Commentary: Emmanuel Clase a valuable asset who could bring lucrative package at trade deadline

How important is Emmanuel Clase to the Guardians? He has led the American League in saves in each of the last three years and his 157 career saves for Cleveland are a franchise record. He has collected 133 saves the last three years and appears headed for another 40-plus saves season in 2025. He has been selected to the American League All-Star team in each of the last three years. In his career he has averaged 8.8 strikeouts and 1.7 walks per nine innings. In his six-year career he has hit only nine of the 1,411 batters who have faced him. His career ERA of 1.81 is borderline Hall of Fame territory, assuming he pitches long enough. His career WAR is 12.4. In an era in which saves count for everything, pitchers who can come into close games and get the last three outs are solid gold. We know that, having watched Clase come into game after nerve-wracking game and get the final electrifying out, or outs, in most of those nerve-wracking games. Clase has been the Guardians' late-game savior for the last five years. You can't put a price on that, but let's try to anyway. In baseball, the closer is like the field goal kicker in football who comes into the final minutes of a tense game and either splits the uprights and sends everyone home happy or doinks one off an upright and sends the wrong team home unhappy. For placekickers and closers, there is no middle ground. You either win the game and go home a winner or you lose the game, go home and the dog takes you for a walk. Mama, don't raise your kids to be closers or football kickers. Either one can be a sad and dreary existence. That's probably why closers and kickers spend so much of their professional time auditioning for their next job, which they know is always just around the corner. What is also just around the corner for closers and kickers is unemployment. Kickers seem to come and go a lot more frequently than basket-case closers. Either way it is a tough way to make a living. If there is a parachute for the species, it more likely finds its way to the closers who manage to negotiate their own fate a little more aggressively than non-closers. Closers also seem to get more second chances than kickers. Nobody is sure why that is, but it just is. Maybe it's because for some of them, there are occasional serendipitous events that create hope where only minutes earlier deep despair had bought a condo. And, as everybody knows, nobody knows hope and/or deep despair more vividly than the sports fans of Cleveland. We relish that kind of stuff. Heck, some of us even relish relish. For many of us, it's the only kind of stuff we know, which is not to say that we don't know stuff. Most of us do. Which, in a twisted sort of way, brings us back to the Clase conundrum. Should he stay or should he go? There are pros and cons to either side of that argument, the most tantalizing of which is what kind of a package could the Guardians get in exchange for primo Clase? Personally, I would ask the Yankees for Aaron Judge. We could start the bargaining there. Hey, you never know if you never ask. Clase for Judge: Who blinks first? Don't get hung up on names, however. Not unless you want to. What matters most is pondering what kind of package the Guardians could get from the Yankees in exchange for Judge. If any. Sure, it's a long shot. But that's not the point. What is the point is the Guardians are one of the worst-hitting teams in the major leagues, but they currently employ the best closer in the majors. Talk among yourselves. I'll wait. It's worth a phone call, don't you think? OK, I'll go first: Clase and Daniel Schneemann straight up for Judge. The best hitter in the game for the best closer in the game. Who says no? At the very least, there has got to be some common ground there somewhere, don't you think? OK, how about semi-common ground? According to sources, the trade deadline is closer than you think. The framework is there. Clase is an elite closer for an offensively challenged team. What kind of a package could the best closer in the league bring to one of the worst offensive teams in the league? There is a deal to be made there, and here is another reason why: Clase is signed through 2026, with club options for two years after that. He will be 30 years old then. Meanwhile, when will the Guards' home-grown hitting phenoms reach the big leagues and start to phenom? Asking for a friend. Contact Jim Ingraham at jingraham4@gmail.com.