The Twins' One Big Flaw in their Free Agency Approach - FOR CARETAKERS ONLY

[Matthew Trueblood]

Under Derek Falvey and Thad Levine, the Twins have prized depth on their roster and optionality in their processes. Their approach to MLB free agency has reflected that fact. Alas, that means they’re only doing half the job that a great front office must do in free agency, and it’s the less vital half.

Image courtesy of © Jeffrey Becker-USA TODAY Sports

MLB free agency is really one name for two overlapping but distinct tasks. One of those is finding short-term answers to immediate problems. In this aspect, a front office needs to reinforce thin areas on their roster; balance the pursuit of upside with the necessity of setting a firm floor for a given roster spot; and husband their resources as closely as possible. They need to fill holes without leaving themselves ossified or cornered when the opportunity or the need to change tack arises.

The other task that makes up free agency, though, is adding high-impact talent to the franchise on a long-term basis. This is talked about too rarely, but it’s crucial. There are a limited set of annual opportunities to make that kind of addition to an organization, and the others are radically different from free agency. International amateur free agency and the amateur draft are much lower-cost alternatives, but there’s also dramatically less certainty that the players a team acquires that way will ever be impactful players, and even if they do so, it won’t be for years.

Signing a star free agent for several seasons comes with risk, especially because most such players are already nearing the end of their prime by the time they reach free agency. That risk tends to be wildly overstated, though, because it’s never compared to the risk (let alone the cost, especially in terms of time) of trying to acquire and develop teenagers into players of similar quality.

Trading for players that good is even harder, because unlike free agency, it depends upon another team making the frequently irrational, ultimately unpredictable choice to make such a player available. There’s implicit risk involved, since the team that knows the player best is making that strange election. There’s also astronomical cost, because of the paucity of players that good available in that way, and because the currency with which one pays in that kind of deal (talented players on whom scouting resources and player development energy and the artificially scarce resource of signing bonus money have already been spent) is much less renewable and much more valuable than money. 

All that considered, it’s vital that a team see each year’s free agent class as a chance to add stars to their core. A smart team approaches free agency and the amateur scouting process with the same set of objectives in mind, even though the shapes of the costs, risks, and constraints in the two arenas are so different. 

That’s because, ultimately, having star-caliber players is a non-negotiable prerequisite for consistent contention. To longtime baseball fans, this can seem like the vapid talk of a cotton-headed basketball or football fan. No individual can have the same impact on a ball club as LeBron James can have on a basketball team, or even the impact that any of several good quarterbacks can have on their rosters. 

One of baseball’s beautiful characteristics is that depth will out, and that good teams are unavoidably reliant upon a broader base of contributors. Every roster spot matters, and stars can’t carry subpar fellows very far. The bottom 60 percent of a 26- and a 40-man roster needs to be full of guys who hew closer to average than to the replacement level, or else a team will stall out over the long season.

True though that might be when it comes to analyzing a team based on its two or three best players, it fades into irrelevance if you judge a team by its seven or eight best. Good teams need above-average players—not a couple of them, but a cadre. 

It’s simple math, really. If you have that army of credible, almost-good players rounding out the bottom of the roster, you’ve set a floor somewhere between 70 and 75 wins. If the top handful of batters and pitchers are each just a win above average, though, you can’t push much past 85 wins. Teams with real chances of reaching and causing trouble in the postseason, and especially those who stand any chance of doing so multiple times in a span of a few years, need to have clear paths to 90 wins or more.

That’s why the search for stars needs to be perpetual and multifarious. If a team creates great processes of scouting, player development, coaching, and aggressive maneuvering to lock up players who show upside at the highest level, they can stick to a largely homegrown core, and they needn’t spend much on the second, more costly task of free agency. The Twins, though, haven’t managed that at all.

Since 2018, 151 position players have had a season worth at least 4.0 wins above replacement (WAR), according to FanGraphs. The Twins have had just four of those player-seasons. Eddie Rosario eked out 4.0 WAR in 2018. Jorge Polanco was worth 4.1 in 2021. Nelson Cruz got to 4.3 in 2019. And in 2022, in what still looks likely to be his only season in a Twins uniform, Carlos Correa was worth 4.4 WAR. 

Another 71 pitcher seasons have cleared that threshold, and the Twins were beneficiaries of just one and a half of them: José Berríos, who cleared the bar in both 2019 and 2021, was traded during the latter campaign.

Along the way, Byron Buxton has sometimes looked like that caliber of player. The team signed him to a contract extension that keeps him in Minnesota and manages the risk posed by his inability to stay on the field or produce consistently enough to bring that full potential to bear. 

Others on whom similar hopes once hung, though, now look as unlikely to be a full-fledged star as Buxton does. Royce Lewis’s development has been twice interrupted by major knee injuries, which are likely to slow down his emergence as a top hitter and to slash his non-batting value much sooner than would have happened otherwise. Injury can be called a culprit in Alex Kirilloff’s derailment, too, and contributed to (though certainly didn’t solely cause) Jordan Balazovic’s failure to turn the corner and become Berríos Redux. 

Cruz’s (and Josh Donaldson’s) age made him available to the Twins in the range Falvey and Levine find palatable. Correa’s openness to what was effectively a one-year deal fitted him to their mold. Even when they have added impact-level talent, the front office has done so only because external circumstances or limitations to the player’s market made them a comfortable addition. 

The discomfort of a true star-caliber, long-term free agent acquisition is also where the greatest value of such a move lies. The Twins have been unwilling to withstand that discomfort in order to capture that value.

This front office is very good at amassing depth, and at remaining flexible enough to pounce when unexpected opportunities present themselves. That’s how they were in position to land Correa, of course, and to trade for Kenta Maeda, and to scoop up the surprisingly affordable Lance Lynn, Marwin González, Logan Morrison, and Jake Odorizzi. 

They’ve also done well to reclaim and finish the development of guys like Nick Gordon, Griffin Jax, and Bailey Ober. They seem determined never to fail that first test of good teams, to have quality options on the wrong side of average even when things go a bit sideways.

There’s a troubling pattern here, though, of being too unwilling to take the leap and reel in the players who raise their ceiling to the same level as those of the Astros, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, or even the Guardians. Each of those teams has enjoyed at least twice as many four-win seasons since 2018 as have the Twins. 

And (because the rich teams are now smart, too, and aware of the value of depth) none of them are much worse than Falvey and Levine at maximizing the utility of their 40-man roster. From a baseball standpoint, there comes a fairly early point of diminishing returns for the skill of filling the organization with guys just south of average. 

Roster rules designed to give players a fair chance to play where they’re most wanted or valued make the edges gained in that way hard to sustain, and talent starts to leak from the organization for purely entropic reasons. The Twins have lost LaMonte Wade, Jr., Akil Baddoo, Tyler Wells, and others recently to the numbers game, and those are just the most obvious examples. 

On the other hand, there is no point of diminishing returns for adding above-average players, at least until the team payroll reaches the first threshold of the competitive-balance tax bracket. The Twins are in no danger of breaching that line any time soon. 

There ae a few potential reasons for the Twins’ consistent preference for short-term, low-risk deals in free agency. Falvey and Levine might be miscalculating—failing to see the collective risk created by their aversion to risk within individual transactions. That seems unlikely, given their established baseball savvy and previous remarks. 

Alternatively, then, they might be so committed to creating stars via their farm system that they’re willing to wait out the frustrations of players like Kirilloff, Lewis, Balazovic, and Austin Martin. That’s more defensible, but the teams who can reliably produce stars that way (so much so that they don’t need to supplement that part of their roster with high-level free agents) are few, and Minnesota has yet to earn anyone’s trust in that area.

The most likely explanation, then, is baseball’s oldest: ownership just doesn’t have the stomach for the higher sustained costs associated with building a winner partially through impact MLB free-agent signings. Maybe that’s sound financial thinking by the Pohlads, and maybe it isn’t. From a baseball standpoint, though, it’s inexcusably foolish. 

In either case, be it a front-office plan or an ownership limit, things need to change. The Twins need to be more aggressive, and to view free agency as a grander opportunity, not just this season, but every year. Failing that, they’ll remain a small-market team with mid-market resources, instead of graduating into a more dangerous and interesting club.

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[Karbo]

Great article. More proof that an ultimatum be given, win or get fired, to the FO on down.

[ashbury]

Free Agency is the failure tax a contending team must pay for not developing an appropriately talented young controllable player for a particular position on the field. To not pay it amounts to saying either you're not contending or you're so set at every position that no further improvement is possible. This writeup is a pretty good analytic summary of how you have to look at roster construction; "where do wins come from" is the facts of life question for baseball, and the answer can't be 1 WAR each from 50 different mediocre players because the rosters aren't big enough.

[rwilfong86]

With this current front office and management, I can't see any top free agent pitchers ever coming as free agents. Their only hope are trades and development.

[Melissa]

Thanks for this thoughtful and deeply researched article!

I do wish MLB owners (almost all of whom have made their fortunes outside or baseball) would not limit payroll decisions to set percentages of income, but instead would treat their teams as public benefits.