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And if you buy into the idea that the Tigers could fall back a bit with the loss of Miguel Cabrera, and that the White Sox and Indians have yet to play their best ball of the season — all distinct possibilities — the Central could get even wilder before the season draws to a close.
The entire American League is bonkers. Coming into play Monday, the Twins are tied with Baltimore — incidentally, the club’s current opponent — for the fifth and final playoff spot. If that wasn’t enough, 13 of the 15 AL clubs are five or fewer games out of a playoff spot. No AL team is more than 6.5 games out. This hurts buying teams two-fold.
First of all, any team that is ‘buying’ so to speak needs a seller. The two teams in the AL that are more than five games out of a playoff spot are Chicago — coming off a spending spree in the offseason — and Oakland, whom Fangraphs’ BaseRuns (best explained here) suggests are playing so far below their ceiling that they should be neck and neck with division-leading Houston. Dealing with Billy Beane in July can be a risky proposition for opposing teams, too. The Twins have done it before — Orlando Cabrera in 2009 — but it takes a certain need for each side to find a match.
The NL side is a little different, with just nine of 15 teams within five games of a playoff spot, and four teams — Milwaukee, Colorado, Miami and Philadelphia — at least 10 games back. Each of those teams have premium talent that could be pried away, with the possible exception of Miami, but that also requires a steep price in terms of prospects — of which the Twins have.
But the other complicating factor with a team being in the thick of it in a heavily competitive AL race is that even the slightest hiccup can leave you in the dust with a veritable dogpile of teams each gaining ground on someone each night. With that many teams involved, at least a few of them each will win on a given night, making any sort of a slide potentially catastrophic in even the short term.
And when you look at this Twins roster, it doesn’t appear to be built terribly well for a playoff run. The same BaseRuns concept that suggests the A’s should be a potential playoff team pegs the Twins as having played like a 35-47 team as opposed to their 43-39 mark. Personally, that doesn’t appear too surprising when considering how leaky the team has been in certain facets of the game at times. The bullpen has the ninth-worst ERA in baseball at 3.88. As a group, they’ve fanned just 6.0 batters per nine — dead last across MLB — and are one of just two teams that are under 7.0 in that respect. The vastly improved rotation is in the top half in ERA, but ranks second to last in K/9 and is only about average in terms of groundball rate.
On the offensive side, it’s been about Brian Dozier and a rotating cast of characters that have picked up the slack at one time or another. Dozier is the clear leader on the team with a 128 OPS+ — OPS scaled to where 100 is average — with Joe Mauer, Torii Hunter and Trevor Plouffe the only other regulars above average — and just by a few ticks. Nothing about the Twins offense — with the exception of doubles, triples and strikeouts — are among the top half of AL teams.
So you don’t have an offense, starting staff or bullpen that really sticks out. Balanced teams can make the playoffs, too, but it most likely would require some sort of ‘boost.’
But where would that boost come from, and where would it go? The Twins don’t really profile as a team that needs help in the outfield. Granted, there’s still no telling what exactly the team can or will get from Buxton or Aaron Hicks, but this isn’t a club in a position to shove one of those two aside for a Marlon Byrd, to throw out a random name who will be available. That’s before also considering Oswaldo Arcia — on a seven-game hitting streak at Rochester where he’s hitting .448/.484/.828 — will also probably rejoin the team at some point, too. Is a run this year so important that you can shove aside players who’ll soon be out of options to take that chance? It hardly seems possible.
The rotation already has a bottleneck with Trevor May squeezed out with Ervin Santana’s return, so there isn’t really a good fit there. Similarly, trading legitimate prospects for bullpen help hasn’t exactly worked out well for this club (or any other) in years past either (Matt Capps for Wilson Ramos, etc.).
In the infield it would seem only shortstop is open. Jorge Polanco had a really rough first game at Rochester on Saturday, but club sources suggested he was markedly better after some early work on Sunday — his 22nd birthday. If he, Danny Santana or Eduardo Escobar aren’t the future of the position, then a look outside could be merited. That just doesn’t feel like a Twins move either, though. The same can be said for catcher, where Kurt Suzuki has been underwhelming in pretty much every facet of the game. He’s only signed for one more year, so even a starting catcher’s salary could be moved aside if the Twins were to inquire on someone like Jonathan Lucroy. Still again, that’s a splashy move that doesn’t seem to fit the Twins’ usual blueprint, and can also be costly another way.
And that way is in terms of trade cost. The Twins could move the likes of Polanco, Jose Berrios, Kohl Stewart, Max Kepler and others. Trading prospects makes sense in a lot of ways, considering the attrition rate of the average prospect versus their trade market value, but at the same time the Twins need to rely on the graduation of some of these prospects emerging to help sustain an extended window as the Buxtons and Sanos mature, and need reinforcements to go alongside them.
So does trading from your depth in the minor leagues actually narrow your contention window? Maybe not, considering the team will have Sano and Buxton ostensibly for at least six years — all of which should be pretty good years for the club, barring some sort of disaster — but it’s worth wondering if making a run at the beginning of their careers — and the end of Mauer’s for instance — is worth pushing all the chips in the middle for. And is that season now? Is the division and league as vulnerable as it’ll get in the short- or long-term? Maybe that is the case, considering there’s no dominating team right now. The Red Sox and Yankees are a bit more down than they’ve been in recent years, and some of the teams who were supposed to take giant steps forward — the Clevelands and Seattles of the world — have failed to step up.
There’s no easy answer for how the Twins should approach this deadline, but there’s also a fairly good chance that in the next 25 or so days, the team will provide its own answer. If they’re in the thick of it in that last week in July, it’s going to be an interesting deadline for the first time in a long time.
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