Thoughts For A Tuesday - What Are These People Thinking Post

 JOSH NAYLOR TRADE PROPOSALS

I am constantly amazed at the trade proposals that are brought forward by 'experts' at this time of year.

Let's look at the proposals so far for Josh Naylor:

• Naylor for Trent Grisham and Will Warren
• Naylor for Will Warren and Clayton Beeter
• Naylor for Cade Smith and Jorbit Vivas

All you have to do is look at what each of these trades would do to the chances of the two teams making the playoffs and having a run in said playoffs.  

• For Cleveland, unless they backfill Naylor's production, it basically will kill their playoff chances.  The pitchers and position players proposed will likely not help us this season and tend to be low ceiling, high floor guys. At best, they will keep the ship afloat so we can finish close to .500.    Grisham is expecially comical.  Having seen Grishamm for multiple years in San Diego, I would rather have Myles Straw.  We already have sunk money into the latter.
• For the Yankees this dramatically increases both the chances of making the playoffs and the chances of returning to the World Series.

But that's really what you see over the winter from 'experts'.  Trades that will help their team win because they think Cleveland wants to dump high salaries and don't care about winning.  Or that it doesn't matter what Cleveland wants because they don't deserve to be in the playoffs, anyway.  Yeah, right!

But my favorite came from a Guardians' fan:

• Josh Naylor and a reliever (presumably Hunter Gaddis) for Jasson Dominguez

This is especially comical because the Yankees overhype their prospects and trading for Dominguez, who isn't even ML-ready yet (and my never be, really), despite his high prospect rating (#14 in MLB), will likely not help us win in 2025. C'mon, guys.  Have a little more respect for our team than that!

WE HAVE ENOUGH RELIEVERS!  REALLY???

After trading Eli Morgan and Nick Sandlin I was chastised when I said we couldn't afford to trade any more relievers.  Well, here are our relievers for 2025 on the 40-man roster:

• Franco Aleman
• Pedro Avila 
• Emmanuel Clase
• Nic Enright
• Hunter Gaddis
• Tim Herrin
• Erik Sabrowski
• Cade Smith
• Trevor Stephan (may be available in May)
• Andrew Walters

That is 9 relievers who will be available on opening day with 4 of them (Aleman, Enright, Sabrowski and Walters) having little or ZERO ML experience and the other 5 (Avila, Gaddis, Herrin, Smith, Clase) all were overused in 2024.  Aleman and Stephan are coming off of injuries.  Plus Avila was DFA'd last year, so, there's that.  And Hentges and likely Espino will be on the IL most or all of the year.

So, right now, we are not in great shape in the bullpen.  Ah, but people say we have other guys who might be able to work out of the bullpen:

• Lively
• McKenzie
• Cantillo
• Logan Allen

Maybe.  But, really?  You want to try to patchwork BOTH your rotation AND your bullpen?  When you lineup is sub-optimal offensively and worse defensively than last year, with the latter not being even particularly close, IMO.  Really?

And you want to trade MORE relief pitching to fill other gaps?  No way.

THAT'S YOUR BACKUP PLAN AT CATCHER...REALLY???

The Guardians signed 30 year old Dom Nunez to a minor league deal.

He represents the next man up as a ML catcher if either Naylor or Hedges get hurt.

Nunez is who he is.  He's a AAAA player who can't hit in the major leagues and should be at AAA (or AA) to work with our young pitchers and give our catching prospects a breather.

He should be probably the third option for a callup to the majors in case of an emergency.  Not the first.

We need to re-sign Bryan Lavastida.  I wanted to add him to the roster before the roster freeze and we didn't do it.  So he lingers on the FA market.

I am truly tired of these AAAA relievers, AAAA catchers being top options as injury replacements in the majors.  We are on a razor's edge as to whether we qualify for the playoffs.  We can't be in a position where we are giving games away just because we haven't planned well to have quality depth options at AAA to be called up in case of injuries.

Imagine a universe where your catching duo/platoon is Austin Hedges and Dom Nunez!  Can we have the pitchers hit and DH for the catcher position?

This seems to be the MO of the Guardians.  Sign really bad AAAA players to minor league contracts thinking that you can bring them up for a few days and DFA them without losing much talent.  Roster flexibility over competitiveness.  Not a way to win a championship, IMO.

Thoughts For A Friday - Rule 5/Roster Freeze Promise, Trade Fallout and Potpourri

 RULE 5 DRAFT

I have said it elsewhere but will say it here for posterity.   I will NEVER, EVER, EVER question the Guardians FO (at least when Antonnetti is around) when it comes to roster freeze day and the Rule 5 draft.  

Whether it was dumb luck or whether it was reading the room, the Guardians did not lose any of the pitching prospects I felt they might lose.  

Congrats to the FO for knowing the Rule 5 and what teams are looking for.  I thought with the Mitch Spence success from the 2023 R5, teams might be on pitchability pitchers who were ready or close to ready to immediately move into ML rotations.

But, as often happens in the R5, I have no clue what teams are looking for and neither do most experts.  

So, we move on next year and keep Webb, Davenport, Denholm, Abney, Mace, Mikolajchak, Misiaszek, Hanner and others who can and likely will (if we stop the infernal AAAA pitcher train from ever leaving the station) impact our 2025 ML roster at some point.

As far as the minor league portion, there was nothing to see there.  If Will Wilson, with our middle infield prospect backup, ever sees the Guardians' ML roster I will be amazed.  I would have rather have some slow developing, low A, flyer pitcher with a big fastball who we could put into our pitching lab to straighten him out.  

BTW, do people realize that Justin Campbell, our 2022 Comp A pick, will be eligible for the R5 in 2025 and he has not even thrown a single professional pitch due to injury.   There HAD to be someone out there like this in 2024 that we could have latched on to.

But, who am I to second-guess our R5 braintrust.  Don't know if it will stay this way due to people moving on to promotions in other organizations but, right now, they are the best in the majors, in my opinion, at 40 man roster management in anticipation of the R5 draft.

TRADES AFTERMATH

Some thoughts about these trades:

• Dumping Gimenez to save money sounds cheap, especially on the heels of the Guards Fest announcement and with the surface uncertainty about their finances due to the TV deal situation. 
• There appear to be two very polarized sides of the debate about the Gimenez to Toronto trade
• Gimenez's defense is more valuable than people think
• Gimenez's salary in the future wasway overpaying for his offensive production.

I tend to fall on the cheap side.  Yes, paying Gimenez up to $23 million a year for his current production is untenable for a cheap, small market club like Cleveland.  With a low and rock solid budget line we just couldn't keep him if we planned to do other, expensive side.  But the key to do is that we HAVE to spend the savings from dumping his contract.  That is, we have to do one or both of two things to make this trade make sense:

• Play the long game and sign Kwan and Bibee to extensions.  By this I mean that they pray they can get enough production out of our second base prospects that their offense offets thair defensive liability (rated against what Gimenez brings).  But even if they can't they have at least locked up their core to build a championship-caliber roster over the next couple of years with reinforcements from the minors and other veteran-for-prospects trades with Josh Naylor and/or Lane Thomas.
• Play the shorter game and use the money to bring in (either in FA or  trade) high-priced starting pitchers to keep us in contention until Beiber and Stephan come back and/or we get reinforcements from Columbus.

We absolutely have to.  If we don't do that this winter we are NOT trying to win or create a championship roster.  Our owner is simply selling off players to make money...or avoid the risk of possibly losing money (if you factor in the incredibly cheap and shortsighted cancellation of Guards Fest).  The ownership has to know the fans are watching.  If they think the fans will drink the koolaid and keep showing up in the face of self-serving profiteering by Dolan, I think they will find out otherwise.

PLAYERS WE RECEIVED IN THE TRADES

I want to break this down into 2 parts: players we got from Toronto and those we got from Pittsburgh.

The return from Toronto was undeniably light.  We recieve a Will-Brennan-like OF prospect in Mitchell and a guy, Horwitz, so far down the depth chart in Toronto that they didn't even have a defensive spot for him and his middling bat.  Twenty-seven year old players don't just burst on the scene and become 55 grade major leaguers (like Gimenez was). They become bit players or platoon players.  The fact that we had to include Sandlin (who should have, himself, brought back AT LEAST Mitchell) was disturbing.

But then we traded with Pittsburgh.  I applaud turning Horwitz into 3 legitimate pitchers.  But there are a few comments on want to make on this trade.

• Do you really think that Horwitz was worth THREE guys of the quality that we received?
• Do you really think that Pittsburgh, if they thought these three pitchers were quality, would have EVER given them up for Horwitz, who was older and has not shown the ability to even be a ML regular, let alone a GOOD MLer?  If you answered yes because you think Pittsburgh is just that stupid or yes because you think Horwitz is better than he is...then you and I will just have to disagree.

So, what we have left, IMO, is the occam's razor answer that Ortiz is overrated and will likely become Logan Allen part deux in 2025 and that Hartle will be the middling prospect who never turns out and Kennedy will be, at best, Bresnahan.  As far as Mitchell, we have my Will Brennan comparison.

All that being said, these trades do two things that headscratching, apparently salary dump trades made by small market teams tend to do:

• They bring in someone like Ortiz that, if he hits (Clase in the salary dump of Kluber is an example) the FO looks like geniuses, even if logic and analytics question if he was just lucky in 2024.  I think a prime example of how our eyes can fool us is when Cleveland traded blocked thirdbase prospect Kevin Kouzmanoff for Josh Barfield after Barfield's magnificent rookie season in San Diego's cavernous ballpark.  No way any of us thought that would turn out as badly as it did...but that was before analytics, LOL.
• They contain players (Mitchell and Kennedy) who are so far away from the majors that the axiom about not being able to really judge a trade for 5 years is still in play. Including Josh Wolf and Isaiah Greene in the Lindor deal was an example of this.

So, there you have it.  I am not a fan of these trades because I think they represent smoke and mirrors return that we won't really be able to characterize as that for years to come.  They also involve this team HOPING that a rookie can produce more offensively than Gimenez (something I really doubt is true for Arias, Freeman, Brito or Martienz) without losing so much defense that the switch is a net negative.

One thing is for sure, IMO: These trades make us worse in 2025 than we were, salary savings notwithstanding.  The only way, to me, this all makes sense is IF we can extend Kwan and Bibee AND buy some quality starting pitching for 2025.  Otherwise, we have made the 2025 team weaker.  Things are so close in the AL Central that even incremental losses in competitiveness will be enough to keep us out of the playoffs even if EVERY player performs at the level they did in 2024.  

And we can't afford to waste years in our current competitive window.

So, FO, we are counting on you to pull several rabbits out of your hat in the next 2+ months.  You are OK'd to begin. :-)

It's Rule 5 day. But let's start by talking about the trades yesterday

 OK, I will make this as quick as I can.  

• The trade of Andres Gimenez made the 2025 Guardians a weaker team as the loss of his defense will cost this offensively-challenged team a lot of runs next year.

• We made this trade even though we have no proven prospect to take over second base.  We don't even know if guys like Brito or Martinez or Freeman (or even Arias) can even hit at the level that Gimenez did and we sure as heck know that they can't play defense as well.  Brito probably isn't even an average second baseman and never will be.

• This was clearly a salary dump, pure and simple.  Gimenez was overpaid, to be sure, and it was only getting worse.  But instead of trading a bad contract for Gimenez's bad contract we got a journeyman that Toronto didn't need or have a place for and a marginal outfield prospect

• We then traded that journeyman (Horwitz) to Pittsburgh for three pitchers.  One of them, Ortiz, pitched in the majors last year and did well, statistically. The other two are legitimate prospects being ranked 15th and 17th in the Pirates' system.    But you have to ask yourself this: how good could Ortiz and these two pitching prospects be if the Pirates were willing to trade the three of them for a journeyman who has not even established himself as a ML regular after 6 seasons in pro ball after playing 3 years in college?   Think of the haul we thought we got for Will Benson (Boyd and Hajjar) until we found out what non-prospects those two guys were.  Heck, they weren't even good enough to be solid organizational players.   I remember when we got Barfield for Kouzmanoff.  It looked like a steal at the time for Cleveland but we soon found out that Barfield wasn't really a major leaguer in talent.  The trade with Pittsburgh feels a lot like that.

• Trading for Mitchell makes protecting Petey Halpin and leaving Ryan Webb (and other 2021 draft picks) exposed to the Rule 5 this year look even more stupid, as now Mitchell and Halpin are redundant...and there is no way Halpin would have been picked in the Rule 5...but Webb will be.

• We will likely lose Webb and maybe others today for nothing when we had to trade to get a guy in the Pittsburgh trade today (Hartle) who is very similar.  For those keeping score, it DOES NOT offset the loss of Webb for essentially nothing because we traded for Hartle at the cost of our all-star second baseman. Ditto for Ortiz who is who Webb will be in 2026.   We traded Gimenez to get Ortiz when we would have been in the same place, at least in 2026 and maybe in 2025, if we had just protected Webb.  Again, one gain does not cancel out one loss because the loss includes trading away Gimenez.

• The loss of Bresnahan for Cobb last year is NOT offset by us obtaining Michael Kennedy in the Pittsburgh trade today.  Getting Kennedy at the expense of years of gold glove defense from Gimenez isn't even comparable to getting 4 starts from Cobb for Bresnahan.  Not even close.

In summary, the moves made on Tuesday make Cleveland a weaker team in 2025.  The players we got back were similar to prospects we had already so there was no tangible improvement in our farm system.  So nothing good came out of the trades today except that Dolan saved a lot of money.

And that, my friends, along with the cheap-ass move of cutting Guardsfest, which cost about the same over 3 years as one year of a rookie's salary and alienated a lot of fans and future fans who may not buy tickets to games now and in the future, is how you take a 92-69 team and make it weaker in a division that is getting stronger just because you have to save a buck and, in so doing, alienate some of the best fans in baseball!

Payroll Floor? I Didn't Know We Had One

Taking a little time out from my all Rule 5, all the time recent postings to talk about something that is, at the same time, one of my most favorite and least favorite subjects: mandated minimum total player payroll amount, otherwise known as a salary (or payroll) floor

Interesting report from BaseballTradeRumors today:

Athletics Risk MLBPA Grievance Without Further Payroll Increases - MLB Trade Rumors

Turns out, if you receive revenue sharing, you DO have a salary floor.  

For Oakland, since they will receive a full revenue share for the first time in 2025 ($70 million) they have to have a 2025 payroll of at least $105 million as their payroll have to be at least $150% of the amount of revenue sharing they receive.

Thus the unexpected signing of Severino and maybe some more FA signings in the future may be making more sense for a nomadic team with no intention of making a playoff run in 2025.

Not knowing how much revenue sharing the Guardians get it is possible that they may have a salary floor of $105 million, as well.  But their projected 2025 payroll now stands at an interesting $97 million level (after the Gimenez trade), which would be just over that $105 million threshold if, indeed, they receive a $70 million revenue share.

Payroll Floor

I have posted previously how much I hate this concept.  Oakland is the perfect example, signing quality free agents and paying them a lot of money just to meet the minimum team payroll required by the latest CBA.  They could extend players to up that payroll but I am pretty sure that players like Brent Rooker will see that coming and would ask for more money than Oakland would want to pay. 

Bottom line: the payroll floor, if it is applied the way the MLBPA wants it to be applied, makes teams that have no chance of being competitive spend their money on players just to pay those players more than they would likely get in a completely open market.

Instead of this I propose the following:

• create a payroll floor like has been proposed
• calculate the international signing pool amounts and draft budget amounts the way they are normally calculated
• If a team chooses to go under their payroll floor they must add 25% of that underage to their international signing pool, 25% to their draft budget, with the rest of the underage being split between other revenue sharing teams to be split evenly between their international and draft pools

So, instead of overpaying major leaguers teams that will not be competitive, simply spend where they should: on obtaining talent they can develop to be competitive in the future and be forced to give some of your revenue sharing dollars to other teams in your same situation.

Is this unfair to the larger market teams with good revenue streams?  Absolutely.  But at least we know teams are going in the right direction in terms of developing.  The additional dollars in draft pools offset the effect of NIL money, at least somewhat, and it gives the weaker teams more money to sign international free agents who are posted by their foreign teams at a young age.

2024 Rule 5 - Part 8 - It's December 10th - We'll Find Out Tomorrow, I Guess

 A few thoughts as we head into Rule 5 Day

• PREDICTION: This R5 draft is going to be a blood bath for the Guardians.  They will likely have 3 players drafted away from them in the ML portion.  I think 3 is solid but more than that could be possible if teams see relief prospects that they value.  Normally it is the Yankees who are hit hard but some of that comes from Yankees guys being taken early and it just snowballing.  That might happen to Cleveland this year.  It is pretty easy to predict that this will be the most damaging Rule 5 drafts ever for the Guardians. The minor league portion is a big question mark but I would think 2-3 would be a reasonable number and, given how flat our talent level is in our farm system, it may be guys you don't even suspect would be available in the minor league portion as we may simply run out of room to protect guys on the Columbus reserve list.

• IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER: The Guardians have been really, really good at protecting prospects who might be taken in the Rule 5.  Aside from losing Kevin Kelly, who is a prototypical middle relief guy, they haven't lost much in the recent past, with the last significant player lost being Anthony Santander, who was lost as an unlikely selection (injured, low A ball player in 2016).  Aside from minmizing their losses in the R5, they have also recently made some surprising and shrewd additions to their roster on the freeze day and those players (Cade Smith and Tim Herrin) have payed big dividends almost right away.  In the last 2 years they left other, high profile prospects available and those prospects were either not taken in the R5 or were returned to the Guardians. Yes, Oscar Gonzalez would have been picked in 2021 if there had been a R5 draft, but they did protect a number of guys that year who would likely have been picked.  In addition to minimizing Rule 5 losses, the Guardians have also made some recent quality R5 draft picks.  Trevor Stephan turned out to be a very astute pick. Deyvison De Los Santos, who is flirting now with being one of the top prospects in all of baseball, was their pick last year although they had to return him this past spring to keep Esteban Florial.  So, while their evaluation process for major league hitters may be in question, we should have some faith that they know what they are doing in protecting and picking in the Rule 5.  History has shown that!

• BAD ASSET MANAGEMENT - That being said, protecting Petey Halpin over Ryan Webb makes no sense. Halpin was not the profile of a ML R5 draft pick.  Webb was (see Mitch Spence the A%1 overall R5 pick from 2023).  Heck, continuing to protect Will Brennan, who is either too stubborn or too incapable of making changes that will up him from his current AAAA player status, instead of Aaron Davenport is almost as big a travesty.  There is a great deal of angst for me leaving exposed to the Rule 5 a number of high draft pick and/or high performing, 2021-drafted, polished college pitchers who likely can pitch in the majors in 2025.  Developing this many talented arms and leaving them dangling as Rule 5 fodder screams to me: POOR ASSET MANAGEMENT PLAN.  It is pretty likely that this poor planning will end up with them losing significant prospect(s) in the Rule 5. 

• GEORGE VALERA - Maybe I am wrong but I truly believe that he is Rule 5 eligible.  I doubt he gets selected as teams could have had him for free with no Rule 5 strings attached after the Guardians released him.  However, any minor leaguer on the reserve list of a team who is Rule 5 eligible based on service time can be drafted in the Rule 5.  Valera is not an exception.  If he was, more teams would try to use that loophole.  So, when he doesn't get selected, realize why that is the case.

More tonght as I explore Cleveland's history in the Rule 5 and then tomorrow morning as I detail the Rule 5 results and the meaning of those results as it applies to the Guardians.  Until then, keep your fingers crossed and hope Oakland, the White Sox and Colorado have full 40 man rosters by tomorrow morning.