The Guardians and Rays keep finding ways to cross paths, and as the ALCS opens Monday night, one of the biggest reasons Tampa Bay has such a bright centerpiece is sitting right in the middle of this matchup.
Junior Caminero, now the Rays’ star third baseman and an MVP candidate, was originally signed by Cleveland as an amateur free agent out of the Dominican Republic in July 2019. Two and a half years later, the Guardians moved him to Tampa Bay for right-hander Tobias Myers. At the time, Caminero was only 18 and still in the Dominican Summer League, the lowest level of the minors.
That deal now looks as lopsided as they come. “That's a bad trade,” Guardians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti told MLB.com in 2023, and there isn’t much more to say than that.
The swap barely registered when it happened in November 2021. Caminero was not considered a premier prospect yet, and the Rays were betting on the kind of young hitter they believed they could get ahead of the market on.
He didn’t show up on Baseball America’s top 30 Rays prospects list until 2023, and he didn’t crack baseball’s top 100 until 2024. Tampa identified a player before the rest of the sport caught on.
“We just saw a really talented hitter,” Rays vice president of player personnel Kevin Ibach said in November 2021, via MLB.com. “ ...
When you acquire players in the complex leagues, whether it's domestically or internationally, I'd rather be a year early than a year late acquiring that profile. You're not always going to get them right, but when you do, those players make such strides over the course of a calendar year that they may not be accessible a year from now.”
Myers, then 23, was the kind of arm teams often move in that part of the calendar. He had reached Triple-A in 2021, but Tampa Bay wasn’t going to put him on the 40-man roster to shield him from the Rule 5 Draft. Rather than risk losing him for nothing, the Rays flipped him for a lower-minors lottery ticket.
Cleveland added Myers to its 40-man roster right away, but he never pitched for the Guardians. He struggled in Triple-A in 2022, got designated for assignment in July, and was eventually dealt to the San Francisco Giants for cash considerations. Cleveland wound up getting nothing back from the move, which makes the Caminero trade a total loss on that side.
Still, the larger point is that trades don’t happen in a vacuum. Caminero’s career path would have looked different in Cleveland than it has in Tampa Bay, with different coaches, different teammates, and a different climb through the minors. The idea that he would have become this exact player somewhere else isn’t guaranteed, even if his talent was obvious in hindsight.
There are two lessons here. First, you have to know your own players better than anybody else.
The Guardians clearly missed on their read of Caminero, who was sent away only two years into his pro career for a Triple-A depth arm. Reading teenagers is one of baseball’s hardest jobs, but it’s also one every front office has to nail.
Second, a bad trade doesn’t have to bury a franchise. Baseball leaves room for recovery.
One player matters a lot, but not so much that a single mistake defines everything. Since the Caminero-Myers deal, the Guardians have won four AL Central titles in five seasons, including this year, and they could still beat Tampa Bay on the way to the World Series.
The Rays have made their share of mistakes, too. They gave away 2026 All-Star Tristan Peters in December.
Their three-team Brandon Lowe/Mason Montgomery deal with the Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates has been a stinker. Tampa also got basically nothing from the Blake Snell trade with the San Diego Padres.
So yes, the Caminero trade has been franchise-altering for the Rays and a disaster for the Guardians. But it hasn’t broken either team.
Smart clubs make bad moves. The best ones keep moving anyway.
“I think one of the things we always continue to do is learn organizationally from both our successes and things that may not have played out the way we had hoped,” Antonetti told MLB.com in 2023. “The list is a lot longer than that on opportunities to learn.
I think they're all individual circumstances ... Each of those decisions, there's an opportunity to learn.”
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