Carlos Vargas for Ross Carver
I don't understand this move at all. The Guardians give up a guy who is on the brink of being a usable piece for the major league bullpen and they get back a 2oth AND LAST round pick from 2021 who had a 10.00 ERA in 9 starts at AA and has a 93-94 mph fastball.
Vargas can get it up to the plate at close to 100 mph. What the hell? Looks like another pathetic small trade at the deadline that will eat at us for years (see Tobias Myers trade).
So Antonetti has proven he can't trade more experienced minor leaguers at the Rule 5 deadline and he has proven he can't trade FOR that kind of player.
Perfect!
I know Carver is the D-backs #23 prospect and I get that this relieves a little 40-man roster pressure but this move tells me the Guardians didn't think Vargas would help them in 2023. So he shouldn't succeed with the D-backs this coming year, right?
On paper this doesn't seem anywhere like an equal trade in a year where it doesn't appear to me that we had a roster crunch if we get rid of Maile, Gose and Miller, none of whom are useful to this team in 2023 or easily replaceable.
40-Man Roster
Additions:
Angel Martinez
Joey Cantillo
Tim Herrin
Remove:
Anthony Gose
Kirk McCarty
Traded
Carlos Vargas
Analysis
On the surface this is a mixed bag. The obvious 2 guys that should have been added were added, Cantillo and Martinez.
Gose should have been DFA'd as he is unlikely to pitch next year and we can re-sign him to a minor league deal if he passes through waivers (likely). McCarty may be less likely to make it through waivers, given the guys we lost on waivers during the year (Call, Gibault, Jewell).
I already mentioned that the trade made NO sense and it makes less sense now as we are essentially saying that we have more certainty that Tim Herrin can help us in 2023 than we did in Vargas helping us in 2023 and that we considered Vargas such a dispensible asset that we would trade him for a guy who had a 10.00 ERA in 3 starts at AA and was a 20th round draft pick in 2021.
As far as Tim Herrin, when looking at all the minor league relievers we COULD have protected, Herrin looks like about the 5th best, if you count Peyton Battenfield. If our roster was not stacked I would have yawned at this move. But rostering Herrin at the expense of Vargas is just stupid and, in fact, rostering him at the expense of McCarty, who has actually shown he can pitch in the majors, is not that much better.
Leaving Battenfield unprotected is, as I said in a previous post, not the end of the world. IF YOU DID SOMETHING GOOD WITH THAT ROSTER SPOT. We didn't. Battenfield being selected in the Rule 5 is almost a given, considering his history as a reliever in college and his early pro career and his success last year and the first half of this year, before he tired from the heaviest workload of his career. The Guardans are supposed to have experts who see this stuff but I think they whiffed on this one. He is more likely the guy we saw in 2021 if he is used as a starter and maybe an even better fit as a bullpen guy. I can't imagine he makes it through the Rule 5 as SOME team will see what I see. What the Guardians are seeing? I don't know.
In the end there was very little that the Guardians could do to screw up the content of the roster, if they just protected Martinez and Cantillo. However, they took full advantage of screwing up the edges of the 40-man roster with moves that are head scratchers. Hopefully Herrin turns into something and Battenfield and Vargas don't come back to bite us in the butt like Junior Caminero is. However, on paper, these moves just sucked. When you are a low payroll team like the Guardians, you can't afford to throw assets away for nothing. With last year (Myers) and this year (Vargas, Battenfield and, to a lesser extent, McCarty) they seem to be throwing away assets that I would have liked to hold onto and brought in or protected assets that are not, in my opinion, any more than organizational filler.
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