25 for 25: Indians

I'm actually a St. Louis Cardinals fan, but over the past few months I've been working on a roster for each franchise in the majors, composed of players over the last 25 years. The way this works is that I pick one player from each season and I have to fill out an entire roster (for AL teams, 2 catchers, 2 infielders at each position, 5 total outfielders, one designated hitter, 5 starting pitchers, 4 relievers)*. I can't take more than one player for each year, I have to take one player each season even in the bad years, and I can't use the same player for multiple positions or years. If a player played the majority of his games at one position, I can't use that season for another position even if he's played it before. And I used basic minimums of 60 innings or 250 PA's (prorated for strike seasons). I primarily utilized WAR from Baseball-Reference (Fangraphs numbers only go back to 2002), WARP1 from Baseball Prospectus, Win Shares, and OPS+/ERA+ to determine season value.

*Just to make things simpler for roster construction for the Indians, I replaced the 2nd first baseman with a 6th outfielder slot and the DH Travis Hafner essentially "backs up" at first. There aren't a lot of good options after Thome anyway and it just made more sense to get an extra outfielder.

The interesting part with this are the decisions that have to be made, whether it is, "Dang, there are some really nice outfielder seasons to choose from, who gets left out?", or, "Does this team even have two decent catchers in a 25-year span?", or, "This guy had so many great years - which one do I choose?" Sometimes a great year gets left out, sometimes a fluke, partial season gets tabbed for the team. I actually posted a fully researched extended version for the Cardinals from 1910 to 1934. The NL versions for this era are there as well (linky, linky, linky, linky).

You're welcome to pick apart my choices and make suggestions of your own. I'm looking forward to hearing from everybody.

C – Sandy Alomar (1997), Victor Martinez (2005)

1B – Jim Thome (2002)

2B – Carlos Baerga (1993), Roberto Alomar (2001)

3B – Brook Jacoby (1987), Travis Fryman (2000)

SS – Omar Vizquel (1996), Asdrubal Cabrera (2009)

OF – Brett Butler (1985), Joe Carter (1986), Kenny Lofton (1994), Albert Belle (1995), Manny Ramirez (1999), Grady Sizemore (2006)

DH – Travis Hafner (2004)

SP – Greg Swindell (1988), Tom Candiotti (1989), Charles Nagy (1992), CC Sabathia (2007), Cliff Lee (2008)

RP – Doug Jones (1990), Jeff Shaw (1991), Mike Jackson (1998), David Riske (2003)

Notable exceptions: Tony Bernazard (1986), Jhonny Peralta (2005), Shin-Soo Choo (2009), Bartolo Colon (2001), Jake Westbrook (2004), Fausto Carmona (2007), Steve Olin (1992), Jose Mesa (1995)