Friday Night Post - Foresight or luck, Promotions and Non-Promotions, 70 win threshhold, Don't look behind the curtain, Same old, same old

 Foresight or Luck?

Well, if we hadn't traded Civale we would all be saying right now: Damn, as this season is dead I wish we would have traded Civale.

So, now in hindsight, our bad strength of schedule compared to that of Minnesota probably doomed us WITH our lineup intact.  Without Naylor this season for the Guardians is functionally over with or without Civale.  So, it turned out well at this point unless he is on the IL because we don't need him because we waived the white flag. , sort of like Tito in 2021

Promotions and Non-Promotions

Naylor was having such a good season that I hate to see him miss any more time.  Freeman's injury hurts his chances in 2024 because, apparently, if these guys don't see you with their own eyes they can't project what you can do, if you are given an extended look.  Hope both are back soon.

These two injuries led to the promotion of Jose Tena and the purchase of Kole Calhoun.  So I have some questions:

• Does the organization think of 26.5 years old Daniel Schneeman as a real prospect or as an organizational guy having a good year?  If it is the latter then why not bring him up and give him a cup of coffee while Freeman is out.  Can't hurt and makes MUCH more sense than bringing up Tena, who just got to AAA.  It's also a good look for future minor league free agents who know if they play well and there is an opportunity they will get it.  Plus, if you were ever in your wildest dreams thinking you might roster Schneeman this winter, now is your chance to get a look.  FYI, Tena will lose 25 or more valuable PAs in AAA a week while he rides the pine in Cleveland.  Doesn't make a lot of sense to bring up Tena as Tito tends not to play these rookies AT ALL who are brought up just as insurance.   I think Schneeman would not be hurt by this time sitting as he has almost 400 PA in Columbus already, over two seasons.  Tena has 4.  
• Why bring in Calhoun when you could bring up Noel?  You have deemed this season dead with your Civale trade for a 2024, at best, guy.  Why bring in a broken-down 35-year old when you can get a look at Noel.  Yes, he isn't a polished prospect yet, but I have seen him play almost every game this year and he is a lightning in the bottle kind of guy for this year and is passable at 1B, LF and RF and came up as a 3B so he could even be used in a pinch there.  Plus that bat!  If this is more of the service time crap they pulled with Bo Naylor I will just freakin scream!!!
• Fry is your 26th man.  If you haven't figured that out by now then you need to.  Letting him play a lot is only going to cloud your vision of him for next year.  Some guys just play better in a limited role and I think Fry is one of those guys.  Whenever I have seen a team try to expand the role of a guy like that they are disappointed and end up jettisoning the guy as replacement level.  Fry IS a member of a WS team.  Now just find 25 guys to put in front of him!
• If you want to do promotions let's rip off the band-aid.  DFA Gallagher and bring up Lavastida.  The latter is actually the absolute worst I have seen this year, any level of professional baseball, at controlling the running game.  But he calls a good game, can block some balls and he is red hot with the bat.  Again, it gives you an extended look at him to see if he can handle a backup/30 games per year at catcher role.   Gallagher won't be here next year and we have already waived the white flag on this season so......

70 Win Threshold

Looking at the rest of our schedule, if we don't sweep the White Sox this weekend we may not even get to 70 wins this year.  Yes, going 16-37 the rest of the year is VERY possible and every loss we have to the White Sox this weekend makes that more possible.  The only thing I will say about that, if we have to, it is better to do it all at the end of the season instead of starting out that way at the beginning of the season.  The latter makes for 6 months of depressing baseball.

Don't Look Behind The Curtain

It is very easy to look at the results of our player acquisition process and have the following words/phrases come to mind:

• Morons
• Idiots
• Unprepared
• Dunning-Kruger effect

While any of these MAY be the case, the security blanket we all tend to cling to is that we don't know all the details and/or we don't have the analytics software to calculate the probable outcomes of a particular path forward.  So there is some possibility that we, as lowly fans without the sophistication of baseball executives just don't get it and we would be better served to just accept what is in front of us instead of trying to pull the curtain back to see what the 'real' story is.  

Or, we could say that the proof is in the pudding and that the pudding appears to be rotten, LOL.

Same Old, Same Old

This trade deadline a couple of things came out:

• The rich got richer, robbing the poor.  It just that, IMO, it was sooooo much worse than what we have seen in the past.  It was clearly a buyer's market where teams got multiple years of control players for pennies on the dollars of their worth...and not necessarily as salary dumps.  
• Cleveland was pathetic at making trades, getting less than equal value in every deadline transaction.  
• Cleveland, repeating the mistakes of 2022, had a disastrous 2023 draft where they chased after every LH hitting contract/no power prospect they could find and then piled onto that by trading for two more hit-over-power prospects at the deadline.

Sometime, do a deep dive into the transactions of the 70s and 80s.  Bad draft picks, trading hitting for pitching and then, a couple of years later, trading pitching for hitting, basically getting worse or treading water with each trade.  The key point here is that drafting and signing international free agents HAS to be the backbone of your system as these are really the only two ways in baseball that you increase the net talent in your organization.  If you screw either of those up, or if you make bad prospect-for--veteran trades, your team goes down the crapper, year-over-year.

Unfortunately the FO has a lot to answer for with their free agent signing fiascos, trade fiascos and draft fiascos.  The only place they appear NOT to be behind the curve for small market teams is sigining international amateur free agents.   To say they need to get better is the understatement of the year.   Don't know how to make that happen but these guys need to get better as we are now seeing enough evidence to show that they are NOT helping either the present or the future of this franchise with the moves they are making.