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Miguel Sanó is one of the biggest young stars to ever come through the Minnesota Twins franchise – figuratively and literally. Both these qualities would ultimately come to play against him, in terms of expectation and perception.
A Rising Prodigy
His emergence as a youth in the Dominican Republic drew the attention of filmmakers, who produced a documentary detailing Sanó's courtship from major-league teams. Amid controversy swirling around his actual age, Minnesota was able to swoop in and sign him for a franchise-record $3.15 million bonus.
From there, Sanó began a rapid pro ascent. The third baseman flashed his immense slugging prowess in the low minors and quickly established himself as a premier prospect, ranking #4 overall on MLB.com's rankings after 2013.
Then, in spring of 2014, he tore the UCL in his right elbow, requiring Tommy John surgery and wiping out his age-21 season. It was sadly the beginning of a nonstop cycle of physical setbacks that would keep Sanó from ever settling into any sustained healthy groove in his career.
He came back in 2015 and quickly reached the majors. He was as advertised, slashing .269/.385/.531 as a 22-year-old against major-league pitching. Sanó consistently worked counts and capitalized, looking every bit the part of a premier cleanup man for years to come. He finished third in AL Rookie of the Year voting behind Carlos Correa and Francisco Lindor.
From Odd Fit to All-Star
The following year, Terry Ryan's effort to shoehorn both Sanó and Trevor Plouffe onto the roster led to the ill-advised experiment of shifting Sanó to right field. As a fast-growing hulk who seemed clearly destined to move down the defensive spectrum rather than up it, this assignment did not suit Sanó.
He struggled in 2016, at the plate and in the field, contributing to an all-around total system failure that prompted Ryan's dismissal. In 2017, the Twins rebounded, and Sanó was a driving force. Posting a .902 OPS with 21 homers and 62 RBIs in the first half, he made the All-Star team and finished runner-up to Aaron Judge in the Home Run Derby.
At age 24, Sanó was without question one of the true rising stars in Major League Baseball, his presence registering on the national scale. In all the talk of what a disappointment and bust he's been, people seem to forget this. For a while, it really was all coming together for him. And then...
The Leg Injury
About a month after his All-Star experience, Sanó suffered an injury that would permanently alter the course of his meteoric career. On August 18th, he fouled a ball hard into his left shin that did serious damage. Diagnosed as a stress reaction, it never really healed, and Sanó had a titanium rod inserted during the offseason, which prevented him from being able to condition and prepare as normal for the following year.
This cascading series of events contributed to a completely disastrous 2018 campaign, during which Minnesota took the drastic step of demoting a broken Sanó from the majors to Single-A, merely so he could go to the team's facility in Fort Myers and try to physically get right. He finished the season with a .199 average and .679 OPS in 71 MLB games.
Bomba Squad Revival
In 2019, we got one last burst of brilliance from Sanó, but it was a worthy final glimpse, offering everything we hoped he could be. Following a late start due to an offseason incident, he stepped in as a spiritual leader of the Bomba Squad, launching 34 homers in 105 games en route to a .934 OPS.
Reigniting his dominant offensive game, Sanó provided many of the season's most memorable highlights, including the grand slam in Cleveland that effectively sealed a division title.
By this point, Sanó was a 26-year-old with 118 career home runs and a 122 OPS+, coming off a monster campaign and seemingly ready to enter into a prodigious slugging prime. The sky was the limit, and Minnesota's front office attempted to capitalize with a three-year extension.
But from there, the sky started falling and it didn't stop.
Miguel's Mighty Collapse
It's easy to forget, but for most of the shortened 2020 season, Sanó actually looked the part. Through 42 games he was slashing .236/.321/.549 with 11 homers and 22 RBIs. Then he cratered in the final two weeks, going 4-for-42 with 22 strikeouts, and carried it over to the playoffs where he was 1-for-8.
Sanó's offensive production was solid but unspectacular in 2021, where he slashed .223/.312/.466 with poor defensive ratings at first base to produce a modest 0.9 fWAR. Nearly his entire 2022 season was wiped out by a knee injury, and now, here we are.
A Mixed, But Largely Misunderstood, Legacy
No one can deny that by the end of his tenure in Minnesota, Sanó was of little use. Framing his legacy within that narrow scope, however, tells a very incomplete and misleading story. Yet many people are oddly obsessed with doing so and always have been.
All the way back in 2017 I wrote about the implicit negativity bias that threatened to forever tarnish Sanó's perception in the eyes of fans. For whatever reason, there's always been a compulsion to myopically focus on the negatives of his game, even in the face of overwhelming positives and legitimately exhilarating moments on the field.
Ax-grinding columnists and pandering media snobs have been relentless in hurling lopsided critiques at the slugger even during his best moments, playing off the most base tropes: that because he's big and strikes out a lot, he must therefore be lazy and bad.
During his All-Star 2017, Jim Souhan penned a column for the Star Tribune titled "Pounds sneak up on injured Miguel Sano as Twins get back in race," directing blame for the stress reaction in his leg to his ... diet? At the beginning of Sanó's amazing 2019 season, a local outlet blasted out headlines about how Sanó was not "good at baseball," amidst an endless volley of derision, because – you guessed it – he was big and struck out a lot.
As I wrote in 2017, "Sano's historic power is enabled by his size and strength, his ferocious cuts – the very same things criticized by anyone who's looking for a grievance to air." Would it have been nice if he remained a bit more svelte and made more contact? Sure, but Sanó is who he is and was always destined to be: a massive human being who swings obscenely hard and generates ridiculous power.
By singling out the negative aspects of his size and swing, you miss out on the historically rare things they enabled him to do. Sanó ranks fifth among all Twins, ever, in slugging percentage. He has hit 162 career home runs before the age of 30.
Over the course of his career, he has consistently hit the ball harder than almost anyone in the world. Just look at all the red in those max/average exit velocity columns, indicating he was at or near the top percentile of all MLB hitters:
His tremendous raw power produced some of the most memorable moonshots of the Target Field era.
He hit the longest measured home run in the ballpark's history, a 496-foot tank off the White Sox in September of 2019. He nearly matched that distance at Fenway in 2021, where his 495-foot nuke off Nick Pivetta became the longest home run hit by anyone all season. The man put forth some of the most dazzling power-hitting highlights Major League Baseball has ever seen, which makes the pervasive compulsion to diminish him especially weird to me.
To be clear, Sanó also had some notable off-the-field issues, and was subject of multiple investigations. I don't begrudge anyone for disliking him based on these factors. In fact I can't say I care much for the person, based on all I know. But from a purely baseball vantage, the general conversation on Sanó has been extremely skewed, as any honest look at the facts and statistics will show.
Was he a disappointment? Certainly fair to say, especially in light of the expectations set by his own talent and his excellent early MLB output. But to say he was a bust, or bad at baseball, or "never lived up to expectations," is out of touch with reality.
Sanó was well on his way to fulfilling his promise, but in a twist uniquely on-brand for Minnesota sports, his ascent was halted and forever reversed just as he was rising to his peak. It's something to be lamented, not celebrated.
Especially if the ending of this story follows script and he goes elsewhere to recapture his peak slugging form.
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