Things I Think I Think About the Twins’ Trade Deadline

Photo by David Berding/Getty Images

My wife and I spent the last week in Montana hiking in Glacier National Park. If you ever get the opportunity to go there, do it. I highly recommend it. The landscape is breathtaking, and it’s a wonderful place to disconnect and unwind.

We regained steady connectivity on Thursday afternoon, about two hours before the trade deadline. In other words, we got back just after news that Carlos Correa had been sent back to Houston broke, but before the total dismantling of the Twins’ bullpen had occurred.

I was able to experience that systematic roster teardown live, like all of you, via the Twinkie Town Slack channel and my furious refreshing of MLBTradeRumors.

We began traveling home the next morning, which meant I had plenty of time on airplanes to stew on the dismantlement of the Twins’ roster. I suppose that quiet time with my thoughts followed the stages of grief in some haphazard way, but I remember it mostly alternating between rage and despair. There were many heated thoughts about the Pohlads mixed in with serious questioning of the point of following this team. I suppose many of you went through something similar.

I typically endeavor to be clear-eyed and logical, particularly in emotionally charged times and most especially when it comes to analyzing baseball. That’s been easier said than done since late Thursday afternoon, but it’s getting a little less difficult as time passes. As the sharp-edged rawness of what Thursday meant smooths out, I have many thoughts that I keep coming back to. In this day and age, that means subjecting the internet to them.

This Wasn’t Working

In hindsight, this was probably always the most likely outcome once the Pohlads purposefully reduced payroll after the 2023 season. The trade deadline teardown of 2025 has its roots in that “right-sizing,” primarily because the roster that existed entering this week was built under different constraints. The new (albeit self-imposed) constraints left the front office with few options to improve this club.

Moreover, it was becoming increasingly clear that something about this roster wasn’t working (and wasn’t going to). Since the start of the 2024 season until the trade deadline on Thursday, the Twins were 133-137 (.492). But even that pedestrian mark was propped up by a couple of improbable, lengthy winning streaks that added 25 wins without losses and only served to demonstrate how far this roster was from consistently reaching its possible ceiling.

Outside of those 4 spectacular weeks within nearly two full seasons, this group had played about as well as the Pirates. For whatever reason(s), the whole has been consistently less than the sum of its parts, which other teams’ trade interests reflected.

If contenders wanted 10 players from the Twins, shouldn't the Twins have been, like, good?

— Anthony Castrovince (@castrovince) July 31, 2025

You probably haven’t noticed, but I haven’t published much of anything here this summer. Mostly that has been because my work and family commitments have kept me plenty busy, but it’s also because this team just wasn’t interesting enough to motivate me to find or make the time to write about them.

You can only write so many breakdowns of Royce Lewis being hurt, Griffin Jax underperforming his peripherals, and stuff, and Carlos Correa failing to meet expectations before things get repetitive. The Twins’ style of play wasn’t particularly interesting, and they weren’t doing much of anything innovative or novel. They were just stuck in neutral.

They had to take the Opportunity to move Correa’s Money

This was perhaps the most impactful way to shake things up and create avenues for other moves. It’s one thing to have Carlos Correa’s payroll commitment make up 20% of the budget, but it’s a very different thing to have it consume nearly 40%, especially when he wasn’t performing like that kind of anchor investment (and probably won’t going forward).

Photo by Justin Edmonds/Getty Images

This just wasn’t working

We can argue and complain about the situation the Pohlad’s have willingly put the franchise in all we want (and we will — they are now permanent duds as a matter of Twinkie Town policy), but that doesn’t change the fact that having Correa’s contract on the books had become prohibitive for the front office.

If the task given to Derek Falvey and Jeremy Zoll going forward was to operate within a $70-$80 million payroll (in line with those in Miami, Pittsburgh, and Sacramento), which it now seems to be — and we assume they still want to try to be competitive, despite ownership’s apathy on that front — there was just no way to make that combination work while committing such a large fraction of the budget to one player.

When the Astros offered the Twins a lifeline, especially one at something close to fair value, they simply had to take it despite the awful optics of a pure salary dump and Derek Falvey’s (somehow straight-faced) assurances that the Twins weren’t motivated by financial flexibility. Those claims, of course, are directly undermined by reporting from Patrick Reusse that the specifics of the Correa trade were negotiated directly between Astros owner Jim Crane and Jim Pohlad.

Selling Relievers is Usually Good Practice

As baseball, particularly October baseball, has become less driven by starting pitching and more reliant on relievers, the market value of the big-stuff, swing-and-miss relievers has increased. The trade deadline is contenders’ last chance to add another stopper to their bullpen, which can serve to drive up the prices to acquire that player demographic.

Relief pitchers are also the most volatile and unpredictable position group. After their early tenure misstep with a multi-year deal for Addison Reed, this front office has shown a steadfast resistance to investing payroll in relievers. They have also demonstrated some successes in conjuring effective relievers from low-dollar and scrap-heap signings.

With Jhoan Duran’s and Griffin Jax’s annual price tags increasing through arbitration, an (assumed) unwillingness to extend them or pay them in their eventual free agency, and lots of interest from contending clubs, making trades of SOME of the relievers for prospects in addition to getting whatever they could for the players on expiring contracts was perfectly logical. That said, probably no one foresaw them moving ALL of their high-leverage bullpen pieces in one afternoon.

Trading Louis Varland Was Different

Moving one of Duran or Jax was perhaps expected. Same thing for selling high on Brock Stewart and his lengthy injury history. Danny Coulombe's moving on was obvious. But moving Louis Varland, an inexpensive player who isn’t even yet eligible for arbitration and will not be a free agent until 2031 (!), was particularly galling.

Out of all the moves made, moving Varland — a Minnesota native and a Twins draft and development success story — stood out to me as the most personal and cold-blooded. If there were any remaining doubts about the ownership’s lack of interest or care in the fanbase, this move answered them definitively.

Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images

Louis Varland should still be a Twin

Keeping Varland around for this expected upcoming fallow period on the field would have seemed logical as a means of maintaining some local rooting interest. That might have been especially attractive with the now-open opportunity at the end of games.

But it wasn’t to be, and Varland, it has been reported, understandably took the news of his trade to Toronto the hardest of any of the now former Twins moved this week.

Falvey, for his part, dispassionately explained on Friday’s game broadcast that the team traded Varland because they felt the Blue Jays’ offer of outfielder Alan Roden and left-handed pitching prospect Kendrys Rojas was too good to pass up.

That would suggest the Blue Jays overpaid and blew the Twins away with their offer, but that view isn’t shared by the consensus view of the public facing player evaluation industry who have Rojas as a back end starter prospect with some relief risk because of his unrefined command and lack of feel for his secondaries, and Roden as a high floor 4th outfielder/platoon bat due of his lack of prototypical power.

Their Pursuit of “Value” Shaped Their Acquisitions

In the runup to the trade deadline, some of the rumor reporting mentioned other franchises saying the Twins’ front office is often difficult to deal with because of their stubborn pursuit of “value” and their unwillingness to budge on their evaluations. On one hand, that’s a necessary trait for running a club in constrained conditions, and it’s usually good practice to try to buy low and sell high.

But on the other hand, if taken to an extreme or made a rigid ideology, that approach can mean consistently buying low on flawed players. Always trying to get something for 80 cents on the dollar and rigidly adhering to internal evaluations when others’ data might be contradictory, might just mean you end up with a bunch of stuff that’s worth 80 cents.

One of the general themes I took away about the prospects the Twins acquired this week is that they were buying low on guys whose warts have started to be exposed at higher levels of competition.

Right-hander Mick Abel, who was part of the return for sending Duran to Philadelphia, was a more highly rated prospect and viewed as a potential front-of-the-rotation guy before his lack of command and fastball life started to become a problem in AAA. Now, without a significant development on those fronts, the chances that he’ll need to end up in the bullpen are much higher. There are similar questions about Rojas.

Falvey’s broadcast evaluation of Roden as a “potential everyday position player” reflects some post-Spring Training positivity about more power coming, but that has not materialized yet. Outfielder James Outman, acquired from the Dodgers for Stewart, hit 23 homers and posted 3.9 fWAR in 2023, but has since seen his strikeout rate rise to 35% last season and above 40% this season. He has spent most of the past two seasons in AAA as a result.

Taj Bradley, who came from the Rays for Griffin Jax, has long been viewed as one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, but has been maddeningly inconsistent in the majors and has not yet lived up to his prospect billing.

Taj Bradley's 2Ks in the 1st. pic.twitter.com/5aVWLlud0d

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) July 10, 2025

To be clear, that’s not meant to be a personal knock on any of the new Twins, but intended to establish a frame of reference for how the front office is valuing players.

In each of these cases, the Twins seemingly jumped at the chance to acquire players who might have down arrows next to their names right now, but who might not have been available at these prices previously. Only time will tell how those bets turn out.

The Farm System Doesn’t Seem Much Different

Relatedly, you might think that all these trades for prospects would have put a major boost in the standing of the Twins’ farm system. After all, Eduardo Tait, Abel, and Roden have all seen their names on Top 100 prospect lists. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not yet, and certainly not in the eyes of FanGraphs’ evaluators.

Before the deadline, FanGraphs described the Twins’ system as “probably a shade above [league average]” thanks mostly to its depth of potentially useful platoon bats, utility players, and back-end starters, but maybe not average regular players (also known as 45 or 45+ future value grades).

After the dust from Thursday has settled, the Twins system is ranked 9th at the outlet. That’s improved over a few weeks ago, but not significantly so. More to the point, the overall shape of the distribution of their prospects did not seem to change.

Tait is listed as a 45+ future value. Roden, Abel, and Rojas are at 45. Ryan Gallagher, a high-floor starting pitcher prospect who came from the Cubs in the Willi Castro deal, is a 40.

In other words, they added prospects that seem to be of the same class as the ones they already had. As Ben Clemens pointed out at FanGraphs in his review of the deadline, every team ahead of the Twins on their farm system rankings, and the ones just behind them, have more elite prospects than Minnesota.

Among the prospects acquired (not counting Bradley and Outman), Tait is perhaps the only one that might be considered a major fundamental building block of a core, and he’s in A-ball and a long way away from the big league club.

Empirical studies of historical top prospect lists have shown that something like 60 to 70% of the players on Top 100 lists will fail to become even average big leaguers. About 15% of them fail to reach the majors at all, and position players tend to turn out slightly more frequently than pitchers, mostly due to injuries. Along those same lines, around 30% of the players who produce 3+ WAR seasons were never ranked on top 100 lists.

Given all that, perhaps there is wisdom in the quantity over elite quality approach? Then again, those same studies have also shown that the best players have tended to be ranked very highly on prospect lists.

They Are Targeting A Different Kind of Pitcher

For most of this era of Twins baseball, the front office has found success targeting amateur pitchers with command, but who were light on raw stuff. They’ve then trained and developed better velocity and stuff for those arms — like Bailey Ober, Jax, Cole Sands, David Festa, and Zebby Matthews — often from mid-round draft positions to the point where those pitchers have worked valuable innings for the big league club.

Starting with the MLB draft a few weeks ago, and again here at the deadline, they seem to have shifted their sights to pitchers with more present stuff and less feel for command and execution with their secondaries. Abel, Bradley, and Rojas all fit that description, and so did their draft selections of Riley Quick, James Ellwanger, and Matt Barr. One exception to this apparent new strategy is Gallagher, who fits their usual profile of a quick-moving college strike thrower.

Mick Abel, 97mph Paint. ️

9th K pic.twitter.com/DRag9ZEuzE

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) May 18, 2025

For these trade deadline acquisitions to fully pay off, the Twins will need to be right in their belief that they can tease out additional command and tactile feel for spin and offspeed from these hurlers.

They'd Better Figure Out How to Develop Young Hitters

Coaxing the last little bits of performance out of the young pitchers in the system won’t matter much if the team doesn’t significantly improve its ability to target, acquire, and develop hitters. There’s a good argument to be made that this teardown wouldn’t have happened if even a few of the Twins’ young bats were even just meeting minimum expectations.

To varying degrees, every one of José Miranda, Edouard Julien, Royce Lewis, Matt Wallner, Trevor Larnach, Austin Martin, and Brooks Lee has failed to live up to their minor league track records and prospect billing. All of them have more or less conquered the minor leagues and even shown somewhat extended flashes of being highly productive in the majors. But none of them have demonstrated they can or should be counted on as a key part of the lineup, let alone a building block for a future core.

Photo by Bailey Hillesheim/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Brooks Lee (2) looks on after striking out

Falvey proclaimed in his widely panned letter to season ticket holders sent in the aftermath of the deadline that “impact potential was brought in on the position player side”. As mentioned above, the public scouting reports are skeptical of that view, especially in the near term. Be that as it may, the only path for that claim to end up being true is for the club to suddenly develop a heretofore absent competency for nurturing young bats.

There are Probably More Departures to Come

That dearth of building block bats, both on the current roster and in the minor leagues, makes me think there are probably more trades on the offseason horizon. Joe Ryan was a much-rumored trade candidate over the last couple of weeks. For many of the same reasons laid out in the discussion about Correa above, Pablo López might have found himself in the same boat had he not been injured.

Ryan will be a free agent after next season, which would make him an obvious candidate for a contract extension in any normal operating franchise. But that’s not Minnesota.

An apt comparison for Ryan, given his track record and performance, might be former Twin José Berríos. Berríos was a couple of years younger than Ryan is at this point in his team-controlled years, but the two players delivered strikingly similar numbers through most of their first five big league seasons:

Data from FanGraphs

The Twins, you’ll recall, traded a 27-year-old Berríos to Toronto at the deadline in 2021 rather than work out an extension in advance of his final season before free agency. Toronto signed him to a 7-year, $131M contract shortly thereafter.

Given Ryan is already 29 years old, that type of length might be too much, but the $18-$20M per year value seems like the probable lowest end of what Ryan might be able to command in an extension or free agency. For further reference, Shane Bieber, Nathan Eovaldi, Sean Manaea, and Jack Flaherty all earned deals with $20-$22M average annual values this past winter. With perhaps the exception of a healthy Bieber, Ryan is a superior pitcher to each of them.

Joe Ryan, RIDICULOUS 80mph Sweeper. pic.twitter.com/Q2CwTh5PPZ

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 27, 2025

This could be a moot point if the Twins’ ownership situation resolves with new owners this fall, but if the Pohlads are still in charge as the offseason progresses, there’s almost no chance of Ryan being in Minnesota long term at that price point.

And that means the front office would be wise to explore trades this winter. Both Ryan and López could draw significant interest and big returns in trade should they be made available. They could be the way the front office acquires some high-end, low-salary (obviously), difference-making bats to supplement the depth of pitching and lower-end hitters they have already accumulated.

Concluding Thoughts

I mentioned toward the beginning of this tome that I was finding myself disinterested this summer. I don’t think the events of the past week will do much to change that, and I honestly don’t know how engaged with the Twins I’ll be going forward. That’s an open question for the rest of this season and maybe beyond. Maybe some of the new acquisitions will pique my analytic interests, or perhaps I’ll get energized by new owners. But I’ve got plenty of other things competing for my time and attention that make that far from a guarantee.

I still love baseball, the game. But I’m growing more and more concerned that baseball, the business, is fundamentally broken.

At the macro level, the results on the field — which should be the primary consideration — aren’t strongly enough aligned with the factors that drive the owners’ bottom line. It shouldn’t be this easy to do what the Pohlads, or the owners of the Pirates, Marlins, Rockies, and Athletics, are doing. The solutions to these problems are not obvious, nor will they be without contention. I think the labor fight that will follow next season is going to be ugly and protracted. But it will almost certainly be necessary to secure the future of the sport.

David Banks-Imagn Images

Commissioner Rob Manfred will probably oversee another lockout

As a result of these disingenuous owners, I’m feeling increasingly inclined to dedicate what baseball attention span I have to the teams that are actually trying their best to win. Say what you want about the Dodgers’ and Yankees’ inherent competitive advantages, but at least they are clear about what their goal is. And they pursue it, with vigor, every year.

I’m interested in teams like the Padres. They have a good group again this season, and they are going for it. Profit-taking and prospect hugging be damned. We can say something similar for the Blue Jays and (at least for this season) the Mariners. The Royals and Angels aren’t very good, but they are giving it a go anyway. That’s the way it should be, and fans of the sport should be supporting the clubs that take that stance.

At least until the long-sought sale of the franchise in Minnesota is consummated, the Twins aren’t, and won’t be, one of those teams. Perhaps we all should have come to that realization sooner (many of you probably have), but this week has really driven it home for me. I’m completely disillusioned by the Pohlad family’s actions over the past couple of seasons. The previous 35 years should have led me to know better, but I didn’t (or didn’t want to).

It all makes me think of something my parents told us often when we were growing up. They would tell us that it’s not always about what you do or say that makes a difference, but how you do it or say it almost always will. How this franchise has chosen to go about its business has made a difference for me, and not in a good way.

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John writes for Twinkie Town, Twins Daily, and Pitcher List, with an emphasis on analysis. He is a lifelong Twins fan and former college pitcher.

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