Edwin gives Tribe best chance to win

CLEVELAND — This is how you seize a moment and a market. This is how you further rid yourself of a reputation, fair or not, for being too timid, too fragile, too cheap to claim a crown.

Just less than five months ago, the Indians raided a well-built farm system to land relief ace Andrew Miller, which was stunning enough. But on Thursday night, according to multiple reports, they threw $65 million on the table with a three-year contract to Edwin Encarnacion, one of the game’s elite bats who, in a stroke of luck and fate for the Tribe, was victimized by Hot Stove circumstance.

• Source: Tribe, Encarnacion agree to three-year deal

The Miller move got the Indians all the way to Game 7 of the World Series.

The Encarnacion move just might get them back.

Now, before we get too hot and bothered here, let’s make some obvious, but pertinent points about this deal, which is pending a physical and said to include a fourth-year option for $25 million.

After all, the very things that allowed Encarnacion to become a member of the Indians are the very things that lend a fair share of risk to the equation.

• Hot Stove Tracker

Encarnacion, whose home run trot features the lovable “Edwing,” is 33. If he ages as well as his buddy David Ortiz, no worries. But mid-30s sluggers sometimes stop slugging.

(Some parrots, though, can live to be 100, so there’s that.)

Though Encarnacion is a fundamentally different player than Michael Bourn, the way these events unfolded does bring to mind the way Bourn “fell in the Indians hands” after they had already signed Nick Swisher post-2012. Neither player aged particularly well, and the Indians are still paying the price, in the form of $9 million still owed to Chris Johnson, the guy acquired and then cut as part of a bad contract swap with the Braves.

The Indians gave up the 25th pick in the Draft for the Encarnacion deal, which, like the Miller trade, is going to have an effect not just on their present, but also their future. The frustration here is that, just one year from now, as a function of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the Indians would not have to give up a first-rounder, …

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