Guardians Executive on Possible Free Agent, Trade Additions

Even though the Cleveland Guardians had one of the worst offenses in baseball during the 2025 season, the front office doesn’t seem entirely desperate to go out and add one of the top free agents to improve their lineup for next year.

President of Baseball Operations Chris Antonetti recently spoke at MLB’s Winter Meetings about where the roster stands and what the team is looking to do this winter.

"What we want to look to do is build on the group that we have,” Antonetti said (quote via MLB.com’s Tim Stebbins). "We have a lot of players we want to give runway to and allow them to take the opportunity and help build on the experiences that they had from last year. That was the group of guys that were here, and even another wave of guys that have not yet had those opportunities at the Major League level.”

Of course, the group Antonetti is referring to is the young core of Chase DeLauter and George Valera, who emerged at the end of the season, and Travis Bazzana and Juan Brito, with their big-league debuts likely coming sometime in 2026.

Antonetti continued, "The thing we're balancing - especially on the position-player side - is whoever we bring in, what opportunities does that take away from the group that we have? We spent, like, three hours on that this morning, really talking through, ‘OK, if we bring this guy in, who's not going to play?’”

From Antonetti’s perspective, it’s entirely understandable to want to see the group of players that the organization either drafted or traded for when they were in the earlier stages of their minor league career.

That said, the Guardians were in this same position last year; the team wanted to see what Brayan Rocchio, Gabriel Arias, and Kyle Manzardo could do with consistent playing time. There was some good, and there were some growing pains.

Maybe DeLauter or Bazzana absolutely break out and hit the ground running at the beginning of 2026, but there’s also a chance they need more time to develop to reach their star potential.

There is definitely a world where adding proven, veteran players to the platoon and adding depth to the young core could make sense. Now, we’ll just have to see if that’s the route the Guardians choose to take, or if their current roster is what we’ll see on Opening Day.