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!