All these evaluations miss the fact that Cleveland has an extraordinary amount of young talent with either a fair amount of MLB experience or on the cusp of MLB. Most of them have a strong prospect pedigree.
Gavin Williams, Logan Allen, and Luis Ortiz were all top 100s, and have some experience.
Among position players, Brayan Rocchio, Bo Naylor, Kyle Manzardo, Gabriel Arias, and Tyler Freeman were all top 100s, all now with some experience under their belts. An org should expect a natural improvement from its highly thought of kids as they gain experience.
Then, Juan Brito, Travis Bazzana, and the since injured again Chase Delauter are all top 100s on the verge of making their debuts.
While an org can’t count on any one of the kids to improve, it can make plans based upon several of them doing so. But if you dont play them, it can’t happen.
The loss of Josh Naylors offense probably won’t be offset by Santana, but improved production from Manzardo would fill the gap. The other kids may not break out, but a slight bit of improvement across the board would give the Guardians an improved overall offense…and that kind of minimal improvement should be expected.
High off season grades are passed out for major, or multiple, free agent signings. But Cleveland, even if they did have a bigger budget, probably didn’t need to make outside player position additions, because the improvement is already in house.
On the pitching side, everybody knows by now that young, cost controlled starting pitching is the hardest thing to acquire. Cleveland managed to acquire four of them, two with MLB experience.
That, all by itself, gets a very high grade.
