The Minnesota Twins took a stab at ending the Cleveland Indians' three-year stranglehold on the American League Central, and it worked. The Twins made a concerted effort to upgrade through free agency while the Indians largely stood pat, and they ended up winning the division by eight games.
This winter sees the Twins are trying to hold their gains. They retained Jake Odorizzi with the qualifying offer and re-signed Michael Pineda for two years and $20 million. While they haven't yet added from the outside, they've been consistently tied to the notable Tier 2 free agent pitchers and Josh Donaldson.
Cleveland's reaction is unclear. They haven't yet added, they aren't firing up their fan base with rhetoric, and their first move seems to subtract from their immediate plans. On Sunday, they dealt Corey Kluber to the Texas Rangers for an uninspiring return (Delino DeShields Jr. and hard-throwing reliever Emmanuel Clase).
I don't think the Kluber trade itself represents a white flag for Cleveland. The Indians won 93 games, but Kluber only contributed 35 innings and a 5.80 ERA to the effort. Hell, the White Sox even smacked him around the park the only time they met in 2019, which might be the biggest caution flag of all given Kluber's otherwise stellar history in head-to-head matchups. The White Sox were finally able to hand Kluber a loss after failing to do so in their 11 previous encounters.
Kluber's stuff looked less than stellar even before a line drive broke his forearm, and his rehab from the injury stalled due to an oblique strain. Daren Willman posted series of Statcast graphs that shows something that looks like a decline phase.
The Indians also have a knack for grooming replacement starters in a hurry. I wrote about this back in August when Aaron Civale and Zach Plesac joined Shane Bieber to give the Indians three starters from a single draft. Earlier this month, The Athletic's Zack Meisel wrote in detail about the Indians' "starting pitching development factory" in a piece that's well worth your time.
The Indians might be positioned to take advantage of the savings, but there are a couple of twists. The Indians have lost two cogs from their inner workings. Matt Blake, Cleveland's former director of pitching development, was hired as the new pitching coach of the Yankees as part of New York's dramatic coaching staff overhaul. The Indians also had to promote Ruben Niebla from roving pitching coordinator to assistant pitching coach in order to avoid losing him to another organization.
Also, the Indians have saved money with previous moves over the last calendar year -- trading Yonder Alonso to the White Sox, trading Trevor Bauer to the Reds -- but they didn't exactly reallocate the money in an exciting fashion. At The Ringer, Zach Kram called this trade a disaster for Indians fans, and while future moves could reduce the panic, precedent makes that difficult to dispute in snap judgments.
I talked about this on today's podcast, but my sense is that while the Indians aren't giving up on their immediate future, they're trying to build a team more for 2022 than 2020 in the event that they receive an offer for Francisco Lindor that's too hard for them to resist.
That would theoretically make this winter all the more important for the White Sox, because if the 2020 Twins are the only Central team actively trying to win in the present, the 2019 Twins show the value in trying to keep that front-runner honest. Crazy stuff happens, especially on a team with a bunch of young talent that could click faster than expected.
Whatever the White Sox's plans are, they won't include Madison Bumgarner, who signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks for five years and $85 million. It's hard to tell how connected the White Sox were to Bumgarner -- they were supposedly suitors for his services, but he didn't seem like a great fit in terms of his flyball tendencies or his style, which screams "National League lifer" to me. That said, the White Sox couldn't land the guy they thought would've been an ideal fit, and with other comparable arms flying off the board, there isn't much of a point to nitpicking improvements.
