Indians obtain Sandy Leon

With the winter meetings one week away and with the bigger news for so many being the craziness between major and minor league baseball taking most of the docket, it's easy to forget that the same teams that are attempting to crunch minor league baseball under their heel are still attempting to improve their main product as well.

The Cleveland Indians started their attempt to improve with a trade with the Boston Red Sox to bolster their bench as the Tribe added catcher Sandy Leon to backup Roberto Perez.
The move to add Leon enabled the Tribe to pass on offering their 2019 backup Kevin Plawecki arbitration and allow him to leave via free agency.

With the bat, there isn't a lot to differentiate Leon from Plawecki.
Neither player is a strong hitter with Plawecki hitting .222 with three homers to Leon's .192 and five homers in a similar number of at-bats (172 and 158) and both are close to the same age (Leon 30 and Plawecki 29 in Feb. 2020.).
Leon is noted as a good defender with a strong arm that has thrown out 34 percent of attempted base stealers over his career.
The former Hagerstown Sun is noted as a good handler of pitchers and Leon's profile is exactly what a team is looking for when looking for a backup catcher that will play once or twice a week- strong arm, solid defense and usually not the best hitter in the world.
It's not that teams would be against a good hitting backup, but when it comes to catchers if they were good hitters they would be starting already for a team somewhere.

Leon signed a contract with the Indians immediately following the trade to avoid arbitration for two million with incentives for the 2020 season.
Those incentives are unlikely to be reached unless Roberto Perez would miss a large amount of time for whatever reason.

Boston received minor league righthander Adenys Bautista, who at 21 and hasn't left the compound league level.
That's a concern even before you look at his numbers which were pretty bad even with limited data.
Still, I like Boston's willingness to look at a longshot prospect and try to see what they can make with a player that they saw a piece of talent in.
All too often, MLB teams will lazily take those "cash considerations", which are a joke as you consider the amount of money involved (Usually 50K and under for transactions of this type)  for teams that make the profits that even lower-level markets take away each season.
Kudos to the Red Sox for trying despite the odds of Adenys Bautista reaching even AAA are very long.

I'll be back later with some other ideas and scribblings.