I have been a little busy so I haven't had time to comment on this, but I am extremely disappointed with the Guardians' international signings in 2026.
Let's level-set the international amateur signing period:
(1) To be clear, the bonus pool that a team is assigned is NOT money they are given. It is the amount of the team's revenue they are allowed to spend on signing international amateur free agents in a given year. Therefore, teams don't 'pocket' the amount they don't spend. At the same time, money that goes unspent represents an opportunity lost to acquire the best talent possible into your system.
(2) Some (or most) of the players signed during this period are linked to teams through unofficial agreements made between teams and players years before those players are even eligible to sign. Therefore, only a few good players are still available within 6 months of the beginning of the signing period so there is very little time to throw excess money at great players who haven't committed to a team yet.
(3) Players who are signed must be at least 16 years old on January 15th and must turn 17 before September 1st, meaning that it is likely that no new players will be added to the eligible group during the time between January 15th and December 15th, the end of the 2026 signing period. The Guardians have tended to do that with somewhat older Latin American pitching prospects who they have signed sporadically throughout the spring, summer and fall.
SALIENT POINTS OF GUARDIANS 2026 SIGNING CLASS
(1) The Guardians had the highest bonus pool of any team in baseball at $8,034, 900. They used $6.3 million for their bonuses meaning only 5 teams had more money left in their pool, if you don't count trades involving international bonus pool money. Counting the $1.5 million they traded to the Mets for Franklin Gomez, they used $7.7 million, leaving $250,000 in their bonus pool, ranking 21st in baseball, meaning they used, for signing and trading, a larger percentage overall than 2/3 of the teams in baseball.
(2) There were 56 players signed to higher bonuses than the Guardians highest priced signee, Svert Reynose ($820,000). That's an average of 2 players per team.
(3) 27 teams (not the Dodgers or the Yankees, who had $3 million less to spend than the Guardians did) spent more on their first pick than Cleveland did on Reynoso
(4) 17 teams had 2 or more players with bonuses higher than Cleveland's top bonus
(5) The $1.5 million they traded to the Mets allowed New York to sign the 2nd highest ranked player in this signing class, Wander Asigen, so you could argue that their trade allowed the Mets to acquire a talent worth more than the entire Cleveland class.
(6) The Guardians were the only team that spread out their bonus money among a number of players. It should be noted that Philadelphia did the same thing in 2025
(6) In 2026 the Giants used >95% of their budget to sign the highest ranked player in this cycle, Luis Hernandez. While this is not necessarily a great strategy, the Giants certainly positioned themselves to get a much better prospect than any of the Guardians' signees are. Of course one could argue that signing a bunch of decent prospects is better than signing one great one.
(7) The highest ranked prospect in this class that the Guardians signed was the 38th best prospect in this year's international class.
ANALYSIS
One of two things likely happened to the Guardians during this signing cycle:
(a) The strategy they employed was designed to target a larger number of middling prospects and avoid the highly ranked prospects and, as a result, limit spending on the 2026 international crop.
(b) They were unable to reach agreements early on with highly ranked prospects as those prospects cost more money than the Guardians were likely willing to commit to one player.
We don't really know what path the Guardians took but the results were:
(a) They did not get top talent out of this signing period
(b) They avoided having to spend almost $2 million of their own resources on signing players during this signing period.
Cleveland is a small market team. They almost HAVE to spend and spend heavily on amateur talent and still outscout other teams to find the best talent. They simply can't buy their way out of mistakes. They had the largest bonus pool of any team in baseball during this period and didn't fully utilize that pool to draft top end talent.
It was, as they say, a choice to follow this path. As this path was not followed by any team with the same bonus pool that Cleveland had.
CONCLUSION
Once again it appears that Cleveland tried to show they are the smartest guys in the room and ended up with middling talent that will require that their scouts 'outscouted' scouts from other teams and their development team outdevelops those of other teams. And they left the impression that they were doing this to be cheap. I think, in the next CBA, there should be provisions to not allow teams to be cheap on the R4 draft or on international amateur acquistion, which I hope will take the form of an international draft going forward.
In essence, this international class puts the Guardians behind the 8-ball, prospect development-wise. This disappointing international class followed a poor 2025 ML draft filled with incredible reaches, a draft that was preceded by a disappointing (Bazzana & Cozart) and late developing (excess of HS pitchers) group in 2024.
Again, it appears that at every turn the Guardians try to prove they are the smartest guys in the room leaving us to hope that they have found incredible talent for little money. As pundits who support the Guardians at every turn tell us that it is not as bad as it seems, it certainly walks and quacks like a duck, no matter how you look at it.
The Guardians, on the surface appear to have laid another egg. Let's hope it hatches into more than it looks like at the moment.
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