Are the Minnesota Twins going to make some trades at the up-coming trade dealine? Of course they will. Derek Falvey and Thad Levine have made no secret that a teams front office is not doing their job if they they fail to make changes at the deadline either through buying or selling.
I can’t see any way that the Twins will be sellers this year, why would they put up a white flag when they are in first place by a couple of games in a weak division. The team is not drawing well for a first place team and they certainly don’t want to squash any momentum they may be building from a fan perspective after signing Carlos Correa. Rumors have circulated recently that they might trade Correa. That is one of the dumbest things I have heard in a long time, why would you be paying Correa, one of the best players in the game, $35 million and then trade him for prospects just because he has an opt-out clause? Sure, he might, but that is a chance you took when you agreed to put that clause in his contract.
So changes are coming. What those changes will be is the exciting part that we are all waiting for. I don’t play GM so you won’t see any trade proposals here but this team obviously needs some pitching help both on the starting side and the bullpen.
Trading for pitching is such a risky proposition because every pitcher is just one pitch away from sitting out a year from a Tommy John surgery, not to mention the cost of acquiring pitching. Top notch starting pitchers are relatively stable commodities for the most part and that is why they are called Aces. Then again, even a Jacob DeGrom or a Max Scherzer get injured and miss large parts of baseball seasons.
That takes us to relief pitchers, maybe the riskiest of all. One day they are heroes and the next day you want to see them DFA’d. The life of a reliever is tough, one bad pitch and you could find yourself walking back to the dugout after giving up a walk-off hit. The only consistency we see from relievers from one year to the next is their inconsistency.
So why are relievers becoming more and more important? In the past, relievers were failed starters. Now relievers are specialists but yet they are not good enough to be starters for one reason or another. Yet these are the guys that analytics experts say the game should be turned over too after the starters face a line-up twice. Where is the game going? 18 relief pitchers on each team so that they can throw one inning every other day?
The next week or so will be interesting and I can guarantee you two things. The first is that the Twins FO will make some trades, the second is that half the Twins fans will say it was the most stupid move they have ever seen and the other half will say the moves were brilliant. Falvey and Levine don’t have easy jobs but that is why they make the big bucks and why they have no job security. Nevertheless, most of us just wish we had the opportunity to do what they do but since we can’t, all we can do is sit around and tell them what they did wrong and no one writes about us and tells us how stupid we are, unless of course we are on Twitter and express our views. Enjoy the next week everyone, I know I will.