GOODYEAR, Ariz. — The Los Angeles Dodgers scored the most runs in the National League last season, and then signed the best hitter on the free-agent market. The Cleveland Guardians scored the fewest runs in the American League last season, and then added no hitters to their 40-man roster.
If anything exemplifies the fault lines beneath the surface of the 2026 MLB season, it’s that. Two strong teams, one with an unlimited payroll, one with severe restrictions. One gives Kyle Tucker the highest average annual salary in history, at $57.1 million, adjusted for deferrals. The other all but sits out the winter.
And yet, the Guardians players know, they have only themselves to blame.
“We’re just, like, shaking our fists up at the sky — but then we do the opposite and we basically enable that behavior,” outfielder Steven Kwan said after practice last Friday. “What I mean by that is, we win with the lineups they construct and the pitching staff they construct. So it’s like, they clearly know what they’re doing up there. And, yes, it would be nice if we could go sign a Kyle Tucker — but, I mean, who’s to say that Chase DeLauter won’t be the next Kyle Tucker?”
DeLauter, 24, is a blank canvas for Cleveland; like Tucker, he’s an outfielder with a first-round pedigree and a sweet lefty swing. Maybe he breaks through as a star, and maybe other young Guardians — Travis Bazzana, Kyle Manzardo, George Valera — do, too. It’s a lot to ask, but that’s life in Cleveland.
The Guardians are always among the youngest teams in baseball. This is by necessity, they say, but also partly by design. Adding a clear difference maker, like Tucker, would be one thing. Otherwise, signing veteran first baseman/DH Rhys Hoskins to a minor-league deal — worth $1.5 million if he makes the team — is about as far as Cleveland will go.
“If we could get a top-tier guy, of course he would fit in our lineup,” general manager Mike Chernoff said. “But last year, we spent money on Lane Thomas, who was in his last year of arbitration, and Carlos Santana. We brought in guys like that and spent a decent chunk of money on one-year deals. We got better when we got younger in the second half.
“Our best offensive performance was in September, and we didn’t even have Chase DeLauter on the team until the playoffs. We have to provide runway for these guys that will be with us for a long time and potentially have significantly more upside than some of the veterans that we might otherwise bring in.”
The Guardians expect to have a payroll around $78 million, including $6.4 million earmarked to closer Emmanuel Clase, who is currently on nondisciplinary paid leave. Last year’s payroll was about $100 million, with $45 million going to six players who contributed 2.1 bWAR: Clase, Santana, Thomas, and pitchers Shane Bieber, Jakob Junis and Paul Sewald.
It’s something of a pattern for Cleveland, going back well over a decade. After the 2012 season, the team spent a combined $104 million on four-year contracts for outfielder Michael Bourn and Nick Swisher. Both were gone by August of the third year. In 2021, the team signed outfielder Eddie Rosario for $8 million. He, too, regressed and was gone by the deadline.
Kwan replaced Rosario as an Opening Day outfielder in 2022. A former fifth-round pick with no major-league experience, Kwan immediately established himself as a skilled hitter and Gold Glove fielder. He wasn’t blocked, and he thrived.
“Everybody loves playing GM, and we think we know more than we do — but at the end of day, we don’t know anything,” said Kwan, a two-time All-Star. “I remember in ’23 we got Josh Bell and Mike Zunino and I’m like, ‘We’re going to the World Series this year, these are awesome guys, what value picks’ — and that was the only year that I’ve been here where we didn’t make the playoffs. We ended up selling everybody off.
“And then last year I had the kind of opposite (feeling), where I’m like, ‘Oooh, we didn’t really do enough, this might be a really tough year’ — and we win the division. I think all that is just showing me that I don’t know anything about team construction and I should just shut up and play my game.”
Last year’s American League Central title was among the more unlikely achievements in MLB history. No team had ever finished first after trailing by 15 1/2 games, as the Guardians did in early July. No team had ever hit as low as .226 in a full season, as Cleveland did, and reached the playoffs. Their opponents outscored them by six runs.
The Guardians lost the wild card series to the second-place Detroit Tigers, two games to one, but it’s tough to call their success a fluke. They have simply been too well-run for too long. Since 2013, only the Dodgers and New York Yankees have more victories than Cleveland.
“The biggest thing — and what I didn’t even realize back when I was here, but now I understand when I reflect on it — it’s the player development,” said reliever Shawn Armstrong, who played for seven other teams after starting his career with Cleveland in 2015.
“They know they’re not a team that’s going to go out and sign a huge guy. So they hire the people that are working behind the scenes to develop their players to be the best-caliber players they can be. And then on top of that, they build a culture.”
The Guardians held together last season despite revelations that Clase and starter Luis Ortiz were allegedly throwing first-pitch balls on purpose to win prop bets. Their leadership has since been rewarded: Stephen Vogt won another the Manager of the Year award, stalwart third baseman José Ramírez signed a seven-year, $175 million contract extension, and Austin Hedges, the savvy backup catcher, signed his annual one-year deal to return.
Otherwise, though, the club invested only in Armstrong, who earned a one-year, $5.5 million contract after a stellar season for the Texas Rangers. The Dodgers, naturally, signed a reliever for many times more: Edwin Díaz, for three years and $69 million.
Two years ago, Cleveland reached the championship series with the majors’ three biggest spenders: the Yankees, Dodgers and New York Mets. It doesn’t seem like a fair fight anymore, but that’s not how the players see it.
“When you get here, your expectations should be to win a World Series, and that’s what you strive to do,” Armstrong said. “No one thought these guys were going to overcome a 15-and-a-half game deficit last year, but they did it. So I think that’s the biggest thing: it doesn’t matter about the payroll. Yeah, you have super teams. But the cool part about baseball, too, is there’s also human error. Nobody’s perfect.”
No system is perfect, either. The NFL has a salary cap, yet the crosstown Browns have had two winning seasons in the last 18 years. If MLB somehow convinced the players to agree to a cap/floor system — without significant sharing of local TV money — low-revenue teams would still seem unlikely to be high bidders for the best free agents.
Stuffing the payroll with overpriced veterans, just to hit a salary floor, might make those teams worse. Redirecting the money to younger players would seem more logical, but those players might rather seek raises through arbitration.
All the Guardians know, for sure, is that veterans in their price range often aren’t worth it. Neither Bell (two years, $33 million) nor Zunino (one year, $6 million) lasted through that 2023 season. Trades could bring better fits — Brendan Donovan, who went from St. Louis to Seattle in a three-way deal that also included Tampa Bay, would have been ideal — but that would mean sacrificing the young foundation on which Cleveland is built.
The lower payroll for 2026, then, is partly because of reduced television revenue, but also because spending just to spend makes no sense. Chernoff said the possible ownership transition — David Blitzer has an option to succeed chairman Paul Dolan as majority owner — has had no impact on spending.
“David Blitzer is heavily involved with Paul now; he’s a minority partner and they have a great partnership, especially as we talk about the José Ramírez deal, they were working collaboratively through that,” Chernoff said. “But my expectation is unless the economic system in baseball changes, the way we operate our team is not going to change. Our ownership group has always invested back into the product on the field to figure out how we can have the best team that we can.”
He added: “Our goal is not to be the youngest team in baseball; our goal is to be the best team in baseball. But we have to (skew younger). That is the only way for us to build sustainable success, at least in our minds. So we have to do it differently and we end up being very young.”
More often than not, those young players find their way to October. They have always gone home without a title, but the formula works, as far as it goes. And for now, in a sport with different paths for different markets, that will have to do.