Cleveland Sports Forum

He’s more than strong enough to make consistent hard contact, getting that BABIP well up over .300, with a batting average in the .270-280 range and 20 homers.

That would be quite an accomplishment for an Indians Outfielder. But is probably what we should expect from Rosario in LF. Would be exciting to have 2 outfielders who can hit. Then we can put up with another 300 OPS in CF I guess.

civ - every time I see Naylor this spring training, in person or on tv, he has quality at bats. Even his outs are often hit hard.

(BTW, Zimmer looked quite good yesterday too - damn that guy can still run like a deer)

Zimmer 7-20 a double 3 walks 7 strikeouts. tried to steal twice, caught both times. Used to be a better basestealer.
Better than Mercado, right? Does he earn the job to start the season? Perhaps by default

1 Hernandez switch hitter
2. Gimenez LH
3. Ramierez switch
4. Rosario LH
5. Reyes RH
6. Naylor LH
7. Bradley LH
8. Perez RH
9. Zimmer LH

if he were available Luplow would platoon with Naylor and perhaps via Naylor at 1B with Bradley; can he play CF to platoon with Zimmer?
Perhaps Chang plays some 1b vs Lefties; and SS if A Rosario is not still around.

civ - as we sorta discussed - if Naylor can continue to develop as a hitter then perhaps it's time to give CF to Zimmer!

We know he can cover ground in CF and he is a real outfielder unlike Rosario.

Perhaps a more realistic goal for Amed Rosario is for him to fill in across the infield and maybe platoon with Zimmer in CF eventually.

Ideally for Amed, teams see he can still hit and he is dealt for something of value.

"players turning scouts heads in ST"

Triston McKenzie, RHP, Indians

McKenzie made his major league debut in 2020 and went 2-1, 3.24 with 49 strikeouts and nine walks in 33.1 innings. The Indians No. 1 prospect, he entered this spring competing for one of two open rotation spots behind Shane Bieber, Zach Plesac and Aaron Civale.

"prospects hitting 100 mph"

INDIANS

Emmanuel Clase, RHP

Top Velocity: 100

The key prize in the trade that sent Corey Kluber to Texas, Clase was suspended for 80 games during the 2020 season (reduced to a season-long suspension because the season was shortened to 60 games) and spent time rehabbing a strained muscle in his shoulder. Nevertheless, he was still bringing the heat at instructs and should be a key piece of Cleveland’s pen in 2021.

Baseball America out with its season predictions; Indians 3rd in the Central some like Sox to win the pennant. Various categories of questions with answer supplied by each of their reporters


Which Team will be the Biggest Surprise?" One vote for:

Matt Eddy — Indians. No team is as practiced at moving on from star players as Cleveland, which traded Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco and let closer Brad Hand walk. The Indians will weather those departures, just as they weathered the losses of Corey Kluber, Trevor Bauer and Mike Clevinger before them. The organization is swimming with young big leaguers who could take steps forward, including Zach Plesac, Triston McKenzie, Cal Quantrill and others in the rotation; James Karinchak and Emmanuel Clase in the bullpen and Josh Naylor, Andres Gimenez, Franmil Reyes, Oscar Mercado and Amed Rosario in the lineup. The farm system runs deep, which could manifest in both callups and trade chips. In other words, do not assume that the Indians are playing for third place in the AL Central.

On the other hand, another guy answers the Question,
Which Team had the most disappointing off season:

Kyle Glaser — Indians. The Indians made the playoffs four of the last five years and won 93 games the year they didn’t make it. With most of the American League taking a step back, they had a legitimate chance to reach the World Series. Instead, they effectively took themselves out of it by trading Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco. With their offseason moves, the Indians now have a lower Opening Day payroll than the Rays—something that should never, ever happen.

2 of our former guys are among those picked to be "breakout hitter of 2021"

Mark Chiarelli — Clint Frazier, Yankees. Frazier’s ability to find the barrel and do damage in limited action, combined with his track record of elite bat speed and above-average power potential, make for an enticing combination. Now it appears he’ll finally have the chance to prove himself in a full-time role.

Josh Norris — Willi Castro, Tigers. Castro put together 36 excellent games in 2020. In 2021, he should prove to be a critical piece of Detroit’s continuing rebuild while playing a key position.

2 of our current guys are picked for

Who Will be the Breakout MLB Pitcher of 2021?

Alexis Brudnicki — Cal Quantrill, Indians. Finally, a chance to make this list Canadian-heavy, with a righthander who found success in last year’s limited season and is poised to carry that into this year. Even if his opportunities to do so aren’t abundant right out of the gate, the increase in workload in 2021 should provide plenty

Mark Chiarelli — Triston McKenzie, Indians. McKenzie’s impressive big league debut quickly garnered Cleveland’s trust, earning a spot on their playoff roster. Just two qualified starters had more vertical break on their four-seam fastballs in 2020: Walker Buehler and Trevor Bauer. Combine McKenzie’s ability to get whiffs at the top of the zone with two above-average secondaries, plus Cleveland’s track record at developing arms, and he looks like their next great homegrown talent.

Who Will be Top Rookies in 2021? Here they are routed 1-20

11. Triston McKenzie, RHP, Indians

Age: 23 | Projected Role: SP

Notable number: Four
The number of pitches McKenzie threw at least 10% of the time last season, giving him a wide and varied starter’s repertoire.

McKenzie missed part of 2018 with forearm soreness and all of 2019 with a back injury, but he returned in 2020 and helped stabilize the Indians’ staff after Mike Clevinger and Zach Plesac were placed on the restricted list for breaking Covid-19 protocols. McKenzie is set to take over a rotation spot in 2021 and has the stuff to become the Indians’ next great pitching success, though he still has to show his rail-thin frame can hold up over a full season.

What does Meisel have to say?

Amed Rosario is a man without a position for the Cleveland Indians. What now?


By Zack Meisel 5h ago 21
Four years ago, Amed Rosario had GameStop-like stock as he soared toward the top of every prospect list. An athletic shortstop who could hit for average and figured to grow into some power? Thirty teams would salivate over that skill set.

Now, Rosario’s career has arrived at a crossroads — or, perhaps more accurately, a rest stop, but his GPS is malfunctioning and he doesn’t have one of those old county atlases with the red cover. He’s a man without a position in Cleveland, and at the moment, it’s difficult to envision how his tenure with his new team will unfold.

Andrés Giménez is partly to blame for Rosario’s newfound vagabond role. Giménez has impressed every evaluator on site this spring. As a result, barring injury or asteroid, he’ll be the Opening Day shortstop, having convinced the club not to send him to the alternate site for a few weeks to brush up on his secondary leads or sunflower-seed-spitting competency or whatever excuse teams use to mask service-time manipulation.

Rosario could have handled shortstop during those weeks. Instead, for the second straight year, Giménez has swiped the position from his former Mets teammate.

Rosario won’t turn 26 until November. Cleveland’s front office considered Giménez the prize of the Francisco Lindor trade, but Rosario could still offer plenty of upside. He just, well, needs somewhere to play, which is no small detail.

Since they acquired Rosario, the Indians have believed he is athletic enough to shift elsewhere on the diamond. Giménez will receive the bulk of the playing time at shortstop, and third baseman José Ramírez and second baseman César Hernández, a couple of switch-hitting staples atop Terry Francona’s lineup, rarely spend time on the bench.

So, center field it is.

Rosario has worked daily with assistant coach and outfield guru Kyle Hudson for the last couple of weeks. He played center in a “B” game on Sunday — basically a morning pickup game against the Reds in which the players’ parents supply orange slices and Capri Sun and certain players bat in every inning because it’s all about having fun, not who wins — but only one baseball traveled his direction.

Then, the Indians dispatched Rosario to center field at Tempe Diablo Stadium on Tuesday and it, uh, went poorly. Rosario committed three errors in the first three innings, paving the way for eight unearned runs. Shane Bieber, who watched the miscues from the mound, found Rosario after the third inning and told him: “Listen, man, this stuff’s hard. Don’t get down on yourself. Keep your head up.”

Francona requested that all blame be directed his way.

“I told him before the game,” Francona said, “I said, ‘Hey, if you make an error, just blame it on me.’ I didn’t get to multiple ones, but still, I feel the same way. He’s certainly not the finished product, and we know that. I thought he kept his head up really well. He wasn’t pouting, and he swung the bat really well.”

Francona suggested Rosario was catching the ball too low and losing track of it as it approached him. The manager also said Rosario and Bradley Zimmer had communication issues as Rosario attempted to haul in what became his first gaffe of the afternoon.

“That’s hard,” Francona said. “You can kind of feel like you’re on an island. He kept his head up and kept at it. … We’ll certainly keep giving him as many balls as we can in practice.”

This was always going to be a process that lacked an immediate conclusion. Francona preached patience when he revealed the team’s intentions. Rosario’s first trial (and errors) won’t derail his bid for regular playing time, but he clearly has a long way to go to cause Oscar Mercado any restlessness.

“He’s getting a lot thrown at him in a hurry,” Francona said.

Rosario made his second start in center field on Thursday. Naturally, the first hitter of the game socked a fly ball his way. Rosario made the catch. He’ll play again Saturday, when the club will have another “B” game to create more playing time for those jockeying for a roster spot.

“What we’ve tried to do is take the pressure off him and let him know we expect mistakes,” Chris Antonetti said. “We know things aren’t going to go perfectly right at the outset. What we’re hoping for is continued progress from him.”

Time is a significant hurdle in all of this, of course. The Indians need to determine their starting center fielder and the complexion of their bench, and Opening Day is less than two weeks away. Plus, whoever earns the starting job, Francona said, needs to start playing multiple days in a row to prepare for the regular-season grind.

It’s that reason, Antonetti confirmed when I posed the question Thursday, that Daniel Johnson hasn’t been tossed into the center-field mix. Johnson is athletic, possesses a cannon for a left arm and has appeared in 148 minor-league games at the position.

“If we were in an ideal world and this is a normal spring training,” Antonetti said, “he would get reps out there. … We do think he has the ability to play there.”

Instead, it’s Mercado and Zimmer vying for primary center field duty, with Ben Gamel lurking in the background and Rosario attempting to learn the position on the fly. That experiment would seem to require more than another two weeks.

A trade might make sense. Rosario wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to tap into that top-prospect potential as a utility infielder in Cleveland. The Indians wouldn’t exactly be moving Rosario at peak value, though. They would need a team desperate (cough, Reds, cough) for a shortstop.

The Athletic’s resident prospects expert, Keith Law, ranked Rosario as the No. 3 prospect in baseball before the 2017 season. Law wrote that Rosario “will be above average defensively and projects to hit .300 with some walks and power. He’ll become a cornerstone at short for the Mets.” Baseball America, MLB Pipeline and Baseball Prospectus tabbed Rosario as a top-10 prospect at the time as well.

Rosario looked the part in 2019 when he posted a .287/.323/.432 slash line with 15 home runs and 19 stolen bases as a 23-year-old. Last season, however, his already-low walk rate plummeted, his strikeout rate increased, his knack for collecting extra-base hits disappeared and he didn’t swipe a single base. The 2020 season is a difficult (and, relatively, small) sample to assess. He said he never found his timing at the plate.

“(The) player that I think I am is closest to the version that I showed in ’19,” Rosario said.

It’s not impossible for him to recapture that form. Maybe he won’t live up to the 2017 prospect list hype, but an athletic player who can hit and steal some bases provides plenty of value.

It’s just difficult, for now, to see how — or, more specifically, where — that happens on the diamond in Cleveland.

• Yu Chang, who was scratched with neck soreness on Thursday, is expected back in the lineup Saturday.

• With at-bats and innings in short supply, the Tribe will stage a “B” game against the Mariners on Saturday. Spring standout Logan Allen will pitch in that game.

• Rule 5 Draft pickup Trevor Stephan, who is vying for a spot in the bullpen, had his fifth scoreless appearance (among six appearances overall) Thursday. “He has certainly impressed not just with his stuff but with his poise,” Francona said.

• Bryan Shaw worked out of a fifth-inning jam Friday with two runners in scoring position and no outs against his old Rockies teammates. Cleveland has been pleased with what it has seen from Shaw, who is in camp on a non-roster deal and fighting for a bullpen job.

“My goal was to go out there and pitch, and even if I was with the Yankees with Aroldis Chapman, go take that spot from somebody,” he said. “It keeps you honest. You do what you’ve got to do and pitch instead of going through the motions of getting ready for a season.”

• In search of a bounceback offensive season, Roberto Pérez went deep for the second time this spring on Friday.

“As long as Berto stays with the right-field approach,” said Francona, “he becomes more dangerous.”

Bo Naylor reassigned
Catcher Bo Naylor, the Tribe’s No. 4 prospect, was reassigned to Minor League camp. Cleveland now has 40 players remaining in big league camp.

Naylor, who was drafted 29th overall in 2018 and hasn’t played above Rookie ball, is much further away from the bigs than Johnson. But Josh Naylor’s younger brother impressed the big league coaching staff.

“When you get a kid that young, especially as a catcher, you worry if you can get him in enough games,” Francona said. “But he handled himself so well catching that none of our guys minded throwing to him, which is really a big compliment to a young kid. And we all think he's really going to swing the bat.”

Oscar Mercado started in center field in the Tribe's 9-4 loss to the Rockies at Salt River Fields on Friday. But the question of who will get the bulk of the starts there in the regular season remains a vexing one. [Author of article neglected to mention how Mercado performed on Friday. Better thing that he didn't; 3 K and an error. Kid looks awful]

Even if it were just Mercado and Bradley Zimmer vying for time in center this spring, it would be complicated enough. Mercado struggled at the plate in 2020 (.348 OPS in 93 plate appearances), while an injury and underperformance have limited Zimmer to just 86 games combined in the Majors and Minors over the last three seasons.

Cleveland has only created more questions with the mid-spring experiment of putting Amed Rosario in center.

Rosario recovered from his three-error nightmare Tuesday by making two clean plays on routine fly balls on Thursday. Still, this is all foreign to the shortstop who changed organizations only to lose his natural position to Andrés Giménez for the second straight year (both came over from the Mets in the Francisco Lindor trade).

“I’m really grateful for the opportunity the team is giving me to learn the position,” Rosario said. “I know it’s just a matter of time to get better there and get more reps.”

If the 25-year-old can’t make it work in center field, it’s hard to say where or when his playing time would come in this lineup. And it’s also hard to say if Mercado and Zimmer can hit well enough to stick around.

A solution that could emerge before the end of the season is Daniel Johnson, the Tribe’s No. 21 prospect. At times this spring, including a three-hit game Thursday, Johnson has looked like the best player on the field. But “Jet,” as Johnson is known, was jettisoned to Triple-A Columbus on Friday.

“He was very disappointed, and we knew that was going to be the case,” manager Terry Francona said. “With the way Spring Training is right now and has been, and the amount of people we have competing for spots, we knew we were going to have to make some tough decisions, and this was one of them.”

Johnson, who made a brief debut with Cleveland last season, didn’t see time in center field this spring, but he will play at all three outfield spots in the Minors.

The decisions won’t get any easier in center -- a position that, given all the variables and the few spring games remaining, is likely to be unsettled even when the Tribe breaks camp.

That guy stole the "best player on the field" quote from Tito.