The Twins stunned the baseball world with the extent of their fire sale prior to Thursday’s MLB trade deadline. A team that was on the buyer/seller borderline at the All-Star break decided to go into all-out sell mode by trading 10 of the 26 players off of its major-league roster over a four-day span (including eight on Thursday alone). Five of those players were pending free agents, but five were under team control for multiple additional seasons.
It’s been a whirlwind week for the franchise. On Friday, president of baseball operations Derek Falvey flew to Cleveland to address his new-look roster prior to the start of a series against the Guardians. He then joined the team’s TV broadcast in the third inning of what wound up being their latest walkoff loss at Progressive Field.
The first question play-by-play announcer Cory Provus asked Falvey was this one: “Derek, it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, thinking back to October 2023, ballpark is packed, a postseason win over Toronto. How did we get from that point to where we are now, in just a short amount of time?”
Really, that’s the question that is on the mind of Twins fans everywhere. Falvey basically avoided it.
“Yeah, certainly, we haven’t played the baseball that we expected to play this season, right? And we entered this year with high hopes with a lot of this group,” he said. “As we assessed the current moment in time at the deadline, it was the right time to have some conversations, certainly about guys who were becoming free agents, which was the vast majority of guys that are off the roster today, but we also had some opportunities to really infuse a lot of young talent into our system and into our group to reset. That is a very difficult conversation to have, one that we had internally and tried to make the best decision we could about the long-term benefit of this team. We still think there’s a ton of talent on this club.”
Twins gut the roster, send letter selling ‘championship-caliber’ future
Five out of ten players isn’t exactly a “vast majority,” but oh well. That answer from Falvey is what fans have come to expect from his public comments over the years, which is to say that it lacks any sort of substance. To be fair, he obviously wasn’t going to comment on ownership’s decision to slash payroll after the ’23 season, which looms as one blatant reason why the team has ended up at this point. Still, a touch of transparency would be nice.
Provus then asked why the Twins went beyond just trading away pending free agents and moved so many bullpen arms with years of team control: Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, Louis Varland, and Brock Stewart.
“Those are difficult decisions,” Falvey said. “When you look at guys like Jhoan Duran and Griffin Jax, those guys have been big parts of our bullpen for the last few seasons. We weren’t out there with the goal of moving them, I assure you that. It was that when we had conversations, we felt like we got the type of talent back that made us want to invest in those types of players that are coming back. We’ve got some of the best young talent in baseball entering our minor league system, and a number of players that are gonna find their way up to the big leagues even during the course of this season, and certainly into 2026. Those are difficult decisions to make, they’re always gonna be hard, but we’re doing what we think is in the best long-term interest of this team.”
The next question raised by Provus had to do with one specific trade that a lot of Twins fans have wondered about on social media — and one that Twins players in the clubhouse were particularly shocked by, according to reports. Why trade Louis Varland? The local product was in the midst of a breakout year and under cheap team control for a whopping five more seasons after this one. And yet, just before the deadline buzzer on Thursday, the Twins traded Varland and Ty France to the Blue Jays for LHP Kendry Rojas and OF Alan Roden (who made his Twins debut on Friday).
“It’s difficult. We love Louis, who he is and the way he’s gone about the work,” Falvey said. “We felt like in the deal that we got with Toronto there, a young, exciting starter who has reached Triple-A, someone who we think can be one of those guys who fits into the rotation sooner than later and has a great deal of upside from the left side. And then in Alan Roden, who you’re seeing tonight, we think he’s a guy who can join us as a potential everyday position player. Those are really difficult decisions in those moments, around how do you make your team better in aggregate? You understand that maybe you have to take something away to get really good talent. We felt like the chance for a starter and a position player in that deal gave us additional upside.”
Falvey and the broadcast team went on to discuss some of the Twins’ intriguing new additions, including catching prospect Eduardo Tait, Rojas, and right-handers Mick Abel and Taj Bradley. Provus brought up the possibility of some of the new pitchers, if they don’t pan out as starters, becoming the kinds of relievers who could replace the likes of Duran and Jax and Varland.
“We’re going to continue to develop (them) as starters because they’re young and they have the pitch mix that we want to give them every opportunity,” Falvey said. “But some of these guys may turn into elite relievers and give us a chance to close out some games in short order.”
So far, Roden is the only trade acquisition to be added to the Twins’ roster. Abel, Bradley, Rojas, and outfielder James Outman were all sent to Triple-A St. Paul, and it doesn’t sound like any of them are headed to the big leagues imminently. That’s interesting, given that Outman is 28 and has played in 230 MLB games. Bradley, 24, has pitched in 69 big-league games, but it sounds like the Twins want him to continue refining his arsenal with the Saints before he gets back to the majors.
“Taj Bradley’s a really, really interesting young pitcher, a guy that’s already had success at the big-league level at a really young age,” Falvey said. “He’s continued to try to refine his (splitter), which is what they had him doing there in Tampa in Triple-A. We’ll continue to do that while he gets here. This guy’s got a real good pitch mix, he knows how to pitch.”
“He had been sent to Triple-A in Tampa to work on some of those secondary pitches,” Falvey added. “This year, (he was) a little bit short of where he was last year, but still, the ability to throw strikes with all his pitches. When he finds that split the way he needs to, he’s got a chance to be a major league pitcher right now. We want to work on him a little longer, make sure he’s in Triple-A and gets some time, and then he definitely has a chance to be back up here before the end of the year.”
To wrap up the interview, Falvey essentially dodged a question from Provus about what role the team’s impending sale may have had on the deadline approach.
“It’s certainly something that we are all aware of,” he said. “The sale process continues, something that I’m sure we’ll have an update on when the time is right. The process for me, while we worked through this deadline, and supported by the Pohlads, was to make the best decisions around our baseball club.”
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