It's Deja Vu All Over Again

 The Cleveland baseball club has traded away a proven Major League player for a minor leaguer in his early twenties. Stop me if you've heard this one before.We get used to most anything as Cleveland sports fans. Human beings are adaptable; that's our greatest superpower. Cleveland sports fans are sometimes at the level of adaptability of tardigrades living in space. We normalized 1-or-fewer win Browns seasons, Twitter (X?) Wars over individual players seemingly every year, and LeBron leaving because they happen to us more than any other fanbase, seemingly. When the Browns blew a 13-point lead to the Jets with minutes remaining last year, I booed in the stadium but didn't lose my mind. Why? BECAUSE I WATCHED THEM BLOW A 14-POINT LEAD WITH MINUTES REMAINING TO THE CHICAGO BEARS IN 2001. It's not coping as much as it is the soul's will to keep hope alive by ignoring the weirdness and despair of the bad parts.Cleveland's baseball team has become the master of the move that breaks hearts one year and makes fans get chesty three years later.  Some trades were bound to happen, like Francisco Lindor, CC Sabathia, and Cliff Lee. None of those players were resigning here, all of them had about used up their usefulness in trying to break the 75-year title drought (eek), and the packages they brought back were at least respectable at the time of trade, even better with hindsight. The real kicks to the gut were players we loved at times that were supposed to go better than they did. I am transported back to 2001...I'm 12 years old. The Indians are coming off their greatest season ever. I say this because it is the beginning of my obsession. I know every player on the team, I watch every game I can. A common start for a diehard. I loved Einar Diaz pulling doubles down the line, Marty Cordova putting his career together (for one year), Juan Gonzalez returning to form on a prove-it deal, and so on and so forth, I don't need to list the whole team. Following that season (which ended with the regular season win record-setting Seattle Mariners), I sought hope for resigning Juan Gone and adding some pitching. Instead, the Indians broke up maybe the greatest defensive double-play combination ever, trading Robbie Alomar at the Winter Meetings to the New York Mets for Matt Lawton and a handful of prospects. Mark Shapiro, newish GM, had a line that read something like "retooling without rebuilding." He meant to build a team to win in 2002 while also restocking a farm system that had not produced much besides CC Sabathia in recent years.Matt Lawton wasn't the prize. Years later, Shapiro would admit to regretting this trade for only going halfway. It should have been for win-now players or prospects, not both, according to him. Lawton came over instead of Jose Reyes or David Wright. But there were prospects, led by the five-tool potential of Alex Escobar. Escobar was young, fast, had a cannon arm in the outfield, and had proven to hit for power in the minors. He had a taste of the majors with the Mets and was ready to break into stardom for the Indians. In spring training of 2002, Escobar tore his ACL while running into the center field wall. Injuries would go on to define his career more than production. Such is the risk with prospects, even though Escobar felt like bad luck more than anything preventable. Still, he was the first of a new trend: Trade the stars a little sooner than expected and hope the prospects are home runs.And thus went CC, Cliff Lee, Victor Martinez (that one hurt), Jake Westbrook, and Lindor; in came Matt LaPorta, Carlos Carrasco, Justin Masterson, Corey Kluber, and Andre Gimenez. Various levels of hit and miss, but rarely a deal that didn't involved one young player close or at the major league level and ready to prove themselves. There were more trades, more prospects, but always trying to balance the win today and the bigger win tomorrow. Only in 2016 did they really pull the opposite of trading their prospects for the big-name players, and Andrew Miller damn near relieved the starters into a title. Since then, Cleveland has had one losing season, going 80-82 in 2021.The Guardians have become some form of the dream Shapiro tried to sell in 2002: Not outright, all-in contention, but good baseball while working in prospects and developing young guys alongside proven (but unspectacular) big leaguers. Retool without a full rebuild. Be able to lose stars in trades that bring the next wave of potential stars instead of losing them to free agency for next to nothing other than maybe a draft pick. When was the last year the Guardians didn't put up a respectable season? I don't need to write reminders of the team record under Terry Francona. This trade for Kyle Manzardo has retool written all over it, just like the hopes of Alex Escobar. The Guardians have become experts at threading the needle with contention and development happening simultaneously.So now I'll go through what this particular trade did to me: I was disappointed in what losing Civale meant for this year, I was disappointed in only getting a single prospect in return, I was disappointed looking at that prospect's stats for this year, and then my well-learned instincts kicked in. I made peace with Civale leaving, because he has never had a full healthy season. I saw the potential of the prospect in his minor league stats before this year, scouting reports, and league-wide rankings. I made sense of the first base situation by thinking they could trade Josh Bell and split that and DH between John Naylor and Manzardo. I adapted my disappointment into a newfound hope. This season isn't punted, it is merely adjusted to make room for more future success, in theory. Theory can only take you so far, but let's not quote Oppenheimer too much in a story about hope.Sure, there are still questions to be answered. Someone has to start every 5th day for the rest of this season, and I don't think it is going to be Xzavion Curry and his band of merry men. Noah Syndergaard starts a game tonight and it is weirdly a big deal and not as big of a deal as it would've been Maybe this trade shows faith that the team believes in the healthy return of Shane Bieber and Triston McKenzie this year. Maybe Cal Quantrill also returns and found his best stuff again instead of the pot of meatballs he threw earlier this year. Maybe Josh Bell is traded before August 1st at 6pm for Corbin Burnes and we all start making firm plans for October baseball. It might happen.