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Nunez has been better in the first 10 weeks of this season than he has been in the rest of his career. Combined. Prior to joining the Twins, Nunez had been worth about -1.7 fWAR due in large part to his terrible defense, though he was consistently about 15-20 percent below league average offensively as well, albeit in very limited playing time. Last season, he was surprisingly effective as a bench bat, hitting .282/.327/.431 in 204 PAs, but he’s taken another leap forward this year, driven largely by 54 point rise in his isolated power.
Sustainability is an odd question when it comes to Nunez. His hard-hit rate is up three percentage points, which is good to see, but it’s not enough to explain the fact that his BABIP is nearly 50 points above his career average. He’s hitting more fly balls, and using more of the field, which is always a good thing, but again, it’s not setting the kind of foundation that makes the changes in his game feel like they’ll hold long term. Maybe he sustains it for a full season -- weird seasons like this happen -- or maybe he starts regressing in the summer heat after the best half-season he’s ever had, but either way, it’s hard to look at the first two-plus months of the season and say “this time next season, he’ll probably a similar player.”
To understand what the return from trading Nunez would look like, consider a player moved at last year’s deadline. Gerardo Parra was hitting well for the Brewers, .328/.369/.517 with 9 SB and 9 HR. His defense had slipped a bit from it’s previously Gold Glove-caliber level, but probably wasn’t as bad as the advanced numbers said he was. A year younger than Nunez is now, with a far better pedigree, and shockingly similar half-season numbers to Nunez’s current line, Parra was dealt from last-place Milwaukee to a contender that needed help, the Baltimore Orioles. This is pretty much the best case scenario for the selling team, and it netted them... Zach Davies.
Even though he was just a 26th round pick, Davies entered the 2015 season as the Orioles’ sixth ranked prospect according to Baseball America -- though he was just the 15th best prospect in the Brewers’ system heading into this year. He’s been serviceable, just a touch below league-average in his 10 starts this season, and he’s 23, so there’s room to project growth. His average fastball velocity sits a hair below 90 mph; one of his top comparables according to Baseball Prospectus is former Twin Anthony Swarzak. So to recap: This trade went about as well as it could have for the Brewers, they gave up a better player than Nunez, and the piece they got back is interesting but ultimately the type of player that can be acquired in a number of different ways. To get a player with a higher ceiling means taking on more risk and getting a player further from the majors. Trades like that happen every year -- my passable known quantity for your potentially interesting dice roll -- and the outcome can generally be summed up with “prospects will break your heart.”
Good, bad, and indifferent, Nunez’s profile isn’t unknown in baseball. His career with the Yankees was underwhelming and well-televised, and while his value has risen a fair bit since coming to the Twins, it isn’t as though he has become Yoenis Cespedes. If a team needs a super-utility player who can hit reasonably well, Nunez is definitely on their radar, but that isn’t the profile you give up a top prospect for, and maybe not even a B-level prospect if the team doesn’t have a specific need he’s filling.
This is not to say that the Twins definitely should keep Nunez; if Dave Stewart wants to continue emptying out the Diamondbacks’ farm system for questionable returns, by all means the Twins should be willing to facilitate that. Even if someone offers a Davies-caliber player, the team should make that move in an effort to set up for 2017 and beyond. The point is simply that trading Nunez isn’t a pathetically obvious move to make and only a brain-dead fool would miss this chance. The return is likely to be either underwhelming or risky and that assumes there’s a market for him at all.
Major league GMs aren’t dumb. Usually. They’re not going to be so dazzled by Nunez’s performance over 210 PAs that they forget to look at the preceding five lines on his Baseball-Reference page. If they do move him, great, there’s nothing better than capitalizing on an asset at peak value. If they don’t, enjoy the fact that he’s allergic to batting helmets and that he has been consistently fun to watch, even when the rest of the team has not.
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