How Cleveland is learning from recent trade misses

This story was excerpted from Mandy Bell’s Guardians Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

The second Junior Caminero’s name was mentioned, Guardians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti interrupted the question.

“That’s a bad trade,” he said.

At the season’s end, Antonetti and general manager Mike Chernoff met with media to discuss the past, present and future states of their club. And names like Nolan Jones, Will Benson, Yainer Diaz and Caminero were mentioned as often as anyone on the current 40-man roster.

Yes, Caminero, who made his debut this year after owning a .324 average and a .976 OPS between Tampa Bay’s High-A and Double-A teams, for righty Tobias Myers, who was designated for assignment at the beginning of July in 2022, was a bad trade. And there are a handful of other names on that “bad trade” list. Unfortunately for Cleveland, it seems as though more names were added to the list over the last few years than the typical pace.

Here’s what the front office crew had to say about what it’s learned from some of these misses.

Q: When you guys see the success Jones, Benson, Diaz or guys like that have had elsewhere, is there anything you look at internally that you want to tweak moving forward?

Antonetti: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things we always continue to do is learn organizationally from both our successes and things that may not have played out the way we had hoped. The list is a lot longer than that on opportunities to learn. I think they’re all individual circumstances. Decisions were made whether they were on managing the roster, some were about how do we create playing time. So, each of those decisions, there’s an opportunity to learn.

Q: What does it tell you about your hitting development? Does it tell you that those guys could have had success here? Or does it tell you that you missed on something?

Chernoff: I would say almost the opposite of us missing on something. I think a lot of the reasons that those guys are having success -- I mean, it’s a huge credit to them and of course their new organizations, but I think a lot of the foundation of what made them successful was built here and we were seeing signs of that. And we still have tough decisions, and we can list all the trades, we keep a list of all of them that we’d like to go back on, but I think in my mind, some of that is a huge credit to our scouting and development system that we were able to build up players like that.

Q: Was there a change in your philosophy hitting-wise that made guys like Jones or Benson (left-handed power bats) more expendable than in years past?

Antonetti: There was no philosophical change. … In Nolan’s situation, we ended up getting a player back in Juan Brito that we really liked and we think has a chance to be a productive Major League player. I think it will be a healthy sign for us as we continue to have the type of farm system and are able to acquire and develop players that are attractive to other teams, we’re going to continue to make trades with players that other teams want. Now, hopefully we do that and at the same time we’re building championship teams at the Major League level. If you make enough of those trades, some are going to work out and some don’t.

Q: Why trade Jones for someone who needed a spot on the 40-man roster?

Antonetti: I think we’re making some assessments at that time, and we were better off long term to reposition the roster and bring Brito in and give Nolan an opportunity elsewhere.

Q: Did your 40-man roster crunch over the last few years force you to make decisions on guys faster than you normally would have?

Antonetti: That is definitely an element, yeah. As we have to continue to make decisions to manage the roster, sometimes we try to get ahead of that and be proactive in how we manage that, and it does sometimes necessitate making decisions before you’d ideally like to.

Chernoff: I think it’s combination of having a good Major League team and having a roster that we continue to try to fill with players internally because when you don’t have a great team, you open up lanes of playing opportunity for guys all the time. When you have a good team, you’re balancing competing while also developing guys and you do run out of roster space when you have those competing needs.