Earlier today, Will McIlroy took a look at some of the key prospects in the Tribe farm system. Hopefully, a few of those guys quickly make their way to the majors, because the Tribe currently features a roster devoid of home-grown talent.
According to Adam Rubin of ESPN New York, the Indians Opening Day roster featured just seven players drafted by the franchise – nearly half as many as the next lowest total (13).
The Rangers lead the way with 24 home-grown players, followed by the Athletics and Cardinals (23 each).
It’s tough to put too much stock in this low number, considering the Indians have traded away multiple quality home-grown players in recent years, but it is somewhat concerning. A small market team like the Indians can’t expect to compete by building a team through free agency, so if this number doesn’t begin to grow in the near future, the Tribe could be in trouble.
That stat is a little misleading, right? Brantley, Choo, Cabrera, Hafner, Santana, Marson, Donald, Perez, Masterson, and Jiminez came over as trades (with, arguably, only Jimize being’established’).
It’s not like we’re buying our talent, our only free agents are Hannahan, Lowe, Lopez, Kotchman and a couple of bullpen guys – who are either role players or temporary plugins. I’m not counting players like Duncan as free agents, since they spent significant time in our farm system prior to being called up.
Perhaps a little misleading, they have acquired some solid prospects through trades. However, it does highlight the fact that they’ve whiffed on the vast majority of their high draft picks for the past 15 years. They haven’t had a 1st or 2nd-round pick play a meaningful role in Cleveland since Sabathia (1998 1st round). Hopefully Chisenhall and Kipnis can change that.
I think one of the reasons I wasn’t as bothered as some by the Jimenez deal, is that I kept thinking about Adam Miller. All of the offers they had, yet they held onto him. I don’t blame them, because he had great stuff before the injuries…I guess it goes to show that even “can’t miss” prospects can be ruined by injury.
For most of the Shapiro era at GM the Indians seemed to concentrate on players who had baseball skills but with low talent ceilings(this isn’t just my opinion,I have a close family friend who is national cross checker for a MLB club and it was he who opened my eyes to this ,ironically when I was complaining about Trevor Crowe),Low risk/low reward types and that obviously hasn’t worked.
Going all the way to the Hart reign as GM, the Tribe’s farm system yielded very little in the way of impact players.There seems to have been a change in the way they evaluate talent in recent drafts and we are seeing an influx of talent at the lower levels and that bodes well for the future.It has to change.You need hordes of good prospects to get a farm system to yield that occasional star.
The sorry aspect of all this is think about how much better the 2005-2010 era would have been if the good players the Tribe acquired in trades were supplemented by just a modicum of talent from their own farm system…..sigh.
gonna have to strongly disagree on your comments about Hart… Ramirez, Thome, Sexson, Graves, Colon, Sabathia, Casey and a long list of other quality role players like Ogea, McDonald, Shuey, Roberts… Tribe had one of the best farm systems in baseball for a solid decade.