Thoughts for A Monday Night

•  Guardians vs Braves - I had to laugh when I saw the offensive stats for the Braves.  It was almost comical.  Every player in their lineup tonight had an OPS of over .775.  The league average for OPS is about .725 and the Guardians have an OPS south of .700.  I thiink, based on OPS, only two Guardians, Jose Ramirez and Josh Naylor could have even broke into the Braves' lineup.  For this reason I wanted to compliment Gavin Williams for his stellar start tonight, 'holding' the Braves to 4 runs in 6 1/3 innings.    Watching this game I now know how the fans of the other American League teams felt when they played the 1929 New York Yankees.  Geez!
• As a fan of both the Guardians (by birth) and the Cardinals (by working in St. Louis for 36 years) I was peeved by tonight's game.  First, I saw Sean Murphy in the Cleveland game and then I saw AJ Puk close out the Cardinals-Marlins game for the Marlins.  I know we will never get it but it would be great if we had answers to the following questions:
• What was the package the Braves supposedly asked for from the Guardians for Murphy?
• Why did we not trade for AJ Puk?  I know we could have easily surpassed the pathetic return of JJ Bleday that Oakland got when they sent Puk to Flori
• da.  
• For those of you who remember I said that we should ask for Puk in addition to Murphy if the A's asked for a larger prospect haul than what Murphy was worth.
• Chase DeLauter hit his first A+ ball HR tonight.  I am telling you his swing looks to me like that of Nolan Jones.  BTW, it appears to me like his foot is still bothering him when I looked closely at his gait running the bases.   Imagine giving up Jones and then drafting a Jones clone in the same year. 
• Tommy Mace with a nice start tonight.  As I said before, if he could take a big step forward the rest of this year while in Akron, it would really help the depth of our farm system in terms of how many true MLB prospects we had.
• Bryan Lavastida to Columbus.  Hope that this is the start of something big for him even though his defense continues to look like it is eroding a little more with each day.
• Daniel Schneeman...what else can you say.  If MLB Pipeline doesn't replace Boyd with Schneeman I would be upset.  Yeah, he is a 27-year old journeyman who plays in a hitting paradise in Columbus, but, man, he is being really productive.  At the beginning of the season some of us were thinking this is how Micah Pries was going to look this season.  
• Jonathon Rodriguez:  Still cranking along.  Gotta love the potential he has to be this year's breakout prospect just like Gonzalez was in 2021.
• Gotta love these rookie ball slugfests.  I love a hitting game and if they could guarantee me double figures each game I would be tempted to go to Phoenix to watch some ACL baseball.
• Where is the PTBNL for Owen Miller (sorry, a rhetorical question I will continue to ask).
• Frias and Brito with grand slams tonight.  
• Looking at the way the minor league season has gone for a number of the Guardians' top prospects, I could see their end-of-season to 30 prospects to contain a lot of guys who played rookie ball this year including a few more than expected who played in the DSL this year.
• Don't know what is going on with Hunter Gaddis but at the beginning of the season I thought that Gaddis and Curry were so close to the majors that you could have thrown a blanket over them.  Well, Curry is dealing in the majors while Gaddis continues to struggle at AAA.  Don't know what is going on there but hopefully this is just Gaddis 'working on stuff' as they try to make him more effective for his return to the majors.  Ditto for Morris.  I see both of these guys being important for our ML team going forward, especially next year and beyond.