Indians: 3 Cleveland players to build around for the future

The Cleveland Indians are once again undergoing a minor face-lift ahead of the 2021 season but the team should focus on building around these players.

The Cleveland Indians are slashing payroll, again, ahead of the 2021 season. Have no fear, however, as the Indians regularly have their best seasons when they’re not spending that much money. In 2005 they were 26th in spending, in 2007 they were 22nd in spending, and in 2016 they were 24th. In fact, it’s usually the seasons they spend the most money where they flop as a team. Like in 2018, when they got swept in the first round and had over $130 million in payroll? Just two years prior, the Indians were only $13 million from being at the bottom of the payroll number.

So clearly this team does very well when it’s on a budget.

What hits team needs to do, when the economy of baseball bounces back, is spend money on these three guys to keep them around long-term. The team won’t slash the payroll forever, we’ve seen this three different times and they always put money into the team. After the 2001-2002 seasons, they cut salary. They added in 2005 and beyond, but cut salary again after 2008. Then they added money again in 2013 but cut salary again the last two years.

It’s the ebb and flow of the Indians. Get used to it already. We got so many people whining about “history means something”, yet the same fans then stomp their feet about the team “never” spending money. They obviously do. Just sometimes they need to cut fat to survive. Especially after 2020, when the entire league will be tightening their straps.

So here are three names the team can lean on as they reload.

Franmil Reyes

Any way you slice it, Franmil Reye’s homerun stats were down in 2020. In 2019, Reyes was hitting a home run every 13 at-bats or so. In 2020, he was hitting one nearly every 23 at-bats. Granted those numbers could slide one way or another if Reyes hits three or four home runs in consecutive games, but still, he didn’t. He had a down year power-wise. Yet, he did keep his RBI average up, maintaining the same runs batted in from 2019 to 2020, if by a difference of a tenth at most.

So we can say Reyes has been fairly consistent. Sure, we’d like to have seen more home runs from him, but that’s just the way things break sometimes. He’s under team control until 2025 and hopefully, after fans begin returning in 2021, the team should be looking to raise their budget in the coming years, making it even more likely that Reyes is retained by the club.