2024 Team Previews: Cleveland Guardians
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
Welcome back to the 2024 team-by-team previews and rankings series! Become a paid sub today to get the full series along with 2024 season-long projections, dashboards, tools, rankings, and so much more!
Introduction & Links to All Teams Here
If this is your first time visiting the MLB Data Warehouse, learn more about it here.
Guardians Intro
It wasn’t the worst season in the history of Cleveland baseball, but it certainly wasn’t a great one either. They won just 76 games and were never really a contender for a playoff spot.
The pitching wasn’t an issue, their team 3.96 ERA was 9th-best in the league, and their .250 team batting average was a tick above the league average of .249.
If I told my grandfather those two things he’d probably be like “well hell Jonathan that sounds like a pretty good ball club!”, but he is legitimately 97 years old (shout out to him) and has not had his brain changed by the revolution.
It’s hard to win games without hitting bombs. If you aren’t getting dongs, you’re doing it wrongs, that’s what I always say.
And the Guardians were really in their own tier in terms of power production.
The Braves led the league with 517 barrels, the league average was 333, and the Guardians had just 227. That was 31 behind the second-worst team in D.C.
It looks about the same when you look at homers, which they hit just 123 of:
And as far as exit velocity goes, you guessed it - dead last!
And what have they done to fix that problem so far this off-season? A whole lotta nothin! Their projected lineup right now (I’ve included each player’s 2022-2023 barrel rate for fun)
Kwan 1.2%
Gimenez 5.9%
Ramirez 6.7%
Naylor 8.4%
Laureano 10.7%
Naylor 8.1%
Manzardo n/a
Rocchio 0.0%
Straw 0.6%
There’s some upside with Naylor/Manzardo there, but this team certainly projects to be dead last in homers again in 2024.
The positive side is that their starting rotation actually looks really solid, and it could potentially be one of the best in the league with health from Bieber and strong steps forward from Bibee and Williams. We will get to all of that, but we have got to trudge through these hitters first.
Hitters
Jose Ramirez
Age: 31
Pos: 3B
It was another somewhat quietly elite year for J-Ram.
691 PA, 87 R, 24 HR, 80 RBI, 28 SB, .280/.355/.471, 10.6% K%, 10.6% BB%
I suppose we might stop short of using the word “elite” here, because 167 R+RBI with 24 homers is a far cry from some of the seasons other guys put up. Ramirez finished way down at #33 on the player rater, but you can see there that he was still strong across the board.
The Guardians poor offensive performance held him down. Let’s look at his 5x5 lines since 2016:
2016: 84 R, 11 HR, 76 RBI, 22 SB, .312 AVG
2017: 107 R, 29 HR, 83 RBI, 17 SB, .318 AVG
2018: 110 R, 39 HR, 105 RBI, 34 SB, .270 AVG
2019: 68 R, 23 HR, 83 RBI, 24 SB, .255 AVG
2021: 111 R, 36 HR, 103 RBI, 27 SB, .266 AVG
2022: 90 R, 29 HR, 126 HR, 20 SB, .280 AVG
2023: 87 R, 24 HR, 80 RBI, 28 SB, .282 AG
Outside of the 2017 season, he seems to be sacrificing some batting average when the home run output comes up and vice versa. He has always been one of the toughest hitters in the league to strike out, and he once again brought the strikeout rate under 11% in 2023 - really good stuff.
The thing keeping him short of elite are the power numbers. His last two barrel rates are 7.0% (2023) and 6.6% (2022), and while he makes up a good bit of that by not striking out, it does keep his homer total more in the twenties rather than the thirties. That said, we could certainly see him change his approach to get more power as he gets into his thirties - that’s not an uncommon thing to see.
Anyways, this is a lot of words about Jose Ramirez. In my head right now, I only can think of Trea Turner that rivals Ramirez in terms of consistent roto elite production. Fantastic floor for Ramirez, and a really great ceiling as well given his cross-the-board production. He’s a first-round pick once again in 2024.
January update - Ramirez is not priced as an first-rounder with an ADP of 14! But he doesn’t project as a first rounder in my model either, as the #22 roto hitter per my projections. But the floor and reliability move him up several spots from there in my ranks. I’ll be thrilled to get my hands on him in the second round if that really continues to happen.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Bobby Witt Jr., Francisco Lindor
JA Projection: 92 R, 24 HR, 98 RBI, 26 SB, .278/.369/.474, .843 OPS
Josh Naylor
Age: 26
Pos: 1B
Another shortened season for Naylor, which has become a theme for him (has yet to clear 500 PA in a season), but it was a pretty productive year for him:
495 PA, .310/.356/.491, 17 HR, 52 R, 97 RBI, 10 SB
That’s a whole bunch of RBI for just 495 PA and 17 homers. He had the second-highest RBI/PA rate in the league, and most of the other names at the top of that list hit homers at a high-rate (and/or played for the Dodgers or Rangers), so Naylor really doesn’t fit in there. His fantasy output was probably a bit over-blown because of that. He finished as the #104 hitter and the #8 first baseman. With the skills and age, he’s certainly a top-12 1B again this year for me, but let’s see how high we can take him.
Good to see the double-digit steals there for the big man, but that’s not going to be a big part of his game.
What he does extremely well is barrel the ball without a high strikeout rate, and he lines up very competitively on the Contact% vs. Brl% plot:
So his barrel rate is around league average (8.6% and 8.2% the last two years), but the effectiveness of that is heightened by the very low strikeout rates (16% and 14% last two years).
He improved on the GB% in 2023, going from 49.5% to 43.2%, and he raised his slugging percentage to a career-best .489.
Naylor is simply a good hitter. The one knock on him could be that he swings a ton. The 56.5% Swing% was 9th-highest in the league.
I’ve talked about this before, but swing stuff doesn’t really matter much to me. High swing rates do correlate with low walk rates, but that’s the end of the correlations. We don’t see any other reliable trend with the high swing rate guys (Corey Seager is right behind Naylor, so it’s not like there are no stud hitters near the top of the board). The bad thing is that Naylor chases a lot too (39.6%). Most of that is just explained by his high overall swing rate, but to keep that Seager comparison:
Naylor: 56.5% Swing%, 39.6% Chase%
Seager: 55.1% Swing%, 28.1% Chase%
So he’s aggressive, and maybe he just doesn’t see the ball super well. I suppose you could say that keeps some of the ceiling down, but he makes so much contact that it’s just not something I’m worried about.
The one thing that keeps the playing time down is the struggles with lefties. Since 2022:
vs. RHP: .843 OPS, 14% K%
vs. LHP: .680 OPS, 18% K%
Josh Bell is gone though, so that could force him into more playing against lefties - but that is definitely something to monitor.
Overall, Naylor probably isn’t a guy you want to go into the season with in your first base slot, but he’s perennially cheap and makes for a strong ADP-considered corner infield option.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Andrew Vaughn
JA Projection: 76 R, 22 HR, 89 RBI, 9 SB, .277/.342/.471, .813 OPS
Andres Gimenez
Age: 25
Pos: 2B
It was a rough year for Gimenez after being drafted pretty high following his nice 2022 season.
616 PA, 76 R, 15 HR, 62 RBI, 30 SB, .250/.310/.397, 18% K%, 5% BB%
He was basically just a steals source guy at the end of the year, but he didn’t crater a roto team anywhere as you can see above.
The barrel rate has never been high, but it did spike up to 6.2% in 2022 and then came back down to 5.5% last season with a 47% GB% and a low .709 OPS. He’s just not a power bat, and we never should have really expected much from him in that regard.
What he’s good at is making contact and stealing bags.
Unlike some of his teammates, he’s not an elite strikeout guy - he’s more just “very good” in that regard. The thing that holds his fantasy upside down monstrously is the lack of swing speed.
He has one of the lower average EVs in the league, and I don’t think’s going to change.
So you’re looking at guy that you’ll draft for the steals and then hope for some positive variance in runs/batting average to pay off the draft cost.
I think you can do a lot worse than Gimenez, I bet the price will be fair or even too cheap, but we’ll have to wait and see on that one!
January update: he’s a top 120 pick in drafts this year, and I have him for a 20-20 projection. I don’t buy the 21 homers here, but the steals and non-awful batting average keep him firmly inside the top 150, so while he’s not a guy I want to draft here, the price is indeed fair.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Tommy Edman, Brandon Drury
JA Projection: 651 PA, 88 R, 21 HR, 77 RBI, 25 SB, .256/.331/.424, .755 OPS
The rest of the post is behind the paywall. Subscribe today to get this full series along with my 2024 projections, rankings, and much, much more!