CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Guardians entered the 2025 season with high hopes for their young talent. The plan was simple: Hand opportunities to promising prospects and watch them blossom into everyday contributors.

Instead, as Terry Pluto explained on the latest “Terry’s Talkin’” podcast, the team now resembles a block of Swiss cheese.

“So no center fielder, no right fielder, no second baseman, no shortstop, basically. And no catcher,” Pluto lamented during his conversation with host David Campbell. “So that’s. … you’ve got Swiss cheese all over the place there.”

Not a single young position player has seized his opportunity. Leading the parade of disappointments is catcher Bo Naylor.

“In 2023, when he first came up for extended time, he played in 67 games,” Pluto said. “He batted .237, but the OPS was .809 because he had 11 homers in those 67 games.

“Then last year he’s down to .201. OPS is .614, 13 homers in 123 games. And now this year he’s batting .171.”

Naylor is trending in the wrong direction. And defensively, Naylor was pulled in a game last week when he let a late-inning Emmanuel Clase pitch get past him. Manager Stephen Vogt replaced him in the next inning with Austin Hedges, one of the best defensive catchers in the game.

“I can’t think of a time I’ve ever seen that,” Pluto said.

But Naylor isn’t alone in his struggles. Pluto identified multiple prospects who have failed to deliver when handed opportunities, including Brayan Rocchio, Gabriel Arias and Jhonkensy “Big Christmas” Noel.

“Rocchio was another because he was handed the shortstop job,” Pluto explained. “Now, he has played better since he came back (from the minors), but given the job, especially after he had the big playoffs and they thought he would do well.

“And then the other is Big Christmas, who looks like he can run for mayor of Columbus now” — a reference to Noel’s frequent highlights for Triple-A Columbus and failure to establish himself in the majors.

“Those three were given the opportunity to claim jobs. I mean, just hand it, you know… But not a single young player that they were given opportunities to have what you would call a breakout season. Not one. And that’s what’s hurt them.”

At 46-49 coming out of the All-Star break, the Guardians are 12 games out in the American League Central and trailing a handful of teams in the wild card race.

Listen to the complete “Terry’s Talkin’” podcast for an insightful deep dive into Cleveland’s disappointments and where they might go from here.

Here’s the podcast for this week:

If you have a question or a topic you’d like to see included on the podcast, email it to sports@cleveland.com, and put “Terry’s Talkin’” in the subject line.

You can find previous podcasts below.

Note: Artificial intelligence was used to help generate this story from Terry’s Talkin’, a weekly cleveland.com sports podcast. Visitors to cleveland.com have asked for more text stories based on website podcast discussions.

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