The Cleveland Indians sometimes have to look beyond the normal scope in order to find franchise cornerstone-type players due to budgetary restraints.
As a small-market team, the Cleveland Indians, especially under the Mark Shapiro era, were desperate to find talent anywhere and everywhere they could. While the farm system is down below the standards it was at in 2020, it’s still stocked full of high-end talent. That wasn’t the case for the Mark Shapiro years.
The Indians had a terrible farm system, filled with washed-out prospects, bad picks, and players who never met their potential. Due to this, the team had to look for starters and cornerstone players anywhere they could, even off of the scrap heap. Sometimes that worked, see Michael Bradley. For other times that failed, see the eight names below.
Now, for clarity, not every name down below will be one that you would immediately think of as a player the club expected to be “THE GUY” moving forward. I assure you, at one point the hype around these players was that they were going to be a great piece to build around, or the team was that desperate that they thought they found something.
Two honorable mentions, because they don’t really deserve to be on this list. Firstly there’s Grady Sizemore. Taken after names like Aaron Herr, Xavier Nady, and Brian Tallet, Sizemore had potential but no one was screaming about him until he landed with the Tribe after the Bartolo Colon trade to Montreal. Sizemore played wonderfully with the Indians until injuries caught up to him. Unlike the names on this list, he did fulfill the hype of being a cornerstone player.
Another name, just like Sizemore, is his old teammate, Travis Hafner. Hafner was a kicker add-on in the Ryan Drese/Enar Diaz deals to Texas. Hafner earned a lot of hype during his stints in the minors for the Tribe and then delivered in spades on the main club. Until that damn injury bug popped back up.
Both guys had good but short careers. That’s why they don’t make the list.
Jody Gerut
I absolutely loved Jody Gerut. He came out of the minors with very little hype around him, becoming a starter in 2003. This was the official beginning of the ‘rebuild’ era. Gerut took over a few weeks in for Karim Garcia (hold on to your butts) and ended up having a great rookie year.
He fell short of winning the Rookie of the Year award, losing out to Angel Berroa (Who? Exactly). He finished fourth, behind Hideki Matsui and Rocco Baldelli. Berroa was seen as a controversial choice, and Matsui was anything but a rookie, having played for a decade professionally in Japan. So in a lot of fans’ eyes, the only two players who even deserved the award were Gerut and Baldelli.
Gerut finished the 2003 season with a batting average of .279, with 22 home runs, 33 doubles, 75 RBI’s, and an OPS of .830.
Gerut came into the 2004 season with all sorts of pomp and circumstance. The media and the fanbase expected Gerut to take a giant leap forward in 2004, and help the team fill the gap left by Jim Thome in free agency. Names like Gerut, Coco Crips, Grady Sizemore, and Travis Hafner were expected to carry the offense and three of them did. Gerut instead would regress, and by 2005 had lost his starting spot to unexpected highlight Casey Blake. Gerut would then spend the rest of his career bouncing around the NL Central and San Diego before calling it quits at 33 years old.
Milton Bradley
The exact words used to describe Milton Bradley upon acquiring him was “Kenny Lofton’s eventual replacement”. All it took to get this alleged future Hall of Famer (because that’s what you’d need to replace Loften) was Zach Day. A steal, right? Then Indians GM John Hart went on to heap high praise onto Bradley, saying;
"In Milton Bradley we are getting a top-of-the-order, middle-of-the-diamond player we feel will have a major impact at the major-league level in the near future"
While Bradley would have a long career, he never reached the heights of Lofton. Not in Cleveland or elsewhere. Bradley would spend parts of three seasons in Cleveland, coming over in the trade deadline deal of 2001 and lasting through 2003. His best year was in 2003, where he hit .321 with 64 walks, 61 runs, and 17 stolen bases.
However, Bradley was a headache to deal with and often butted heads with other players and management. Eventually, second-year manager Eric Wedge had enough of Bradley and had him shipped out during spring training. The final straw came when Bradley refused to run out a pop-fly in a spring training game and was banned from the facility for the rest of the time in Winter Haven, FL.
Bradley would move on and eventually end up in the All-Star game in 2008 with the Texas Rangers, but considering he was once thought of as a replacement for Lofton and never lived up to that expectation, it’s safe to say he belongs snuggly on this list.
Matt LaPorta
Like Grady Sizemore before him, LaPorta was acquired by the Cleveland Indians as a departing ace pitcher. The team shipped off future Hall of Famer C.C. Sabathia in 2008, for a deal built around LaPorta as the key piece. He came over with Zach Jackson, Rob Bryson, and some kid named Michael Brantley. LaPorta was seen as a year or two away from the big’s and the team was very high on his potential.
During his time with the big club in 2010, LaPorta only hit .221, with 12 home runs and 41 RBIs. A considerable disappointment due to him being 25 already and still not ready for the majors. Not to mention what was given up in order to acquire him.
2011 wouldn’t be any kinder to LaPorta, where he played the same number of games, save for three, and had inconsistent results. Sure, his average and RBIs went up to .241, and 53 respectively but his power numbers stayed flat. Solid improvement but he’s now 26 and his home run power, one of his highlight perks, was almost nowhere to be seen.
He would struggle to make much of an impact in 2012, losing playing time to Shelly Duncan, Johny Damon, and Casey Kotchman, resulting in LaPorta spending most of his time in Triple-A, with the Columbus Clippers. In what would be his final nail during his time with the Tribe, LaPorta only put up a .264 average with, 19 home runs, and 62 RBIs against AAA talent. At 27 years old, LaPorta should’ve had much more impressive numbers against supposedly inferior talent.
After that season LaPorta would never again crack a big league’s roster.
Karim Garcia
Ha, I told you to hold onto your butts. Now, Karim Garcia was not someone that would be seen in great esteem as a player. He was a long-time veteran, with good power but inconsistent play. He was called up in 1995 at the age of 19 and played sporadically for the Dodgers through the next three seasons.
He’d move on to Arizona, Detroit, and then Baltimore before joining the Indians for 20 games in 2001. He’d end up showing his power in Triple-A, hitting 31 home runs for the then-affiliate, the Buffalo Bison. That wouldn’t be good enough to keep him and Garcia then went to the New York Yankees but was released early into the 2002 season.
That’s when the Tribe would again acquire Garcia and he would end up playing 51 games for the depleted and rebuilding Indians. Garcia showed what he could do, hitting .299 with 16 home runs and a whopping 52 RBIs.
The city thought that at 26, Garcia had managed to finally “figure it out”. It is the game of baseball. Because of that strong showing at the tail-end of the season, many in the league and around the city expected Garcia to showcase similar numbers in 2003. There was a buzz that with Ellis Burks, Jim Thome, Karim Garcia, Omar Vizquel, and up-and-coming prospect Jody Gerut, the team might make noise.
Garcia was benched in May for Gerut. So, that potential didn’t last too long.
Andy Marte
It felt like people were hyping up how good Andy Marte was for a decade. There was so much chatter on how he was going to take over at third base as soon as he got called up. He first arrived in Cleveland in January of 2006, in a trade that saw beloved fan-favorite Coco Crisp, relief pitcher David Riske and catcher Josh Bard get dealt to Boston for grinding catcher Kelly Shoppach, relief pitcher Guillermo Mota and of course, Marte.
Marte spent his first year in Triple-A, where he won the 2006 Triple-A All-Star Home Run Derby. He was a .261 hitter in that first year in the minors, hitting 15 home runs and 46 RBIs. He would play sporadically in the majors for the Indians but often found himself not able to take the spot away from entrenched third basemen Casey Blake.
He would play 80 games twice, in 2008 and 2010, but he never hit above .230 in both seasons and had a combined eight home runs across both of those seasons. Marte as an asset was a complete bust and he never warranted the type of hype he once was given.
By 2014 he had been out of the majors for three years before getting a second chance with Arizona, but the Diamondbacks didn’t see much in the way of production and eventually let him walk too.
Unfortunately, things got even worse for Marte. After spending two successful seasons hitting the ball in the Korean pro league, and rejuvenating his career, Marte died in a car accident in the Dominican Republic, before the start of a potential third year in Korea.
Marte was 33.
Roberto Hernández/Fausto Carmona
Call him what you will, but we’ll just call him that one guy who the Indians and the city were very high on. The Indians assumed that the talent they were signing in 2000, Fausto Carmona, was 16. From that point on it would take him six years to get to the majors, which means that everyone was under the assumption he was just 22 years old.
While he did have two good years, including one All-Star game appearance, the truth would come out in 2012, when Carmona was revealed to not be 28 as previously assumed, but 31. Also, Carmona wasn’t his real name. No, he was born Roberto Hernandez.
This would cause him to miss most of the 2012 season, having to deal with issues with his work visa and a suspension from the MLB due to age and identity fraud. Upon his return, the now-re-named Hernandez performed poorly, made worse by it being a contract year. He would not be re-signed and ended up leaving for Tampa Bay on a one-year deal.
It wasn’t just his name that caused chaos as his play was also erratic. In all but one year with the Indians, Hernandez/Carmona failed to post a winning record, and constantly had ERA’s over 5.00. He only dripped below 5.00 twice and those were his best years with the Indians.
He was once considered a future Ace and was even given the Opening Day start in 2011, signifying just how much fate the Indians had in him. Yet, that all came smashing down around him once the truth was revealed.
Ubaldo Jimenez
Technically not a Shapiro move, but the title of the article said SINCE the Shapiro era.
This was a move that was made with the hopes of getting the Tribe to the playoffs. It worked, but two years later. Ubaldo Jimenez was traded to the Cleveland Indians in 2011, for top prospect Alex White, Matt McBride, Drew Pomeranz, and Joe Gardner. The move was done to round out the rotation and to give the Indians a “real” ace.
Jimenez was on the outs in Colorado, and a deal came together relatively fast and followed two other trades made by new GM Chris Antonetti. Earlier that day, the Indians traded away Orlando Cabrera for a minor leaguer and acquired Kosuke Fukudome earlier in that week. The additions were meant to help the Indians, who were just 1 1/2 games out of first in the AL Central compete for the playoffs.
Jimenez was viewed as the “new Ace” of the club, who had Justin Masterson, a young pair of starters in Carlos Carrasco and Josh Tomlin; as well as the man with two names himself, Hernandez/Carmona. Despite the high price tag that Jimenez came with both contract-wise and trade compensation-wise, he never produced like he was expected to.
During his first year and a half in Cleveland, Jimenez pitched 242 innings, was a whopping 13-21, and never had an ERA under 5.00. As a full-time player in the majors goes, he had a career-low in strikeouts and his second-worst stretch for walks-allowed of his career in this stretch. Buyers’ remorse was on full display.
Finally, in 2013, the real Ace, the King of the North would ascend to his throne and take his spot as the one true ruler of the Indians rotation, as Corey Kluber became a full-time starter that year. With that pressure off, and Terry Francona now entrenched as manager, the club finally made it to the postseason for the first time since 2007 and Jimenez finally put together a productive season.
Bradley Zimmer
There’s still time for Bradley Zimmer to get off this list, but that seems rather unlikely from what we know about the man. Zimmer was picked in the first round of the 2014 MLB amateur draft and from day one had high hopes that he’d develop into a future All-Star. His stats in college and in the minors really gave many people hope.
He hit .368 in his last year at the University of San Francisco and kept on hitting great in the minors, often hitting over .300 during his stay with a ball club on his way up to the majors. He showed to have good power numbers, especially in the gap. His only weakness, if it was really a weakness, was that he wasn’t some prolific home run hitter. He made up for that by being a great base stealer, oftentimes topping 30 stolen bases in less than 100 games.
He was a new breed of hitter, a hitter built from the ground up by WAR. A player who has done nothing since hitting the majors.
Zimmer by all accounts is a bust as it stands right now. He’s had a major injury to his shoulder and now everything is in doubt. He missed most of the 2018 and 2019 seasons recovering and now in 2020, he’s fighting for his career. There’s still a chance he can recover but he spent nearly two years recovering that he instead should’ve had to work on his swing. A Swing that failed him, as in his one season of substance, he had 99 strikeouts in 101 games.
Russell Branyan thought that was excessive. Not really, that was a joke, but really, Zimmer lost valuable time that he needed to use for improvement. He also wasn’t fairing any better in the 2020 spring training before the season was suspended, hitting .200 with 10 strikeouts in nine games.
Sure, we’ve seen it before with guys like Josh Hamilton of a career resurgence late into someone’s 20s but that doesn’t seem to be the case for Zimmer. At least not yet anyway.