Thoughts For A Saturday: Roki Sasaki, International Signing Day, Guardians Moves: A Full Couple of Days

 OK, it has been an eventful couple of days in baseball.  So let's unpack:

• The Dodgers signed Sasaki - Maybe their most important signing in the last five years, Sasaki doesn't just give them winning now, he gives them affordable winnings for the next 6 years.  Literally, whoever signed Sasaki knew that they had both star power and team financial flexibility without invoking any deferrals of salary.

• The Guardians signed the players they had been linked to but, so far, no additional prospects, leaving slightly over $2 million left in their bonus pool

• They then traded that $2 million to Toronto along with Myles Straw and $3.75 million.  The Guardians will either get a player to be named later or cash.

These 3 events represented the entirety of the Guardians involvement in the international FA process.  Here is what we know in addition to what I suspect about the above events:

• The Guardians underspent their international pool by $2 million.  For a small market team they should never underspend their international budget or their draft budget.  It is the cheapest way to get quality talent into the organization

• The Guardians did a salary dump with Myles Shaw,  Ths saved them over $10 million over the next 3 years.  

• The Guardians spent $0 of the money they saved on dumping the Gimenez and Straw contracts on Toronto.  This is the most significant point here.  With the trades of Gimenez, Straw, Morgan and Sandlin, we lost a lot of talent without bringing much except for Ortiz back into the organization.  Thus, it would be hard to argue that the Guardians are a better team now than they were at the end of the 2024 regular season.

While people may do a victory dance for dumping Straw's salary, realize that even this move hurt our team next year that these moves are just salary-dumping, cost-saving moves if they don't come with signing a quality FA or 2.

When you look back at this off-season, this team is richer, but weaker.  We still have a ways to get back to where we were, offensively, at the end of 2024, let alone do enough to actually improve this team for 2025.

So do your victory dance.  I won't be.     From the canceling of Guardsfest to the dumping of Straw on Toronto, moves appear to be happening to create a war chest.  But if you don't use that war chest to make your club better, you are just saving money to put in the owner's pocket.