If the Indians have had one goal in mind when trading over the last two years, it has been to use their vast amount of low level minor league depth to add fringe quality MLB talent. They did it to acquire Oscar Mercado, Jordan Luplow, Kevin Plawecki, Chih-Wei Hu and Walter Lockett within the last year and they have done it again, moving Ruben Cardenas to the Rays for Christian Arroyo and Hunter Wood.
Cardenas was part of the incredible 2018 amateur draft, a 16th rounder out of Cal State Fullerton. An outfielder who can play all three positions, Cardenas was a huge part of the play-off bound AZL Indians 1 last year, hitting .300/.397/.446 before joining the Mahoning Valley Scrappers for the last week of their play-off run and hitting even better. After such a solid first season and given his advanced age (he’s now 21), Cardenas made the jump to Lake County to start 2019, skipping the extended spring training that most of his 2018 teammates were forced to endure.
In Lake County, he took advantage of the smaller ballparks to turn some of those doubles into home runs as he hit ten out in his 84 in addition to 19 doubles and six triples. His line of .284/.343/.475 showed little to no regression from rookie ball despite jumping two levels in one year. Our own John Hutchison looked deeper into Cardenas earlier this year as he was really starting to pick things up.
Just as it may have seemed odd that Tampa would trade an MLB reliever for a rookie ball 2B last year when they sent Hu to Cleveland for Gionti Turner, on the surface it seems very strange that the Rays would give Cleveland two Major Leaguers for one A ball outfielder, no matter how good he is now or could be in the future. More than the Hu trade, however, this trade is more comparable to the Tahnaj Thomas lead deal that brought in Max Moroff and Jordan Luplow or the Mercado deal that cost the Indians Conner Capel and Jhon Torres. This one is about options with the Rays moving two players they may not have kept anyway in 2021 for one they won’t have to make a decision on for years.
Looking first at Christian Arroyo, a first round pick of the Giants in 2013 who was ranked in the top 70 of all prospects by Baseball America in 2016, the reasoning for Tampa to move on is most obvious. Arroyo has spent most of the season in AAA Durham where he has hit well (.314/.381/.603), but has been burning through MiLB options since the Giants called him up in 2017 and has never hit consistently in the big leagues. He should be crushing AAA pitching, this is his third year there and offense is up around the whole International League.
The second knock against Arroyo is that he’s currently on the 60 day IL with right forearm tendinitis and isn’t expected to be back in action for at least two more weeks. He was never going to help the Rays this year and they would have been motivated to try to force him into the line-up next year, something they weren’t interested in doing. This is exactly why the Indians have Luplow and Mercado right now. Their old teams didn’t have room for them on the MLB squad, but the Indians did.
My expectation for Arroyo is that the Indians will keep him in AAA once he returns until rosters expand when he can become an extra utility man with the ability to play second, third and short while still holding onto Mike Freeman, who has been putting together really solid plate appearances for awhile now. Next year, Arroyo would then compete with Yu Chang and others for the regular utility role. He is under team control through 2024.
The Indians would not have traded Cardenas for Arroyo straight up, however, and the real gain for the 2019 season will be Hunter Wood. Wood was originally a 29th round pick by the Rays in 2013 and has been a solid right handed reliever for the last two seasons.
Wood started this season with AAA Durham and has been up and down quite a few times between there and the Rays with a stint on the IL in the middle. All in all, however, he has thrown just 42.2 innings this year and thus could be a moderately fresh arm for Terry Francona to use out of the bullpen for the rest of the season. While he was initially sent to Columbus, his 2.48 ERA this year and 3.20 career show that he can compete in the big leagues. His 4.19 FIP does lead to some pause, however, as both his walk and strike out rates have fallen a bit since his first full big league season in 2018.
The Rays are in active contention with the Indians for the American League Wild Card, so they were unlikely to give the Indians anything that would really help Cleveland or hurt themselves and this trade should both help the Indians shore up a major weakness, bullpen depth, while not harming Tampa at all. In addition, the Rays get another high ceiling, low level prospect who could help them contend in the distant future.
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