the American League.

"We do?" asked Joe Mauer, the Twins' catcher, who dictates the pace in nearly all of them.

Yes, and one of the reasons is that the organization teaches its pitchers to work quickly so they establish a rhythm and keep fielders from getting too spacey. Surely, then, they know there's a bylaw – Rule 8.04, right there in the book – dictating how many seconds pitchers are allowed between the time they receive the ball from the catcher and throw it.

"No idea," right-hander Kevin Slowey said. "I'm gonna say … 15."

Sorry. It's 12.

"I thought 15, too," said Brian Bass, another Twins pitcher.

What's a couple seconds here or there? Plenty, according to Major League Baseball, which has adopted the swelling time of games as its latest scourge due for extermination. This, of course, is a running gag. As Mauer said, "Seems like they've been trying to do that for years." And his manager – the man who gets his team on and off the field

LOS ANGELES – Might as well start in the graveyard.

In the darkness of a Waxahachie, Texas, night, Marianne Kershaw's phone rang. The parking lot at the high school baseball game she'd come to watch had filled up, so she landed in the auxiliary lot in a local cemetery, and now she couldn't find her car, which made the phone call of minimal importance until she noticed it was from her son, Clayton. At first she tried to explain how freaked out she was, at least until Clayton let her speak no more.

"So do you want to know why I called?" he asked.

It had happened. Friday might not go down in Dodger history. The moment the Los Angeles Dodgers summoned Clayton Kershaw to the major leagues might end up an overhyped note of inconsequence if he bombs in his major-league career. Then it will be looked upon as more a day of lament than anything.

For now, though, there is celebration, from the Dodgers and their fans and Kershaw and his mom alike, because in his first start Sunday afternoon, he

SAN DIEGO – Every year, he tries to learn something new. When Edinson Volquez first arrived in the United States, it was English. Ordering dinner was turning into a game of charades, so Volquez reached out to his rookie-league teammate Tim Cunningham, a Stanford graduate, and asked for tutelage.

Without it, Volquez would not have fully understood the expectation of him last season, when he learned his toughest lesson yet: embracing humility. He was a prospect then, long on talent, short on maturity, and when the Texas Rangers busted him down to Class A from the major-league roster – the real-world equivalent is a CEO-to-janitor demotion – he had a choice. Subvert his ego and follow the rules, or risk rendering all of his previous lessons moot.

And now he's here, 24 years old, back in the big leagues, sporting a different uniform (Cincinnati Reds), a different hairstyle (slight Afro), a different attitude (humbled) and, most noticeably, different results (superb … phenomenal … unfair –

He doesn't get the hubbub. The way Curtis Granderson figures, leadoff hitters actually lead off only once a game, so all of the attention they garner – it's them and cleanup hitters with the recognizable nicknames, after all – isn't necessarily warranted.

Perhaps it was the romantic notion of the leadoff hitter: the scrapper who fouls off pitches and gets on base and dashes from first to third and manufactures runs, intangibles idealized. That player, of course, is a relic in the steroid and sabermetric eras, generally inefficient, and the prototype has evolved into Leadoff 2.0, the type of player Granderson and others across the game embody.

They can run, yes, but they also hit for serious power, enough that they'd fit just fine in the No. 3 hole, the lineup's true glamour spot. And some of them have moved there, only to end up back at leadoff, because the luxury of such players hitting first has proved a narcotic to managers, something that no matter how much they try to wean

The conga line to congratulate Jon Lester on his no-hitter had formed, and one of his Boston Red Sox teammates, caught up in the moment and oblivious to the long-range microphone on the TV broadcast, said what everyone else was thinking.

"Un-(bleeping)-believable," the teammate said. "Unbelievable."

As much as that summed up the night on which Lester turned the Kansas City Royals' bats to swizzle sticks in a 7-0 victory, it applies more appropriately to the past year of his life, where the no-hitter stands out as merely his third-greatest accomplishment.

Which is rather remarkable, because the 24-year-old Lester was great Monday night, his final pitch dashing across the plate at 96 mph, the hardest he threw all evening, Alberto Callaspo nothing more than the patsy to swing and miss. It set off a celebration reminiscent of last October, when the left-handed Lester started Game 4 of the World Series and locked down the Colorado Rockies for five shutout innings, earning the

I like interleague play.

Wow, that felt good.

There is no support group for the afflicted. Though Major League Baseball contends that interleague play is popular and backs it up with compelling attendance figures, the advocates get drowned out by the minority, who are a lot like Ron Paul supporters: loud, passionate and fighting a fight that was long ago lost.

So with that in mind, and with a bull's-eye on interleague play's problems, the challenge to improve it was on as its 12th season commences Friday. And the five resulting suggestions aren't egregious – OK, four aren't – are feasible and would make it better.

Now, this isn't proselytizing. Converts should come on the merits of interleague play, and those who consider themselves purists – or pragmatists, because of the detriments – aren't likely to switch teams anytime soon.

One player who traded honesty in exchange for anonymity started the exercise in style, responding to the question of how to improve interleague play in one