As we approach the middle of this treacherous road trip against good teams I wanted to take a few minutes out to discuss the roster, trades possibilities and the upcoming Rule 5.
Rule 5
Peyton Battenfield, Xzavion Curry, Hunter Gaddis, Joey Cantillo and Peyton Battenfield were locks for me in my last post on this issue. Still feel the same way and it may be a moot point as I think all three of them have a good chance to be called up before the end of the season. As far as position players Bo Naylor is clearly going to be protected. So that is where we WERE about a month and a half ago. Since then the following things have happened
- Will Brennan has continued to hit
- Will Benson has really turned it up and is looking like the 5-tool guy we drafted
- Gabriel Rodriguez is now playing every day and even though he is hitting 6th or 7th (not where your top prospects would likely hit on a A ball team) he is putting up solid numbers with a lot of multiple hit games.
- Aaron Bracho, so far below the Mendoza line he couldn't even see it, is actually starting to hit. Although he won't dent .250 by the end of the season, his second half numbers may make him interesting to teams looking for value. Depending on the shrewdness of our FO, Bracho might be left exposed to the minor league portion of the Rule t.
- Micah Pries and Trenton Brooks keep hitting, continuing to prowl around the edges of Rule 5 World.
- Alexfri Planez is still raking and hitting long, long HRs. If he could follow Noel's path by getting to and performing well at AA this year, he might be in contention for a roster spot this winter.
So now it looks like we would be fools not to roster an additional 7 guys by the roster freeze deadline in November (Benson, Brennan, Naylor and the above 4 pitchers). That should put some strain on our 40-man this winter although I can easily see a path for Cody Morris, Curry, Gaddis, Naylor, Brennan and Benson on the 26 man roster next spring. However this would likely cause up to trade some prospects now or in the off-season and maybe at the deadline.
Trades
Look, teams have holes. But I don't believe that there are many teams in baseball that have holes they could fill if guys with surprisingly bad offensive numbers just return to their average from past years AND, even if that doesn't happen, see those holes being filled next year by guys on their AAA team. The latter, in the long-term view, is the way to go instead of trading prospects for rentals for the short term gain at the expense of the long-teram future of this club. Trading for Sean Murphy of Oakland instead of promoting Bo Naylor (and maybe losing Naylor in that trade) seems to make no sense. The same is true with Andrew Benitendi, Wilson Contreras and other rentals.
Except for the Juan Soto trade I have long asked for and is not become hot topic #1 among Cleveland baseball writers and broadcasters, I just don't see a fit that betters this team in the future while relieving a glut of prospects now. One key to the Guardians trading for Soto is taking on a bloated contract like Patrick Corbin's. No team needs Patrick Corbin and his performance per salary but the Guardians, but would you really rather have Konnor Pilkington now or Patrick Corbin every 5th game?
Current Roster
A lot of roster decisions are based on availability of reinforcements on our 40 man. I doubt if Gabriel Arias had not broken his hand if Ernie Clement would still be on this team. Clement, along with Francona trying to stretch Shaw to 2 innings, cost us the second game on Saturday which, of course, almost guaranteed us a split of the series with Cease pitching on Sunday. We had it in our hands and we let it go. I am not saying Arias could have made that play but I am saying that we were supposed to live with Clement's lack of offense (he hasn't had an extra base hit since May 1st!!!). But the guy is costing us on defense. But Arias is not available as he is still trying to recover from his injury and so we are limited at what we can do if we want to rest Jose Ramirez. Owen Miller started off 2021 very hot at AAA and then cooled off when he was brought to the majors. This year he started off very hot in the majors and then experienced the same cool down he did in 2021. Will he rebound in the remaining games? We will see but even if he does he is extremely replaceable with his 0.3 WAR and -0.9 career WAR.
Draft Signings
When your draft choices do well out of the gate it does 2 things for your organization (1) it increases your prospect resources to help guard against the impact of injuries or sudden lack of development of other prospects, the overall effect being to keep your farm system strong, eventually allowing quality replacements to come up to the majors and (2) it increases faith that prospects at higher levels of the minors can be traded as there is someone to replace them on your organizational depth chart.
So far we have seen one signing (Dylan DeLucia, 6th round, $9,200 under slot) and one projected signing (Jacob Zibin, 10th round, $1.05 millon above slot). It would be great to sign Chase DeLauter and get him to the AZL to see if he is truly helathy and get his development underway. If we have a good, powerful bat in the minor league outfield mix it might facilitate us trading a bat for an important piece sometime in the next year. So many first rounders have already signed that all I can figure is that we are trying to lowball DeLauter due to his injury and to save some of the money to sign Zibin.
Time will tell as we have less than a week (August 1st) to sign all of our draft picks of lose them. Surely more have signed but the Guardians tend to announce signings in bunches.
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