In the hangover of a pathetic opening day hitting performance where we had to, once again, see Jake Bauers and Ben Gamel play and Amed Rosario make a clear error that cost us two runs and, to rub salt in the wound
Rule 5 Draft
The Indians, with their cheap owner and relatively low revenue stream, are clearly going to continue to be a prospect-driven organization. That type of organization can't afford to have prospects get away without getting, at least, equal, young, controllable talent back. It's just the way it has to be.
That being said, the Indians lost two players in the Rule 5 draft this winter, Luis Oviedo and Ka'ai Tom. They got one back in Trevor Stephan.
Fourteen of the eighteen players drafted have, at this point, stuck with their new teams. One of those, Dedriel Nunez, has had Tommy John surgery and so won't be on the active roster this year. Thus 13/18 (72%) began the season on active rosters. This number is much higher than normal. Without doing the long term research (because I am lazy) and only using the two previous Rule 5 drafts my impression is that this represents a TOTAL flip of what is usually seen. That is, about 1/4 of guys selected in the Rule 5 actually stay with their new team or a team that trades for them after the draft.
Teams with two of these players on their active roster this year are the Pirates, Orioles and Marlins. As far as losing players, besides the Indians, the Dodgers, Twins and Yankees lost two players. While these sample sizes are small, it looks like the rich teams lose the most and the rebuilding teams take on the most risk by adding guys. Not surprising. But why are the Indians in the group with the winning teams? It's a little concerning that a prospect-coveting team like the Indians would lose an outfielder and a young pitcher. This is not the first time in recent history this has happened to the Tribe. Anthony Santander was lost to the Orioles a few years ago and wouldn't he look good in the Indians outfield right now? It's not like Cleveland has the top farm system in baseball, either. They have ranked near the middle of the pack or below in the past 4 years so they shouldn't really be losing players in the Rule 5 draft.
And we did this while clogging up a roster spot with Jake Bauers and adding guys like Harold Ramirez to the active roster. Pathetic, really. Protect your own guys.
Options Left
We have heard, ad nauseum, really, about how we MIGHT have lost Jake Bauers if we didn't keep him on the roster because Bauers was out of options. But what has not been mentioned is that when we sent Bobby Bradley down I think we used his last option. This means that next spring he will be in the same boat as Bauers: If we want to send Bradley to the minors in 2022 he would have to pass through waivers. If we had kept Bradley instead of Bauers then Bradley would have had an option left if he had struggled. Just another reason that the Bauers over Bradley decision is a stupid one.
Close but yet so far
We really only needed to fill two positions, CF and 1B. However, repeating the mistakes of 2020 the Indians went cheap with our options in the OF and were left with Ben Gamel. Then the Indians chose with our ego instead of our heads and went with Bauers at 1B. And, on top of that we added two shortstops to our already burgeoning prospect list of SS. We could have flipped one of those (read Rosario) for a CFer who could have played right now.
Just a little better GMing with an owner willing to spend a little money and we could be 3-1 right now instead of 1-3 against two of the worst teams in baseball, the Royals and the Tigers. As I said, all you have to do is see how the Twins demolished the Tigers yesterday after we went 1-2 against then and scored 5 runs in the first 23 innings against their pitching that was bombed by the Twins.
Again, it starts at the top and Dolan is screwing us and Antonneti and Chernof don't appear to be able to make favorable trades or plan for the future. It is all reactive crap and that reactive crap is getting us in trouble now and will continue to in the future.
Dolan said yesterday that the first half of this season will be used to evaluate what we have in our young players. Could that mean that we will have a fire sale in Juley/August if we are out of the race? With Dolan, that is a distinct possibility. Maybe it could mean that we will dump Bauers if he doesn't pan out but do you really trust that this is what Dolan means? I don't.
Lindor Trade
Like noses, most people have opinions. You would probably be hard-pressed to find an Indians fan who doesn't have an opinion on trading (and not signing) Lindor. Many feel we should have signed him to an extension, come hell or high water. However, the astute fans know that isn't possible. What fans should be focusing on is that the return we got for Lindor/Carrasco was light and it was pointed towards a position group (middle infielders) that we were overloaded with. Just a look at the return the Pirates got for Joe Musgrove and the comparison that Carrasco should have netted, by himself, a similar return, tells you it was light. That's really the key here. When you make a trade where you give up a star like Lindor and a #2 starter like Carrasco, you need to do well, extremely well. The sense is that we wanted to dump Lindor, had to throw in Carrasco to get it done, and we had to take the best of a number of bad offers to get it done. So, in summary, we HAD to trade Lindor. But to do that and throw in Carrasco and get the return, both in who we got and how many prospects we got, shows that we got screwed in this trade. "Screwed" in this sense doesn't mean totally robbed. It means we needed more prospects AND prospects who would help us now and in the future at positions we needed. Getting two shortstops and two very low level minor leaguers doesn't help the retool and rebuild at all, really, meaning we got screwed in this trade.
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