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Cleveland Guardians Offseason Discussion 2021-22

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Steve_424

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The offseason is here for Cleveland. Please use this thread for news updates/credible rumors and the GM thread for fantasy trades.

Team Options

Jose Ramirez ($12 M)
Roberto Perez ($7 M)

Eligible for Arbitration

Shane Bieber (1st)
Austin Hedges (4th)
Franmil Reyes (1st)
Amed Rosario (2nd)
Nick Wittgren (3rd)
Bradley Zimmer (1st)

Pending Free Agents


Bryan Shaw
Blake Parker
Wilson Ramos
Oscar Gonzalez (if he's added to 40 man they maintain team control, otherwise he's a minor league FA)

Available Free Agents

Players Who Must Be Added to 40 Man Roster to Protect them from Rule 5 Exposure

INF Tyler Freeman
C Bryan Lavastida
RHP Cody Morris
INF Brayan Rocchio
OF George Valera
LHP Joey Cantillo
INF Jhonkensy Noel
INF/OF Richie Palacios
LHP Konnor Pilkington
INF Jose Tena
OF Steven Kwan
OF Will Benson
INF Aaron Bracho
INF Jose Fermin
LHP Tim Herrin
C Andres Melendez
OF Alexfri Planez
RHP Aaron Pinto
RHP Jerson Ramirez
OF Johnathan Rodriguez
LHP Adam Scott
 
Since I’m here in the great Northwest and don’t get much news on my team, is there any local news about the trademark on the team name? Has anything been settled? This will be an off-season issue so that is why I bring it up here.
 
Since I’m here in the great Northwest and don’t get much news on my team, is there any local news about the trademark on the team name? Has anything been settled? This will be an off-season issue so that is why I bring it up here.

I think it's a non-issue. Just something people opposing the new name latched on to.
 
Since I’m here in the great Northwest and don’t get much news on my team, is there any local news about the trademark on the team name? Has anything been settled? This will be an off-season issue so that is why I bring it up here.
Haven't heard much, but apparently that roller derby team hadn't trademarked the name before the Indians did; in fact the Indians had trademarked the name in another country several months before the announcement. According to some patent lawyer that gives them a leg up for the US copyright claim.

But to me, all that's besides the point- no one is going to confuse a baseball team and a ruler derby team. I see no issue why they can't have the same name. I just hope they get to the merchandise soon.
 
For those not familiar with RHP Jerson Ramirez here is some info from Indians Prospective Twitter:

#Indians 2021 season final minor league leaders (Saves)
1) Jerson Ramirez 17
2) Nick Mikolajchak 8
3) Keven Kelly 7
4) Jordan Stephens 6
5) Nic Enright 5
5) Juan Mota 5
5) Aaron Pinto 5
5) Cade Smith 5
#Indians 2021 season final minor league leaders (SwStr%) by RP (30+ IP)
1) Jerson Ramirez 18.6%
2) Nic Enright 18.5%
3) Juan Mota 18.4%
4) Andrew Misiaszek 17.2%
5) Aaron Pinto 16.6%
#Indians 2021 season final minor league leaders (AVG) by RP (30+ IP)
1) Francisco Perez .152
2) Jerson Ramirez .156
3) Cade Smith .164
4) Anthony Gose .172
5) Dakody Clemmer .180
5) Randy Labaut .180
#Indians 2021 season final minor league leaders (WHIP) by RP (30+ IP)
1) Nic Enright 0.91
2) Jerson Ramirez 0.94
3) Aaron Pinto 1.02
4) Francisco Perez 1.08
4) Nick Mikolajchak 1.08
#Indians 2021 season final minor league leaders (FIP) by RP (30+ IP)
1) Nic Enright 2.41
2) Francisco Perez 2.59
3) Aaron Pinto 2.89
4) Kevin Kelly 2.99
5) Jerson Ramirez 3.00
#Indians 2021 season final minor league leaders (ERA) by RP (30+ IP)
1) Francisco Perez 1.87
2) Aaron Pinto 2.30
3) Jerson Ramirez 2.34
4) Tim Herrin 2.57
5) Nathan Ocker 2.95

------------------------------------------

He has a devastating pitch in his slider.... Think 2016 post-season Andrew Miller effectiveness...

Jerson missed the end of the season with an elbow issue but he is slated to pitch winter ball.
 
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The offseason is here for Cleveland. Please use this thread for news updates/credible rumors and the GM thread for fantasy trades.

Team Options

Jose Ramirez ($12 M)
Roberto Perez ($7 M)

Eligible for Arbitration

Shane Bieber (1st)
Austin Hedges (4th)
Franmil Reyes (1st)
Amed Rosario (2nd)
Nick Wittgren (3rd)
Bradley Zimmer (1st)

Pending Free Agents

Bryan Shaw
Blake Parker
Wilson Ramos
Oscar Gonzalez (if he's added to 40 man they maintain team control, otherwise he's a minor league FA)

Available Free Agents

Players Who Must Be Added to 40 Man Roster to Protect them from Rule 5 Exposure

INF Tyler Freeman
C Bryan Lavastida
RHP Cody Morris
INF Brayan Rocchio
OF George Valera
LHP Joey Cantillo
INF Jhonkensy Noel
INF/OF Richie Palacios
LHP Konnor Pilkington
INF Jose Tena
OF Steven Kwan
OF Will Benson
INF Aaron Bracho
INF Jose Fermin
LHP Tim Herrin
C Andres Melendez
OF Alexfri Planez
RHP Aaron Pinto
RHP Jerson Ramirez
OF Johnathan Rodriguez
LHP Adam Scott
The top 11 you listed all need to be protected from rule 5. None of the otherd should be rostered with the only possible exception being Pinto. House cleaning is definitely needed right now.
 
Not specific to the Indians but I thought this was interesting. From The Athletic:

Remember all those injury worries every team obsessed over back in spring training? They totally knew what was coming. There just wasn’t much they could do about it, apparently.

“We’ve done everything we could possibly do to protect guys,” said one AL exec. “We’ve given pitchers extra days. We’ve dialed back innings. And I don’t feel like any of it has paid dividends. I look around at every team’s injured list, and it boggles the mind.”

The boggle threshold is different for everyone, of course. But no more truthful words were uttered about anything we’ve seen in 2021. Here’s the incredible data, courtesy of Derek Rhoads, who monitors injuries for Baseball Prospectus.

• Not even counting players who landed on the COVID-19 IL, the number of player placements on injured lists around baseball was up (ready?) by about 37 percent compared with each of the previous two full seasons, 2019 and 2018. The average team used the IL 32 times this season — up from about 23 in 2019!

• Recurring injuries were a huge issue. Heading into the final weekend of the season, 216 different players had made multiple visits to the non-COVID-19 IL this season (more than seven per team). In the last full season (2019), it was just 131 (about four per team).

• For your average GM/President of Baseball Ops, managing a roster this year felt like an endless game of Whac-A-Mole. At one point, at the July 22 peak, there were 295 different players on the IL at the same time— almost 10 per team. That’s way above the peaks from either 2018 (207) or 2019 (233).

• And one of the upsets of the year is that teams found somebody healthy enough to pitch every darned day all season. Teams had to use the non-COVID-19 IL for pitchers an incredible 534 times this season. That’s up an astonishing 44 percent from both 2019 (370) and 2018 (367). The math works out to about 18 pitchers heading for the IL per team!

“Every way you sort it,” said the same exec, “injuries took a huge jump this year. I just hope it levels out because it hurts our game when the best players don’t play. So here’s hoping this was just a one-year speed bump.”


Teams need to figure out what the hell is going on. Are pitchers getting to the point where they are throwing so hard they can't stay healthy? But Bieber and Civale don't throw particularly hard and they got hurt. The Indians actually did pretty well from a pitching standpoint, particularly the bullpen.

As for other injuries there was the Naylor collision of course, and Franmil tweaked an oblique and missed a few weeks. Bradley missed a few weeks with a knee injury. Berto missed a lot of time when he got crossed up on a pitch. But otherwise the Indians seemed to have done better than average in this department.

But one thing that may come out of this season is that teams around baseball will want to get deeper in terms of pitching after injuries to pitchers were up 44% this year from 2018 and 2019. Maybe that is a one-year blip due to playing 60 games last year. We'll see.
 
More from The Athletic on the game itself:

BATTING AVERAGE: League average was .244, lowest since 1968.

SINGLES: The average team hit just 5.1 singles per game, almost identical to last year, but producing the fewest total singles in a season since the inception of the 162-game schedule.

STEALS: The average team stole a mere 0.45 bases per game, lowest rate since 1967. But meanwhile, the stolen-base success rate, of 75.5 percent, was actually the best ever, proving that for data-driven teams, base-stealing is now basically a math equation.

DOUBLE PLAYS: The pitcher’s best friend isn’t as loyal as it used to be. The average team grounded into only 0.69 double plays per game, the lowest rate since this has been calculated.

HIT BATTERS: Welcome to the first season in history with more than 2,000 batters getting hit by a pitch. The total is a record, although the rate per game was slightly higher last year.

BABIP: The batting average on balls in play was only .292, barely below last year and the lowest since 1992 (the year before offense exploded in the PED era). Two words: Shifts work!

ERRORS: The average team made only 0.54 errors per game. But we regret to report that is not a tribute to leatherwork. Like the DP rate, it’s a reminder merely that the ball is never in play anymore. All right, not never. But, despite that dip in the Three True Outcomes, not nearly enough.

So what does it all mean? It’s a reminder that too many action plays are disappearing from this sport. And that’s a problem.

“It’s just a symptom of how the game has changed, how the game has moved in the direction of power and strikeouts,” said one AL exec. “When you’re seeing singles, hits on balls in play, stolen bases, all these things, going by the wayside, it’s telling us that nothing that’s been done around the edges has made an impact the way we thought it would.”

So what’s the moral of that story? A lot of traditional baseball fans don’t want to hear this. But here’s the unvarnished truth:

“Without some structural shift — without some significant change to the rules — I don’t see this reversing course,” the same exec aid. “We have to incentivize changing the way the game is played, because it’s just not happening organically.”


My suggestion: Make the baseball itself less aerodynamic. Make it less advantageous to hit balls in the air.
 
More stuff on pitching injuries...

Pitchers who appeared in a game this season: 846!
Ten years ago: 642!
Twenty years ago: 560!

• Until this year, only two teams in history had ever used 40 pitchers or more in a season. Five teams did it just this year! (Orioles/Mets 42, Diamondbacks/Rays 41, Angels 40)

• Ten years ago, only one team in baseball (the Blue Jays) even used 30 pitchers. This year, 25 teams sent at least 30 pitchers out there!

• Ten years ago, just 10 teams in the whole sport even went through 25 pitchers. This year, only one team (the Indians) used under25!

So let’s ask this one more time: Is this really what baseball wants its sport to look like?
 
One more...among the teams execs said to "watch out for next year"...

TIGERS — Throw out those first 33 games, when they went 9-24, and the Tigers have spent the last five months outwinning the A’s*, Reds, Phillies, Mets, Padres, Indians and every non-contender in the sport. And there’s near-unanimous sentiment that all of that was for real.

One review: “They have young pitching (Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal, Matt Manning). You can see what’s coming in (Spencer) Torkelson and Riley Greene. You know they’ll spend money. And they’ve played really well since May. So of all the AL teams out there, it’s them and the Mariners who look like they’re ready to take the next step.”
 
The top 11 you listed all need to be protected from rule 5. None of the otherd should be rostered with the only possible exception being Pinto. House cleaning is definitely needed right now.
More stuff on pitching injuries...

Pitchers who appeared in a game this season: 846!
Ten years ago: 642!
Twenty years ago: 560!

• Until this year, only two teams in history had ever used 40 pitchers or more in a season. Five teams did it just this year! (Orioles/Mets 42, Diamondbacks/Rays 41, Angels 40)

• Ten years ago, only one team in baseball (the Blue Jays) even used 30 pitchers. This year, 25 teams sent at least 30 pitchers out there!

• Ten years ago, just 10 teams in the whole sport even went through 25 pitchers. This year, only one team (the Indians) used under25!

So let’s ask this one more time: Is this really what baseball wants its sport to look like?
Is this due to new training techniques and the increased velos/throwing styles?
 

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