Thoughts for a Monday: Angst Over The Season So Far and Our Complicated Roster Crunch

I Thought Watching Baseball Was Supposed To Be Relaxing!

In 2020 the Browns were playing away against Pittsburgh in the wild card round. As I am sure you all remember, the Browns scored first, and then again. We're a few minutes into the game and we're up 14-0 and I remember saying to myself 'This is not enough, we need a bigger lead'. Well, as fate had it, the Browns found away to run that lead to 28-0 before the Steelers scored.  The final score of the game, 48-37, showed it was two games: The opening quarter plus was 28-0 Browns.  The remainder of the game was 37-10 Pittsburgh, a score that was within what some 'experts' were saying the entire game would look like.

So, forgive me if I angst over losing Tuesday to St. Louis after having a 4-1 lead on a terrible error by Brito AND losing on Friday after holding a 4-0 lead entering the 8th inning on a complete collapse by the bullpen in the 8th.  We are 13-10 and that is at the top of what I could have, with a straight face, predicted our record would be when I looked at the schedule before the season. So I should be happy, right? Well, I remember that Steelers game, I remember the Tigers in 2025 and I remember 2024 when we built a big lead which allowed the team to relax down the stretch and hold that lead.  

Bad loses early are just the same in the standings as one run loses where the team played well and  I also remember the saying that teams are guaranteed to win 60 and lose 60, with the other 42 determining the success of their season.

Still, I HATE early season bad losses as you can't get those games back.  13-10 is good but 15-8 at this point would be outstanding.

Roster Crunch Stuff

Juan Brito needs to go.  David Fry needs to be sent to Columbus.  Matt Festa and Connor Brogdon need to be off the roster.  Travis Bazzana and/or Milan Tolentino need to be called up TODAY. Walters, Espino and Aleman need to be called up to bolster the bullpen and the AAAA guys Festa and Brogdon need to be sent to Columbus. Cooper Ingle needs to be called up and Bo Naylor sent down for a reset

All those things sound nice at this moment, right?  

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. Here are some reasons why:

- Our 40 man roster is full

- We have no one (thankfully) to put on the 60-day IL to create a roster spot.

- The only obvious guys to DFA are Colin Holderman and Codi Heuer, but the former would be owed his entire salary.  Both are bullpen depth.

- The rest of the 40-man is full of prospects and guys in the majors.  There is no fluff

So, while sending Brito down and bringing up Tolentino or Bazzana sounds good, we would have to DFA someone to do it as neither Tolentino or Bazzana are on the 40-man and would have to be added to be called up.  Ditto for Ingle if he was called up and Naylor was sent down. Plus adding Ingle would give us FOUR ML level catchers on our 40-man which is probably not a good use of 40-man roster spaces.

While sending down Festa and/or Brogdon sounds good, neither has an option left meaning we would have to DFA them to take them off the major league roster, likely lessening our bullpen depth available to call up from Columbus in case of an emergency.

Plus Brito and Fry are RH bats and our minors are, by design I think, filled with mostly LHH.  So sending these guys out would make our active roster even MORE LH.

So switching the roster around sounds good, especially to me as a prospect geek.  But essentially almost all of our off-season plans would be trashed with the season less than one month into this season.  And right after we lost prospects to bring in these AAAA pitchers we are now jettisoning (still ticked off we lost JRod and Nikhazy for Holderman and Brogdon). 

So, while people think these are good roster moves, probably it is not a good look if you blow up a roster built on some stupid, off-season free agent decisions. It also is not a good look to send down more young guys after we promised to give those guys enough runway to prove themselves, something we have already went back on (Kayfus demotion).

2026 Draft - Part 1 - Early Season Impressions

 OK, it's time to start thinking about the draft.  This year I plan to organize my thoughts by highlighting guys I think will be available at each of the Guardians draft slots.

Let's first talk about the dates.  The first night of the draft will be July 11th and will include all picks (38) before the second round.  The Guardians will pick twice, at #19 (regular 1st round pick) and #29 (Comp Round A pick). The second day of the draft (July 12th) will be rounds 2-10, the rounds that have bonus slot values above the minimum.  These rounds, along with round 1, determine how much money teams likely will have to spend to offer overslot bonuses on 3rd day picks. The 3rd day of the draft, (July 13th) will include rounds 11-20, similar to what 2024 included but different than 2025, which was only a 2 day draft.  Round 11 becomes a key moment in the draft as many teams will know how much money they have left to spend, what stud prospects are still available and what it will cost to sign them, if they want to be signed.  This was not the case in 2025 where they shortened the draft to 2 days, which created issues for teams trying to budget for late round flyers who would require overslot bonuses to sign. 

From the Guardians perspective (no pun intended) the draft looks pretty open.  There seems to be a lot of strength at the very top, say the top 5 picks will have superstar potential and then, after that, it looks like it could be teams liking who they like.  By that I mean that this year's rankings may go out the window at draft time with a lot of lower ranked players being selected higher than normal.  While that, of course, happens every year, I think this year will be extreme with maybe only 15 top 38 ranked players being selected on day 1, with the other 23 selections being ranked anywhere from 10 to 40 places below where they are selected.  

So, what do I think the Guardians should do? In 2021 the Guardians selected mainly college pitchers. Whether that was by design or just how the draft worked I, that I don't know. Position players they selected (Koxx and Fox) and high school pitchers (Ventimiglia) have not done well.  Of the 18 college pitchers they selected, 15 of them are still in our system, most at AAA and AA.  Most probably won't make the majors or at least won't have long major league careers but the point is not that.  It is that the Guardians did a great job of drafting and developing the college pitchers they selected, starting with Williams and Bibee and maybe, eventually, including Aleman and even, eventually, Aleman, Davenport )inured now), Denholm, Webb, Dion and maybe Abney and other middle relievers. 

The 2021 draft worked so well to infuse quality pitching prospects into their system and the system seems, in 2026, to be thin in terms of pitching prospects as the emphasis in 2022 to 2025 was to infuse position player prospects.  I think this year the Guardians should have another college pitcher draft.  They might have done this last year but essentially every college pitcher that was on their radar for the first 4 rounds was gone before they selected in that round.  They would have had to overdraft college pitchers with middling stuff and chose to go a different direction, over drafting questionable college position players and HS pitchers early, leading to my grade of C- for their draft.

They need to correct that this time around. This might require some overdrafting and going for more solid prospects rather than brass ring guys, saving money for HS flyers and maybe some college sophomores in later rounds.  However, with the approach of slightly overdrafting college pitchers who will almost assuredly be available, I think they stand a better chance of getting the players they put the most scouting hours into.

So let's dive in, looking at round 1 today, as a bonus, give my first mention of a potential 3rd day pick..

Round 1 (slot 19) - Hunter Dietz. LHP, Arkansas

Right now Dietz is rated 35th by MLP Pipeline, 25th by ESPN and 85th by Perfect Game. He is a classic Friday night starter at a good college, with good stuff and projectability. I see him as a Bieber-type of pitcher in the right organization.  He does have an injury history and hasn't thrown much before this year so I don't think he will jump high enough in teams rating to be gone by pick 19, even if he continues to pitch well the rest of this season.  His fastball sat 95 MPH when I saw him this spring and his breaking stuff looked sharp.  

Round 1 CB-A (slot #29) - RHP Tegan Kuhns

This is where it gets dicey as teams may see the value of Kuhns, a draft-eligible sophomore, based on his improvement this year.  He has a history of control problems but, so far this year, Kuhns, currently ranked 43 by MLB Pipeline, 24th by Perfect Game and 77th by ESPN, has only walked 10 and struck out 64 in 51 innings.  I think the combination of leverage from his sophomore status and lingering questions about his control might make him available at that spot.

My backups, should Kuhns be taken, would be LHP Cole Carlon, or LHP Shane Sdao, although I think Sdao is likely to be available in the 3rd or even 4th round, given how his season is going.

SUMMARY - These two pitchers would fill a need within the organization as far as quality college arms who can come fast.  Neither are sexy or the type of brass ring picks that fans like.  However, after looking at last year's draft, it is clear to me that we should aim low and heavily scout guys we are comfortable will be there and I think these two guys will be.

Third Day Pick Possibility - Mark Quatrani C Notre Dame

As a preamble, I identified Boston Smith, a catcher from Dayton, as a potential 3rd day pick for the Guardians last year and Washington actually selected him on the second day (6th round) and then traded him this winter to Tampa Bay.  So, I have at least a little history of success in identifying hidden gems among senior college catchers.

I have seen Quatrani twice this spring. He is a senior transfer from Cornell and Notre Dame's primary catcher.  He is currently hitting .343 with 11 HR 15 BB and 30 K in 134 AB with his swing and miss being exposed by hard stuff inside.  However, I saw him hit a 460 foot homerun vs North Caroline and all that is enough for me to make him my 11th or 12th round picks.  I think he stands a good chance to be significantly better than Boston Smith (a 6th orund pick in 2025) and Bennett Thompson (our 13th round pick in 2024).  The Guardians put a lot of emphasis on good game calling and catching skills in their 3rd day college catchers as organizational catchers appear to be crucial to them in developing their pitching prospects.  Still, you get a catcher who can hit AND hit for power who will be available on day 3, you should jump on him as your 2026 3rd day college catcher.

So, this is my first foray into the 2026 draft as it applies to the Guardians.  Over the next three months I will be posting other articles about the draft.  

Minor League Previews: Columbus Clippers

 It's opening night in the minor leagues and the Columbus Clippers will have good enough weather in Des Moines (not always a given in March) to play the Iowa Cubs.  In fact, weather this entire 3 game series will trend upward.  

So, let's take a look at the opening day roster for the Clippers:

Hitters - In short, they currently have 11 hitters on their roster. I think this number may increase over the weekend but right now, with 3 of those 11 being catchers, I think you'll see everyone play a lot and the catchers who are not catching that day may play 1B or DH. A probable lineup looks like:

C - Ingle

1B - Brito

2B - Bazzana

SS - Tolentino

3B - Frias

LF - Halpin

CF - Watson

RF - Fairchild

DH - Jones

Bench: Huff, Nunez

There is no AAAA filler in this lineup outside of Fairchild and even he is interesting. The lineup begins and ends with Bazzana but I could see that Bazzana and maybe 6 other guys among the hitters could play in the major leagues this year.  However, as long as this hitter list remains this thin, these guys will get a lot of runway, so to speak which is exciting since the fewer AAAA guys the better for me

Pitchers - Unlike the hitters, there is an excess of pitchers with that number likely being thinned by injury.

The Bazzana of the pitchers is clearly Daniel Espino as he is the pitcher to watch here.  The rotation will likely be guys who were SP at either Columbus or Akron last year, with Logan Allen (if he isn't called up replace Tanner Bibee), Webb, Dion, Yorman Gomez, Tommy Mace and even Rorik Maltrud being candidates.  Given how pitchers get hurt, guys like Webb, Gomez and Dion might see major league time this year.  Among the relievers there are some interesting names, many of whom had cameos in ML spring training this year and, while not considered top prospects, might see ML time this year as fungible assets.  That is, guys who we wouldn't be afraid to lose if we had to DFA them to clear a ML roster spot.  If just 1-2 of those relievers leap forward this year it will be a big boost to the ML bullpen depth during the season.

Summary

All-in-all, this will be a very interesting set of hitters to watch during the year and, knowing how injuries happen a lot to pitchers, which guys will step forward if a need is felt on the ML team. If you are looking at W-L record, this team could go either way as there are lots of pitchers with a lot of experience and a lot of hitters who might shine.   That combination could, possibly, be a real winning one at AAA.

Guardians Top 100 Prospects - Pre-2026 Season Edition

 Spring training is over and we will start the minor league seasons on Friday.  It's time to roll out the top 100 Guardians prospects to begin the season.

NOTE: This list was made without benefit of any minor league spring training information about who has advanced in the off-season, who is hurt, who has taken a downturn. I have also chosen to not include Messick as he will almost certainly blow by his rookie eligibility limits soon. It is also subject to change as information on guys getting released and anecdotes about players could raise or lower rankings of other players.

NOTE: Added Pallette, removed Nikhazy (may add him back in (in the 50 range) if he clears waiver).

1. Chase DeLauter 

2. Ralphy Velasquez

3. Travis Bazzana

4. Angel Genao

5. Jaison Chourio

6. Jace LaViolette

7. Braylon Doughty

8. Joey Oakie

9. Juniker Cáceres

10. Khal Stephen 

11. Cooper Ingle

12. Robert Arias

13. Dean Curley

14. Welbyn Francisco

15. Andrew Walters

16. Khalil Watson

17. Alfonsin Rosario

18. Gabriel Rodriguez

19. Daniel Espino

20. Juan Brito

21. Josh Hartle

22. Franco Aleman

23. George Valera

24. Dauri Fernandez

25. Yorman Gomez

26. Petey Halpin

27. Jogly Garcia

28. Peyton Pallette

29. Chase Mobley

30. Milan Tolentino

31. Jackson Humphries

32. Nolan Schubart

33. Jacob Cozart

34. Austin Peterson

35. Matt Wilkinson

36. Franklin Gomez

37. Wuilfredo Antunez

38. Dylan DeLucia

39. Aaron Walton

40. Michael Kennedy

41. Will Dion

42. Will Hynes 

43. Jacob Zibin

44. Cam Sullivan

45. Luke Hill

46. Magnus Ellerts 

47. Nelson Keljo

48. Ryan Webb

49. Logun Clark 

50. Trenton Denholm

51. Anthony Martinez 

52. Kody Huff

53. Dayan Frias

54. Riley Nelson 

55. Hiverson Lopez

56. Heins Brito

57. Alex Mooney

58. Luis Merejo

59. Jose Devers

60. Jack Jasiak

61. Justin Campbell

62. Aiden Major

63. Tanner Burns

64. Jay Driver

65. Tommy Mace

66. Caden Favors

67. Juan Benjamin

68. Izaak Martinez

69. Sean Matson

70. Esteban Gonzalez

71. Aaron Davenport

72. Jake Miller

73. Rodney Boone

74. Alaska Abney

75. Steven Perez

76. Rafe Schlesinger

77. Ryan Prager

78. Cam Schulke

79. Guy Lipscomb

80. Harrison Bodendorf

81. Connor Whitaker

82. Jervis Alfaro

83. Raudy Rivera

84. Luis Flores

85. Johan Rodriguez

86. Christian Knapczyk

88. Yeiferth Castillo

88, Melkelis Hernandez

89. Zach Jacobs

90. Maick Collado

91. Zane Morehouse

92. Will McCausland

93. Tommy Hawke

94. Davis Sharpe

95. Jack Jasiak

96. Aaron Savary 

97. Ryan DeSanto 

98. Evan Chrest 

99. Jose Pirela

100. Evelio Hernandez

101. Keegan Zinn

102. Anthony Silva *

103. Tyrese Turner

104. Jake Fox

105. Nick Mitchell

106. Joe Lampe

107. Jonah Advincula

108. Rorik Maltrud

Anyone For Some Horse Trading? Part 1 - Setting the stage

 Twitter is buzzing with lots of opinions about what baseball needs to thrive and a lot of tweeters are spouting gloom and doom about a work stoppage in 2027.

And I can see why people are concerned, given what it will take, just from an approval perspective:

1. The owners have to UNANIMOUSLY approve the new CBA that will be proposed?

2. That a majority of players have to approve it and that vote can be influenced by the thirty union reps (one for each team) and the executive committee of the MLBPA.

And that is after the negotiations between the MLBPA (led by their new Executive Director), and the Labor Relations Department within the office of the Commissioner of Baseball.

Just from a numbers and personalities perspective it seems impossible to believe that this could get done.

Still, let's assume reasonable heads will prevail and both sides WILL want to hammer out an agreement to save the 2027 season. 

How would an agreement come about that the owners and the players would be able to approve?

From some good, old-fashioned horse trading, that's how.  The trick is to know what compromises will have to be made on each side and how those compromises fit together.

The thing that rankles me is that the Labor Relations Departament and the MLBPA do not appear to be seriously negotiating yet.  Now when I began college my preferred study method was all-night cramming before an exam.   But as I got a little older I saw that if I just studied more along the way it made preparation for tests a lot easier.

So I think the the MLBPA and the MLB owners need to do less crammng and more work along the way, starting today.

Part 2 will lay out, using my 7 part series on how to fix baseball, what points will be horse traded.  That is, what points I think the players union and management will be willing to compromise on, including  sub-groups within each group.

So, look for part 2 soon.  I am working on it now.

What Would An International Draft Look Like?

 So, I was thinking: What would it look like if we had an international draft?

From my previous posts on the subject:

General

• The goal of the international draft would be to distribute the talent more favorably to teams that needed it the most while making sure that the top players were still going to make similar bonuses to what they had made previously.
• The draft would be 5 rounds, with 150 players being selected
• Non-drafted free agents could be signed for $150,000 or less and not count against a team's draft pool. There would be a limit of 30 players any team could sign in one year
• Draft order would be based on the regular season record in the previous year 
• The draft would have a hard draft cap for those 5 rounds.  If a team exceeded their cap they would lose the ability to participate in the international draft in the next year.
• All teams who receive competitive balance picks in the Rule 4 draft would have an additional $2 million added to their draft budget.  A competitive balance team that has one of the first 5 picks in the international draft would not be eligible for this additional bonus money.
• Teams must spend 90% of their draft budget
• International bonus money could no longer be traded
• Trading of international draft picks would not be allowed as this could be used by teams as a way not to have to spend money on bonuses for this draft.
• An add-on to the draft would be that the rules of control change so these players can not become minor league free agents until after their 7th season (current is after 6 seasons) and the Rule 5 draft is abolished. In this way teams have enough time to develop these players and yet the players are still young when they can become minor league free agents, even including the 3 options years if they are added to the 40 man roster at some point during that period.

What would the draft budgets look like?

Looking at the top 150 bonuses from the international signing periods of 2026 and 2025, I came up bonuses for the 150 slots in my draft.  If you follow the bonuses that come out of these signing periods you'll see that the slot values are generally flatter than they are in the Rule 4 draft, meaning that I had to do some work to make sure that bonuses continued to go down slightly with each pick with the goal to keep the 150th pick having roughly the same value as the 150th highest signing bonus for the most recent international classes.  I also compared those bonuses to the top 150 draft slots in the 2025 R4 draft, finding that all the R4 draft slots were significantly higher, as expected, than the equivalent slot values in my international draft. That made me feel good, knowing teams would be spending significantly less on 16 year olds than they spent on 18-21 year olds who likely had more polish and were more known quantities. 

So, how did all this turn out?

Cleveland, based on their 2025 record, would draft 22nd. Their bonus pool would be $4,070,000 with the additional $2 million added to their budget given them a total pool of $6,070,000 of which they would be required to spend roughly $5,500,000.  Note that their bonus cap for the 2026 international signing period (includes all bonuses of > $10,000) was $8 million of which they spent roughly $6.7 million on signing prospects.  It is very reasonable that they would meet their bonus pool spent this year if we included all the additional prospects they would sign as NDFAs in the international draft who they signed for over $10,000. If Cleveland used their entire bonus pool AND signed an additional 25 players to bonuses of $150,000 they would have a total budget of almost $11 million to work with as they could spend up to $3.75 million on those additional 25 players if all signed for $150,000.

Colorado, based on having the worst record in 2025, would have the #1 slot and their bonus pool for the first 5 rounds would be about $8.5 million. The Chicago White Sox would have a budget of $8.2 million, and the Washington Nationals would have a budget of roughly $7.9 million. The LA Dodgers would have the 30th slot and, as a result, would have a 5 round bonus pool of roughly $3.6 million, which would almost double if they signed 25 additional prospects to bonuses of $150,000.

THOUGHTS

There would be some wrinkles that would have to be ironed out to have an international draft:

• How would these players be trained if the current buscon system was dissolved.
• How would talent be evaluated leading up to the draft?
• Would these measures ensure that teams are appropriately spending on amateur international player acquisition or would we need additional guard rails to make sure teams were spending enough to acquire quality NDFAs under this new draft.

So, in summary, this is just one possible plan to handle the international draft.  My premise of 5 rounds could be faulty although teams serious about talent in this part of the world might be more incentivized under this system to scout more heavily as the pool of uncommitted players after a draft of this type would be huge, as there are about 550 players who were signed during the international period this year, meaning that there will be about 400 players of signable quality who would be available in the NDFA part of this process, as opposed to the situation in the past, where probably 90% of those 400 being committed to teams long before the signing period began.

Again, one guy's thoughts.  But I hope we can agree on one thing: to aid in competitive balance we need an international draft now.  

Potpourri - February 10, 2026

FREE AGENT THOUGHTS:

 Here are some truths about free agency

• If you invest in free agency you are likely to overpay but...you get talent you don't have.
• If you don't invest in free agency you have two choices
• Just go with what you have and hope or...
• Trade players (and maybe a draft choice) for players you could have had in free agency

This winter in free agency teams like Pittsburgh, Chicago White Sox and Detroit have invested in free agency. In some cases they also made trades.

But the bottom line is that they have gotten better...at least on paper.  In Detroit's case, they got a lot better, even though their recent signing of Framber Valdez might just have been a precursor to them trade arbitration winner Tarik Skubal.  

The Guardians, on the other hand have done the following:

• Sign free agent Austin Hedges (money well spent, and I don't care what anyone says)
• Sign free agent Shawn Armstrong (I'll reserve judgement on this one, cough, Paul Sewald, cough)
• Sign free agent AAAA RPs, Connor Brogdon and Colin Houlderman to MAJOR LEAGUE contracts and FA AAAA OFer Stuart Fairchild.  Never can have too many AAAA FAs, although you don't usually sign those guys to ML deals.
• Have gone public saying that they are (1) they won't be signing any top, expensive free agents and (2) they inept at signing meh free agents so they don't plan to sign any of those, either...and publicly bet money that the media couldn't identify the mistakes they have made trying to go cheap in free agency over the last several years.
• Said they are going with their own, LHH-heavy prospect pool to fill out their roster as they have to give these guys a chance..right before the Tigers signed Valdez, given the Tigers two of the best LH SP in baseball.

To summarize, the Guardians have, in the past 7 months:

(a) Were sellers at the ML trading deadline

(b) Won the AL Central championship with a historic finish/historic Tigers collapse

(c) Said they weren't going to sign any good or meh FAs

(d) Proceeded to sign two AAAA FA RPs to major league deals

This on the heels of way underspending their 2026 international bonus budget, signing a bunch of middling prospects instead of 1-2 top FAs AND having a really, really bad draft in 2025 where they seemed to panic and make a lot of bad, overdraft decisions and the 2024 draft where their first #1 overall pick in team history is looking like a case of bad scouting, their second round pick looks like an overdraft with the upside of a quality major league backup catcher.  This, of course, follows two years of overdrafting LHH college slap hitters and, for the most part, getting away from the one decision showing they MIGHT be the smartest guys in the room, that being the 2021 college pitcher draft that has netted Williams and Bibee and other potential future ML pitchers.

I remember a movie called "And Justice For All".  A small part of the movie was a subplot where a judge used to eat his lunch on the ledge of his building and, if I remember the story right, would fill up the tank of his private plane and fly it a little further out over the ocean every day to see how far he could go without running out of gas and crashing on the way back. The Guardians' FO seems to want to prove that they can have success with less and less resources every year, sort of like that judge and his private plane.  

My advice to the Guardians FO and ownership is stop trying to get the same result with less resources and, for the Guardians FO, stop trying to be the smartest guys in the room.  This team cannot afford to make mistakes on amateur player acquistion and development and on finding cute ways to compete without spending.

I love this team and always will.  But this crap has to stop.

GENIE IN THE BOTTLE

Continuing on the free agent theme I am still seeing a lot of "But wait, there are still things the Guardians can do"

I have seen free agent signing proposals, trade proposals and extension candidate proposals.

Besides the extension candidates that I already wrote about (Ramirez, Kwan, Cade Smth, Williams), I don't see anything else I would do at this point.

There is a story about a genie trapped in a bottle who sat around waiting for someone to set him free.  At first, when he had hope, he thought he would give the person who set him free the three best wishes possible, no tricks.  But the longer he was trapped in that bottle his hope turned to despair and, eventually, anger.  After a while his only thought was to get out of that bottle and trap the person who eventually freed in in the bottle just to show someone else how bad it was.

Well, I have become the genie.  Except for the extension candidates above, at this point I will be really mad if the Guardians actually sign a free agent or trade valuable minor league resources for a player of the type they could have had in free agency.  Hays, Robert Jr., Ozuna and many other viable free agents went to other small market teams.  It would be a slap in the face for the Guardians to turn to the bargain basement bin to pull out a remaining free agent.  Yeah, maybe guys, especially starting pitching, on minor league deals in case of injuries.  But the Guardians have been clear.  They want the young players to play.  

At this point I am resgned to that happening.  Any change in course now that costs us money and/or rosters spots and/or prospects to try to upgrade a team that CA and Chernoff have purposely NOT tried to make better over the winter is bad management and a slap in the face to Cleveland fans.  Hey guys, you have done nothing all wnter.  Don't do anything stupid now!

OK, I'll say it.  You have proven you are the smartest guys in the room. Now sit back and enjoy the ride.  You wouldn't want to do anything to mess up your brilliant strategy now, right?  So let's, for the rest of this season (except for the extension candidates above) just sit back and all admire your brilliance.  Doing anything now might muddy the waters of how brilliant your strategy is.  So, let's not!