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. :-)