I was in my college dorm room, unpacking from a Fall retreat while closely watching the final few innings of the ALCS last year. As the last outs were being made after Juan Soto’s gut-wrenching 10th inning shot, you can feel the heartbreak throughout all of Progressive Field.
It was a devastating loss, just two games removed from what seemed like an absolute jolt by Jhonkensy Noel and David Fry late in game 3. Everyone was shattered, and the season that had so much promise ended in game 5 of the ALCS.
But, something seemed different. To me it did, at least. As I sat in my dorm, I reminisced on the entire season. The historic start — the incredible power surge of David Fry — the impressive second-half rookie campaign from Kyle Manzardo — Jose Ramirez and his near 40/40 season — him and Josh Naylor combining for 70 bombs — the utter dominance of the team’s bullpen — and so much more.
Not to mention the incredible things beyond just the major league field. The Guardians drafted Travis Bazzana first overall, and followed that selection with even more impressive picks. Progressive Field was in the first half of its renovations, and the stadium looked like it was becoming so much more lively. That suspicion was correct, as the team drew in over 2 million fans to home games for the first time since 2007.
The amount of negative in comparison to the positive in 2024 seemed like nothing larger than an atom. And instead of feeling heartbreak, I felt genuinely proud that this team did what they did. I cried tears of joy instead of tears of sadness just minutes after the last out was made because my team did so much in the first year of Guardians baseball’s newest era.
I was so optimistic for the future. Optimistic, because I already knew that the team would start making real progress towards the height of their contention in 2025 and 2026. Optimistic because I felt that this was the right time and a perfect storm to build on this success and fill in some of the obvious holes in both the rotation and the lineup. Optimistic because the AL is so very wide open in 2025. Very, wholeheartedly, optimistic.
Despite my optimism, the right moves needed to be made during the offseason nonetheless. That’s how you build a playoff team into a World Series contender.
So to start things off, glue-man Austin Hedges was signed to another $4 mil deal, which was pretty much guaranteed. Nothing much to see there.
On December 6th, it was announced that Shane Bieber would be returning on a 1 year $10 million deal with a $16 million player option, with the hopes that Shane could help the team during the second half of the season. A win-now move. The team was off to a great start.
Not even a week after that, the Guardians front office absolutely shocked the Cleveland faithful by trading fan-favorite Andres Gimenez as well as Nick Sandlin to Toronto for Spencer Horwitz and Nick Mitchell, flipping Horwitz to the Pirates for pitchers Luis Ortiz, Michael Kennedy and Josh Hartle.
An unprecedented move that baffled so many, it still served a purpose of filling out the already thin rotation. They traded a below average bat and a platinum glove in Gimenez (who was to receive way more money than he was worth in the remaining years of his contract) for something they needed desperately: more starting pitching. This wasn’t as much of a selling move but more of a retool to favor a huge area of need. Neither was it a fan-favorite move, more-so a very saddening one for fans, but in hindsight it was needed.
11 days later, the Guardians did what a lot of people thought they were going to do and traded another fan-favorite in Josh Naylor to Arizona for pitcher Slade Cecconi. Josh Naylor, who was a huge part of the team’s early success last year, and the other player than Jose to hit 30 bombs, was traded as he was entering the final year of his contract for a controllable pitcher, who only reached as high as No. 6 on the D-Backs’ prospect rankings and posted a 6.66 ERA in 13 starts (20 games) during his first full season. An even more baffling trade to me at the time, but I did figure that this can be used as a retooling move as well if the Guards front office was able to sign or trade for a first baseman that could even get near Josh’s level of production.
But they really started to lose my trust and optimism after they signed 39-year-old Carlos Santana. For $12 million.
Yeah, so the Guardians signed a first baseman on a one-year deal, who is not only older than Naylor, but who only has an up on him in both his eye and his glove. They also signed him for more than what Josh received in arbitration this year. This would make sense if Cleveland made this move for his type of production if he were younger, as Carlos still was in a decent range of Josh’s power stats last year. But Carlos is 39 years old. 39. Signing him instead of keeping Naylor (which wasn’t the right move after I saw what they did with Cecconi) or trading for/signing a more projectable or cheaper first baseman has left me questioning the sanity of this team’s front office since the moment the ink hit the paper. The age of Santana, the figure that they bought him for, and the incredible likelihood that he’d regress confused me to the highest degree.
This was neither a win-now move or a build for the future move. It’s a thread the needle move, which has been the front office’s M.O. for a while now. As I said, this one move shook my overall optimism for the team mightily.
But I thought in the back of my head that maybe, just maybe, they were finally opening up the pocketbook and were even going to pay larger figures to an even more viable option at a different position of need for the lineup. But I was fooling myself, as I often forget that it is Paul Dolan paying the players.
Not a single other signing was made to the starting lineup. Not a single alternative move to fill in at least one or two of the obvious holes in the lineup (besides one that I will cover later on), just pitching acquisitions. The team really needed some real backup for Jose, Kwan and Josh (now just Jose and Kwan), and they weren’t given any.
Then, Jakob Junis was signed for $4 million, and Paul Sewald for $7 million. Junis actually seemed to be more like a decent signing, after looking at his Fangraphs page. But Paul Sewald was a head-scratcher. For a bullpen that was already so deep, they signed a regressing 35-year-old righty relief pitcher who has a 2-pitch mix, one pitch being a low-90s fastball with average movement that lives over the heart of the plate. He was just really a one-trick pony who needed his breaking ball not to regress further if he wanted to do well. He was also sidelined for half the 2024 season, and now he was put on the shelf this year for half of even that tenure. Now, he was traded to the Tigers the morning of Trade Deadline day, deeming that move an utter failure.
Just a side note, Eli Morgan was also traded to the Cubs for Alfonsin Rosario, which actually happened in November, but I thought I’d lump it in with the relief pitcher moves. But yeah, that definitely isn’t a win-now move but a high-value one nonetheless that I never had an issue with, especially with Rosario’s obvious improvement so far this year. Good on Antonetti for getting that one done.
Later, John Means was signed for a year and a club option, which could have really helped the team the same way that Shane Bieber’s signing could’ve. But because the Guardians front office neglected the team’s need for offense (hoping that Santana’s signing and some of the young players could step up), those two signings were absolutely pointless as of right now. Means could change if we exercise his option for next year, but right now, both signings flopped because they wouldn’t pay the due diligence to the offense.
Their only diligence after Santana was trading Tyler Freeman to reclaim Nolan Jones, which on paper is a good move to bank on him to get back to where he was. Of course, if the team didn’t totally rely on guys like him to step up in the first place.
That said, those were all the significant moves made during the offseason, one that really made me wonder what has been up with the team.
However, we’re just getting started. Both a flurry of incredibly bad luck and poor team business throughout the season has brought this fanbase to a boiling point. It started with Chase DeLauter going down for a couple months again, this time due to a hernia. That would begin a painful (no pun intended) cycle of Guardians players, mainly prospects, getting hurt while the team was in desperate need of help all season.
Lane Thomas, Juan Brito, Angel Genao, Nic Enright, Franco Aleman, Andrew Walters (now out for an extended period of time with a lat strain, of course after being only a couple games removed from returning from a previous injury), Jaison Chourio and Travis Bazzana all spent some time away from the diamond due to injury. Heck, I’m probably forgetting some. This obviously halted their development, but it even kept the Guardians from getting a bit of help that they so desperately needed over the last two months.
Speaking of which...
When the Guardians finally got Chase DeLauter back in later May, the team wasn’t at a total need for him at the moment. Yes, they needed him, but Santana was great in May (the only month he played even remotely well in), Gabriel Arias was having himself a good start to the season, and things were steadily moving along. They were still in the race for the Central; things could’ve been better, but the team was doing a lot with a little. But as time went on, the seams began to crack, and the team was becoming even more and more desperate for some sort of help, mainly by a potential youth movement from Columbus.
DeLauter, who came back without missing a step, showed very quickly that he is ready to take on the big leagues, that he is hitting the ball well and is excited to help the team. Little did he know that, despite almost 2 months of steady production in Columbus, they would not call him up. Even though the Guardians went on a 10 game losing streak in late June, heading into July — even though they were shut out 4/10 times and scored only 13 runs — even though most of those games were winnable — even though it seemed absolutely reasonable that he’d get called up within a shorter window because the team needed production like his, he did not get the call. And would you know it, Chase broke a hamate bone and will maybe even be out for the rest of the season. Unless he had already broken it and chose to play through the injury, the butterfly effect dictates that this likely wouldn’t have happened if the Guardians front office just did what they should’ve in the first place and called up DeLauter.
So now, our extremely important outfield prospect who should’ve been on the team, helping by now, is out for even longer.
But it doesn’t end there, why would it?
As aforementioned, the Guardians got Luis Ortiz. And he was progressing very well throughout the season. He underwent some bumps here and there trying to prevent the long ball, gain command over his fastball and such. But overall, he was progressing on a steady incline to where the Guardians thought he could be.
Until he was hammered with a sports-betting investigation.
Luis Ortiz was placed on paid leave, to be investigated for betting on himself to throw a ball on two occasions, based on some suspicious action for those bets. The initial paid leave was to last until the All-Star Break was over, but even I knew that it was going to last longer than that. So as of now, he will now be under paid leave until August 31st.
But guess what else happens? The Guardians’ career and season saves leader Emmanuel Clase just got thrown into the investigation. The details weren’t provided, but the context is all there. It shows that he is even worse than Ortiz if they’re being investigated for the same type of bet. For reference, the pitches that Ortiz is getting investigated for are on balls for the first pitch of the AB, and of course he threw a ball in the two pitches being investigated. Now, many are speculating that Clase may be getting investigated for the same thing (not confirmed), because the rate at which he throws waste pitches for his first delivery of the 9th inning (17%) is more than three times the rate that he wastes for any other pitch he throws (5%)(according to Foolish Baseball via Twitter).
That all being said, the Guardians are still at .500, and do not have the firepower to contend this year. Maybe they could have had it for next year as well, but now our hopes of trying to contend then (or even beyond), are very slim if these two players actually get busted for gambling. And I’m not going to hope that they’re somehow innocent, because it is very very likely they will be found guilty and therefore banned from playing in the MLB (most likely course of action).
And to add insult to injury, Clase was a huge trade candidate before this happened. The Guardians were just unsure whether to buy or to sell. And now that both Ortiz and Clase are likely gone, it probably should’ve been time to part ways with a lot of the team’s expiring contracts and valuable pieces like Shane Bieber. And it might’ve been the right time to execute on Steven Kwan’s value and trade him. The team did well by trading Bieber and Sewald, and they even got a fringe-top 100 prospect for Bieber in Khal Stephen, but they stood pat on Kwan.
Kwan’s contract expires in 2027, and considering how stingy Paul Dolan is, an extension is not going to happen. So we have a Lindor-esque situation on our hands. Either sell and rebuild for the future, or keep him and extend him are the only two options. But right now, it seems like the Guardians front office is going to do what they do best and that is thread the needle by keeping him without extending him. No matter what, if this happens and he doesn’t get traded in the Winter, or he magically gets extended, this will only help the team in the short term, and right now, they need to be focused on the long.
I am also scared for the future in the first place. What happens when Kevin McGonigle, Max Clark and the rest of the Tigers’ loaded farm comes up to back a very impressive pitching staff/starting rotation (even if Skubal leaves when his contract is done)? What hope can I have if we’re being dealt a bad hand of luck constantly? Who knows if Chase DeLauter will shake off the injury bug, if Travis Bazzana will become the demon we hope him to be, or if Jose Ramirez’s prime will last long enough to lead a World Series run?
Obviously, those questions can be asked for Tigers fans, or any other fans for that matter, as well. But right now, things are dark. Pitch black. If last year was midday, this year would be 3 A.M., and Cleveland can’t find the light. The Guardians need to find a direction quickly or else they will be lost forever in the night.
Lastly, I am getting outright tired at how the team has just treated the fans. I have a quarter season ticket package, and we have some fellow season ticket members sitting behind us. They were members for 10 years, and aren’t renewing their membership for next year, as the service towards STM’s has been all but respectful, and it has finally reached a breaking point for them.
For context, the team has season ticket member appreciation events every year, and all members can claim a ticket to attend it. Both they and even I went to the team’s ticketing website to claim them and we were all too late for tickets that were just barely out. Not even a few hours passed before they ran out of tickets for their own season ticket members to attend just one of their 4 or 5 (I don’t remember how many but it’s around that) season ticket member appreciation days. I also signed up to receive a gift for being a season ticket member as part of their benefits program, which was just a bag filled with team merch, and I haven’t even received a single email from them about it yet. I signed up for that in January.
And yes, not to mention the notorious cancellation of Guards Fest, such a popular and fun event for the Guardians’ fanbase, to save more money. They tried to cloak that excuse by saying that they polled fans and the “majority” said it’s better off being a bi-annual event. But those are either shamelessly cherry-picked stats or just flat out wrong, considering the uproar within the fanbase it caused, at least on Twitter. Everything has just seemed like a slap in the face the literal year after the team has drawn in the most attendance since 2007, and the literal year after they made it the furthest in the playoffs since their World Series bid in 2016. This year was the worst year to just not care about the fans and they absolutely did just that.
So now, here I am in my bedroom, writing all this because of my frustrations with the team since the 2024 season ended. Mine and the entire fanbase’s loyal dedication to the team last year has not been reciprocated. Whether that be the result of Paul Dolan’s unwillingness to actually help the team the way he needs to, if it was the result of poor talent evaluation and acquisitions, or if it’s just been with the way that fans have been treated overall. I, and so many others, feel defeated and even disrespected by the organization. What was a season that was filled with so much positive and miniscule negative, has been immediately followed by 9 months of so much negative and miniscule positive. The combination of such poor luck that one would think the team is cursed, and the overall business of the organization has doomed the Guardians in a year where there was a wide open AL.
If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening to my rant. I really hope my fears are proven wrong in due time, but I can’t hold my breath and be as optimistic right now as I was after the season ended last year.
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