Guards are taking risks with recent acquisitions

A new day is dawning, and it's a very weird one. When you've done the same thing over and over with the same results, they are libel to label you nutty. So it can make some sense when you start switching things up. The signs were there as far back as last year's trade deadline, but it appears that the Cleveland front office might be trying a different tack. It was no surprise that they were going to deal first baseman Josh Bell, he of the underperforming bat and redundancy in the lineup. But getting Kahlil Watson was the first sign that Cleveland might be doing things a bit differently.Watson is a departure from the profile of hitter Cleveland usually goes for: FanGraphs rates him a 30/40 hit tool, meaning at the time of this grade ((Last January, before he worked on his swing in the developmental league.)) his "actual" hit tool was 30 with a ceiling of 40, and a "game power" of 35/55. If you like words over numbers, Watson has "light tower power" as he's graded 50/60 raw power, but has too much swing and miss in his swing to make it work out well enough. If he gets ahold of one, it's in another zip code, but the chance of that happening lessens with each whiff. Check that with guys like Tyler Freeman, a 50/70 hit but 20/30 power, or Brayan Rocchio, a 50/60 hit but a higher 40/45 power, and you can see where the difference is. Watson shows that the team might be willing to be a little riskier to add in some pop, and he figures to get some prolonged time at Double-A Akron this season since many of the others along the middle infield have graduated.If you think Watson was a risk, then yesterday's news during the Rule 5 draft was betting the house payment on green in roulette. Cleveland selected 1B/3B Deyvison De Los Santos from the Arizona Diamondbacks, a 20-year-old hitter who hasn't played above Double A. De Los Santos, or DDLS as I like to shorten it, has hit 50 dingers across three seasons in the minors and adds a 70/70 raw power to the lineup that the team has been missing. He figures to add a ton of punch to the lineup but the 20/30 hit tool he has been graded as having pulls the "game power" grade to 25/60.There are more issues with De Los Santos than being a Pedro Cerrano clone. Being a Rule 5 pickup, DDLS has to remain on the Cleveland major league roster for the entire season or be surrendered back to Arizona. He can go on the injured list, in which case the games on the ML roster dwindle to 90, but it's hard to promise a player 1) as young as he is and 2) as redundant as he is will be viable on the roster for that timeframe. 20-year-olds can play in the bigs for sure, as well as players who have skipped levels of development like De Los Santos will, but those players are more polished than he appears to be at first glance. The other issue I mentioned, roster redundancy, is he obviously will not pull third base from Jose Ramirez, and 1B/DH figures to be filled by Josh Naylor and prospect Kyle Manzardo. It's possible and extremely likely that Manzardo stays in Columbus for a bit while they fill with DDLS, giving him every opportunity to show that he can be a big-league hitter with the pop the team needs, but what happens if he doesn't perform well enough, or if Manzardo forces the team to bring him to Cleveland on Opening Day? These questions don't need to be answered on December 7th, but they are things that we can consider. I, for one, am happy the front office is doing some interesting things to try and fix the offense, but I hope it's not at the expense of a Manzardo takeoff.