For the second year in a row, the Guardians stormed back in the second half to win the AL Central, only to come up short of the World Series. Their season ended Monday night at Tropicana Field, where Cleveland dropped Game 6 of the best-of-seven ALCS to the Tampa Bay Rays, 7-3.
Now comes an offseason that feels especially important for a team with a lot of moving parts and a few big-name decisions looming. José Ramírez, Steven Kwan and the organization’s usual appetite for extensions all sit at the center of the conversation.
The biggest question of all is whether Ramírez still looks like the kind of bat Cleveland can build around. The third baseman became the franchise leader in games played this season at 1,734, but it was also his worst year since he became a regular in 2016.
He hit .235/.320/.368, dropping 175 points of OPS and 43 points of OPS+ from the year before. In 2025, he was an MVP candidate.
In 2026, he was just OK.
The hamate fracture in his left hand may explain a lot of that decline. Ramírez injured it on June 13 and was hitting .239/.339/.418 at the time, through 72 games.
That was below his standard, but still respectable production. After surgery and a return in late July, though, the drop-off was obvious: .229/.296/.302 over his final 53 games, with very little hard contact.
He did not resemble peak J-Ram.
The numbers before and after the injury tell the story clearly. Before the hamate issue, his average exit velocity was 90.3 mph and his expected slugging percentage was .444. Afterward, those marks fell to 86.5 mph and .321.
That matters because Cleveland’s offense is built around him. If Ramírez isn’t driving the lineup, the whole thing starts to wobble.
It also matters financially. The Guardians signed him to a seven-year, $175 million extension last January, and he’s due $25 million a year through 2032 - about 33% of the team’s 2026 payroll.
If he is no longer a star, the consequences go beyond the field.
He turned 34 last month, which adds another layer of concern. The Guardians need to believe 2026 was mostly about the hand injury, not the beginning of a longer slide. They don’t have enough offense to absorb a real decline from him and still expect to chase a title.
Kwan brings a different kind of dilemma. His season was a roller coaster, starting with a brutal stretch that had him sitting at .206/.321/.251 on June 22, ugly enough to put him among the worst hitters in baseball at that point.
Then he flipped it around in a big way, batting .345/.433/.429 over his final 80 games. By the end, his line had settled at .282/.382/.349, which looked familiar even if the route there was anything but.
He’s now entering his final year of team control and is projected to make around $11 million through arbitration. That’s affordable by big-market standards, but it still stings for a Cleveland payroll that sits near the bottom of the league. And because Kwan has come up in trade rumors for the last 18 months - especially around the 2025 deadline, when a deal reportedly came close before time ran out - his future is very much unsettled.
The Guardians can go three ways with him: keep him for 2027 and let him reach free agency after the season, work out a long-term extension, or trade him now. An extension for a defense-first player with limited power is not an obvious move for a team that has to stretch every dollar. Keeping him for one more year and letting the market decide after that is also defensible, though it would mean risking losing him for nothing.
Still, it would be hard to argue that president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti shouldn’t at least check the trade market. The one year of control narrows the field to contenders, but that still leaves plenty of teams who could use Kwan. The Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres all fit that description.
Given Cleveland’s history - Francisco Lindor and Corey Kluber are among the players it has dealt a year before free agency in recent years - a trade feels like the most likely path. If an extension was the plan, it likely would have been done already. And if the Guardians simply keep Kwan and let him walk next winter, they’d be left empty-handed.
Beyond those two stars, the Guardians are also likely to keep doing what they’ve long done best: hunt for extensions. No team leans into the early-career long-term deal more than Cleveland, a model that traces back to the 1990s under former GM John Hart and players like Jim Thome. Ramírez and right-hander Tanner Bibee already have long-term contracts, and the club figures to keep looking for more foundational pieces to lock up.
There are several obvious candidates. Cade Smith is under control through 2028.
Gavin Williams goes through 2029. Parker Messick through 2031.
And Travis Bazzana through 2032.
Pitchers always make extension talks tricky because the injury risk hangs over everything, and that’s especially true years before free agency. But with a small payroll, the Guardians sometimes have to take that swing anyway.
Smith, in particular, is heading toward bigger arbitration salaries, with something like $6 million in 2027, and may prefer to move year by year. Even so, Cleveland should try.
That’s the pattern here: the Guardians will look to extend players, and they’ll almost certainly explore deals with several of those names this offseason. Whether those talks lead anywhere is another matter.
These things take two sides, and sometimes the numbers never line up. But the team is going to push.
It has to. Those long-term deals are part of how the Guardians operate, and they matter.
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