Cleveland Indians rumors: David Dahl at $3 million too rich for Tribe

The Cleveland Indians were interested in David Dahl, but he was too expensive.

How low will the Cleveland Indians payroll be in 2021?

A bunch of players hit the free-agent market last week after being non-tendered by their clubs. There were three, in particular, that looked like perfect fits for the Tribe.

Former Rockies outfielder David Dahl was on the list, and it turns out, the Tribe did have interest in the former first-round pick, according to Cleveland.com’s Paul Hoynes.

However, Dahl signed a modest one-year, $3 million deal with the Texas Rangers, because apparently, that much money was out of the Tribe’s price range.

The Dahl signing serves as a cold slap into the face as to how rough things could get on the corner of Carnegie and Ontario for a team that couldn’t host fans last season while claiming to have lost “tens of millions” of dollars.

Before this offseason, Dahl was exactly the type of player the Indians would’ve gambled on. He’s enjoyed some big-league success, but injuries have kept him from realizing all of his potential.

So Texas gets an outfielder who actually played in the All-Star game the last time there was a mid-summer classic, which was in Clevelady, by the way, while the Indians will see if some combination of Jake Bauers, Jordan Luplow, Bradley Zimmer, Oscar Mercado, Daniel Johnson and Josh Naylor can play well enough over the course of an entire season to cover three spots.

Hoynes also forecasted what the Tribe’s payroll would be if the Tribe ended up trading Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco. The longtime scribe calculated the payroll to be under $40 million, which is astonishing, considering the Indians were paying its players around $135 million before the start of the 2018 campaign.

Here’s what more astonishing: The Indians are expected to contend for a postseason berth on the strength of their pitching staff, led by 2020 Cy Young Award winner Shane Bieber.

The Rays figure out how to compete while spending peanuts, and it looks like the Indians–an already fiscally conservative team, are going to try and follow that model.

If the Dolan ownership fails to win a championship and waste this pitching staff in the Bieber/Plesac/McKenzie/Civale era, it should go down as one of the great boondoggles in the history of the franchise.