Cleveland Indians: Breaking Down the 25-Man Roster

First/DH

On the Team

• Edwin Encarnacion and Carlos Santana

This position (along with most of the Indians’ infield), is locked up. With the signing of Edwin Encarnacion along with Carlos Santana coming off a stellar season, Cleveland will be seeing plenty of home runs this season. With the two sharing time at first, even the defense should be slightly better than last season.

Replacing Mike Napoli with Encarnacion gives the team a more consistent hitter as well as a slight upgrade at first. Last season, Napoli had a -1.4 Defensive WAR compared with Encarnacion’s -1.2 (Santana was slightly better at -1.1). Overall, the group is pretty bad at first, but Napoli led the league in errors last season with 13. In all, even if Encarnacion has a bad year on defense, Napoli was not that different.

The true upgrade with Encarnacion is offense. He finished the 2016 campaign with a league-leading 127 RBI, 42 home runs, and 56 fewer strikeouts than Napoli. His offensive WAR was 3.7, while Napoli’s was only 1.4.

The Indians had a huge hole at DH going into the offseason (or some might say going into last year’s playoffs), but Encarnacion has more than filled it. He’s very consistent at the plate in all regards (.263 batting average, eight sacrifice flies, and 87 walks in 2016).

All this talk about Encarnacion has pushed Santana aside, but he had 34 homers, 99 walks, and only 99 strikeouts last season. He seems to finally be rounding out every aspect of his game. As this is the last year of his contract, look for another huge year (and hopefully an extension).

Down on the Farm

• Nellie Rodriguez

Not to be confused with Ronny Rodriguez, Nellie had a fairly good 2016 at Akron where he hit 26 home runs to go along with 85 RBI in 132 games. He played good defense at first with only eight errors (compared with 14 last season), but he has a huge hole in his game. In 492 at-bats, Rodriguez had 186 strikeouts (37.8 percent!).

He has a lot of power, and some of his home runs were moonshots, but he needs to fix his swing before getting a call-up. He’s very athletic but striking out 1.17 times a game for your first five professional seasons throws up some warning signs.

• Bobby Bradley

In 131 games at Lynchburg in 2016, Bradley hit .235, but there is a lot more to examine. One of the Indians’ top prospects, the 20-year-old Bradley had 29 home runs and 102 RBI. He does make some errors at first, and he also had 170 strikeouts in 2016, but he is very young and has plenty of time before he will be in Cleveland.

Don’t let his batting average fool you, he is a top prospect and will most likely be a part of the post-Encarnacion era (which hopefully isn’t for a while).

Odd Ideas

• Wily Mo Pena and Chris Colabello

Colabello definitely seems like a more realistic option as he hit .321 for Toronto in 2015 before being suspended after testing positive for PEDs, but Pena would be the better story. Last playing in the MLB in 2011, Pena has 84 lifetime home runs (and some were absolute taters). Wouldn’t it be great to see him hit the 100-mark on a walk-off against the Cubs in Game Seven of the World Series?

Neither will likely make the team (especially since Pena isn’t even invited to Major League camp), but with the randomness of the outfield, Colabello could be a good fit as a utilityman.