Cleveland Indians announce 2017 player development staff

There is some news regarding Indians legend Luke Carlin today, but first, we are going to talk about a free agent that the Indians did not sign, despite a Ken Rosenthal report that they were interested.

• The Indians officially lost out on Jose Bautista, which makes me pretty happy. Bautista re-signed with the Jays on Tuesday, which I don't think is somethink Mark Shapiro really wanted, but he left himself with no other choice after losing all of his other free agents. Bautista did end up beating the qualifying offer, which... cool for him because it is a dollar amount I'd take for 20 years of work, let alone one.

Bautista may not be aging like the baseball players of the past that make his projections look less impressive. Part of this may be because most professional athletes are better than they used to be at not aging. Why did nobody inform Nick Swisher of this?

• The Indians announced their 2017 player development staff. Only because cloning entire humans isn't yet possible, none of them look exactly like Mickey Callaway.

Bookmark the above page, because you might need it when Tom Hamilton refers to 14 of the listed men as "The best person you'll ever meet." Speaking of Hammy...

• Michael Brantley visited the Kent State baseball team on Tuesday. I imagine the two guys adjacent to him had to hold him up because his shoulders are in #SuchBadShape that he would have fallen over otherwise.

• Fangraphs has a list of pitcher Arsenal Scores (formula explained in link) and it's good news for the Indians. Corey Kluber is #9, Cookie Carrasco is #12, Danny Salazar is #34 and Cody Anderson is #38. To put that in perspective the average team should have 1.27 pitchers in the top 38. But hold on because Cody Anderson is one of the listed names I just pointed out. Anderson, as you'll recall, has been beloved by Fangraphs for a while now. And he certainly is yet to pitch like they think he will. He sure is in good company though, so maybe he'll put it together soon.

• BREAKING: The Plain Dealer has a [number of] poor sportswriter[s].

Around baseball

• The Rangers added Dillon Gee on a MiLB deal

• The Diamondbacks signed Gregor Blanco to a MiLB deal that will pay him a million dollars if he is in the majors. Seems to me that he could have done better than that.

• It seems the Dodgers failed to land Brian Dozier, so they'll have to find a second baseman elsewhere

• For some reason, the Rangers wanted to relive The Josh Hamilton Experience

• Many smart human beings exist who would like to build their team around Francisco Lindor

• The Astros would like to add Sonny Gray to their very expensive offseason