Archive for Guardians

Perhaps it’s fitting that, in a trade season without any big name stars, the biggest story that may emerge before the deadline is a deal that didn’t happen. As August noted over on InstaGraphs, the Indians and Brewers appeared to have struck a deal for Jonathan Lucroy last night, but this morning, Lucroy’s representatives informed the Brewers that he wouldn’t be waiving his no-trade clause in order to facilitate a trade, effectively killing the deal.

Whenever a player refuses to go along with an agreed-to trade, there’s always a backlash. If you’re a Brewers fan, you’re probably frustrated that a guy who has no future with the franchise prevented the team from landing a package of quality prospects, especially after making public comments the last few months about wanting to play for a contender. If you’re an Indians fan, you’re probably frustrated that maybe the best player on the market just refused to join your team, and instead of having a loaded roster headed into October, the team still has a big hole behind the plate. And if you’re August Fagerstrom, you’re frustrated that you had to throw away a nearly-finished article on the Indians decision to push all-in, and lose a nifty cooking analogy in the process.

So there’s a lot of frustration out there, since Lucroy’s decision prevented a lot of people from getting what they wanted. But this is one of those times when it’s definitely worth remembering that ballplayers are people, and when it comes to making decisions about his life, Jonathan Lucroy doesn’t really owe us anything.

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The recipe goes like this. Take an American League-best 59-42 record and sauté it in a 67-year World Series drought. Chop up a recently revamped, sneakily excellent farm system and add it to the pan, along with some league-worst catcher production and a relatively thin bullpen. Let cook for one trade deadline, pour over the long-term perils of building a team around starting pitching, and season with a touch of championship envy from your neighbors across the street. It’s the perfect recipe for pushing all-in, pulled straight out of the Cleveland Indians cookbook.

Let’s get the details out of the way now. Late last night, Ken Rosenthal broke the Jonathan Lucroy news, which has now fallen apart and is a story all of its own. This morning, Rosenthal broke some more news, as he’s wont to do, regarding Andrew Miller. The Miller news is official — no take-backs! — and the details are as follows:

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Around 11 p.m. EST last night, it looked like the Cleveland Indians had acquired catcher Jonathan Lucroy from the Milwaukee Brewers. Then, this morning, news broke that they’d gotten lefty reliever Andrew Miller from the New York Yankees, too. And then… they didn’t have Lucroy anymore. Isn’t trade deadline season fun?

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Tom Haudricourt had it first:

Jonathan Lucroy has exercised his no-trade clause and vetoed trade from #Brewers to Indians. Details to come.

— Tom (@Haudricourt) July 31, 2016

Perhaps the most important thing to understand here is that Lucroy had every right to do what he did, just as the Indians had every right to hold firm in their stance. See, Lucroy has a club option for 2017 that would pay him just $5.25 million, which is an absolute bargain. Lucroy knows this, and his agent knows this, and having the leverage to renegotiate your contract is the exact reason why players push for no-trade clauses in the first place.

Lucroy reportedly wanted the Indians to tear up that club option, effectively making him a half-season rental, so that he could hit 2017’s barren free agent market in four months and cash in. The Indians, understandably, were not willing to part with the same quartet of prospects for three months of Lucroy as they were for one year and three months of Lucroy, so they refused to negate the club option. The club option was a big reason why Lucroy was so valuable in the first place. The clubs reportedly will not renegotiate a lesser package, and talks appear to be dead.

Digging in a bit deeper from Lucroy’s standpoint, though, the choice seems a bit puzzling. Because let’s run through his alternatives. It’s possible Milwaukee is now unable to find a suitor for him before Monday’s non-waiver trade deadline, and he remains a Brewer through the end of the year, at which point the club will immediately exercise his club option and he will not be a free agent. Or, it’s possible Milwaukee deals him to an inquiring club like the Rangers, Mets, or even Red Sox, none of which are on Lucroy’s no-trade list, meaning he’d be unable to restructure his contract, meaning they’d immediately exercise his club option and would still not be a free agent. Essentially, Lucroy’s not going to become a free agent in 2017 no matter where he winds up, and now he’s declined the opportunity to play for the American League favorites, which flies in the face of his prior vocal desire to play for a winner. The only possible scenario where Lucroy gets his wish of 2017 free agency would be a trade to Detroit, under the condition that Detroit would be willing to pull from it’s already barren farm system for a rental, which has seemed doubtful all along and even moreso now, given Lucroy’s demands.

There’s some rumors floating out there that the Indians couldn’t promise Lucroy playing time in 2017 with Yan Gomes and Roberto Perez still in the fold which played a role in Lucroy’s decision, but those seem somewhat dubious, given Lucroy’s status as an unquestioned top-three catcher in the game and the recent struggles of Indians catchers. Perhaps more likely is that Cleveland was unable to promise Lucroy that they wouldn’t simply flip him in the offseason, which seemed like a strong possibility from the get-go, and Lucroy wasn’t interested in being traded again so soon.

Anyway, Dave Cameron will have more on this soon, and I’m sure more details will come out in the ensuing days. For now, we’re left with a reminder that not only can you not predict baseball, but you can’t predict baseball’s trade deadline, either.

You’ll have to forgive me if I think of Andrew Miller as the travellin man. Now in his 11th major league season, Miller is headed to his sixth major league team, all east of the Mississippi. But unlike most journeymen, for the most part the teams acquiring Miller have been quite excited about the possibility. The latest team to celebrate getting the lanky lefty are the Cleveland Indians, who are now looking quite formidable. But they’re not the only team looking formidable. The Yankees may no longer be in 2016 contention, but they’re setting up well for 2017 and beyond.
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Over the past few weeks I’ve seen Cleveland Indians prospects in several different places: at the club’s Spring Training complex in Goodyear, Arizona; at the Cal/Carolina League All-Star Game in Lake Elsinore, California; in Wilmington, Delaware; and at the Futures Game in San Diego. Below are my notes on some of Cleveland’s most relevant prospects scouted during this brief window.

Justus Sheffield, LHP, Lynchburg (High-A)

Once primarily a fastball/curveball pitcher, Sheffield’s most used secondary offering now appears to be a slider. His fastball sat 93-95 mph at the Cal/Carolina League All-Star Game in one inning of work and then was 92-94 in his first post-ASG start in Wilmington. Frequently, Sheffield, who is listed at 5-foot-10, fails to get on top of his fastball and the pitch comes in flat and hittable. The slider isn’t totally new — I wrote up Sheffield back in 2014 when it was his fourth option — but, considering how promising the curveball once looked, it’s a bit of surprise that that the slider has become his go-to secondary weapon. It was 84-86, some featured tight, two-plane movement while others were shorter and more cutter-like. It flashed above-average, and I think there’s a chance it could one day be a 55 offering, but was generally fringe-average to average. Sheffield is already trying to run his slider inside on right-handed hitters.

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The Cleveland Indians had a pretty good rookie last year. Francisco Lindor: pretty good! Led all American League rookies in WAR! Didn’t end up winning the award — that went to Carlos Correa — but, boy, did Lindor have a strong case. Cleveland had been anticipating the arrival of Lindor for some time, as he’d long been viewed as the type of prospect that would make an immediate impact. The type of prospect that one might expect to compete for the Rookie of the Year. You don’t see too many prospects burst onto the scene the way Lindor did.

Bradley Zimmer and Clint Frazier aren’t expected to debut until at least 2017, so no one would have expected another Cleveland player to be competing for the Rookie of the Year in 2016, yet here we are at the All-Star Break, and another Indian sits atop the rookie WAR leaderboard for position players. This time, it’s Tyler Naquin.

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Most All-Stars weren’t born into baseball this way. Most of them had to alter their approach, or their mechanics, in order to find that a-ha moment. They threw a pitch differently, or decided to pull the ball more, or changed their swing, and then found a run of sustained success that put them in the All-Star game that’s being played tonight.

So, given fairly fettered access to the All-Stars from both leagues, that was the question I posed: what was the big adjustment, mechanical or approach-wise, that brought you to this podium today?

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You’ll hear some hitters say that you can’t cover both the inside and the outside parts of the plate at the same time. We heard Marcus Semien talk about the difficulty both of being able to pull for power and also take the outside pitches to the opposite field just last week. And, to some extent, the high and low fastballs require different swings that suit different players. Brandon Moss told us about his problems with high fastballs, and Brian Dozier admitted that his swing was better against the high cheese.

It stands to reason — at least for the benefit of our exploration today — that a balanced hitter would be one who could handle pitches in all four quadrants. They would produce good results against high fastballs, low fastballs, inside fastballs, and outside fastballs. Conveniently, that sounds like something we can measure.

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The Indians have won 10 games in a row! That’s really good, and it’s allowed them to storm out in front in the American League Central. Sure, things can change in a hurry — 10 games ago, the Indians and the Royals were tied. But there’s no sense in just dismissing whole hot streaks, and the Indians now have one of the better records in baseball. For a few years, they’ve gotten some preseason stat hype, and now they resemble an actual contender. A contender that, mind you, has been doing almost all of this without Michael Brantley. Not bad.

I wrote last week about how the Indians’ patchwork outfield has overachieved. That’s been a part of this success. Of course, the rotation has also been critical, and now it looks like even Trevor Bauer might be figuring something out. On the bases, the Indians have been remarkably good, so that’s a quiet strength of theirs. I want to take this opportunity to call attention to another. For a while, the Indians were known for being horrible in the field. Last season, they turned that around. This season, they’ve been up to something special.

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We’ve long known Trevor Bauer as the 21-year-old kid with attitude who shook off Miguel Montero as a rookie. The No. 3 overall pick from 2011 who Terry Francona called stubborn and implored to work more with the coaching staff.

Brian Dozier recently described Bauer to Eno Sarris as someone who “lives up in the zone” and who won’t go away from his strengths to attack Dozier, a high-ball hitter. And while it’s technically still true that Bauer often throws his fastballs high in the zone, it’s an interesting reminder of the perception of what Bauer was in the past, and the reality of what Bauer is now. The perception of Bauer was that he was so transfixed with his own pitching style, he was resistant to change. The reality is now, he couldn’t look more different.

Bauer opened the year in the bullpen after a rough 2015, but found himself back in the rotation after Cody Anderson’s early season struggles. In 11 starts, he’s got a 2.96 ERA and a 3.22 FIP. Over the last 30 days, he leads the entire majors in WAR among pitchers. But results are results, and without a change in process, there’d be no reason to believe the results should be any different. This is what a complete change in process looks like:
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