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Last Thursday, Max Kepler agreed to a $10 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. He’ll play his first game outside the organization he spent half his life in. The club had opportunities to trade him over the last dozen years but never pulled the trigger.
After thinking on it for a while, I’m going to stand by the title of this article. Under Derek Falvey, no Twin has left the organization for no return while being better at baseball than Max Kepler.
Opinions among fans vary wildly on Kepler. For most of his career, he was a good glove at a non-premium position with a low batting average but decent on-base skills and 15- to 20-homer pop in his streaky bat. His actual value and performance probably lie precisely in the middle of fans' most wild positive and negative views of him.
He certainly isn't an elite player, but he wasn’t bad. At worst, he was slightly but frustratingly below average. I wrote that title myself, and I keep asking myself if I’m sure, but I really think I am. I’m not being hyperbolic. And I’ve never even been a Max Kepler guy. Beyond that, I just think it's notable.
You might have other names in mind that fly in the face of that statement. Brent Rooker is a multi-time All-Star, but the Twins got Chris Paddack and Emilio Pagán for him and Taylor Rogers. Luis Gil just won Rookie of the Year, but the Yankees didn’t get him for free; they had to give up Jake Cave! Yennier Cano, Spencer Steer, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, Cade Povich, and Steven Hajjar were let go in trades. Inadvisable trades in hindsight? Yes. But they did get something back for them in the forms of Tyler Mahle and Jorge López.
Sonny Gray walked for free — but the Twins got a compensation pick that they turned into Kyle DeBarge. Lance Lynn netted them Tyler Austin and Luis Rijo. LaMonte Wade Jr.? Shaun Anderson. Ryan Pressly? Jorge Alcala and Gilberto Celestino. Eduardo Escobar? Jhoan Durán and friends. Mitch Garver? Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Ronny Henriquez. Gio Urshela? Alejandro Hidalgo. Danny Coulombe? Cash.
If you want to be hyperbolic or pragmatic alike, you can very well claim that some of these trades were “for nothing.” The Jorge Polanco trade may give the Twins two 2024 relief innings from Justin Topa, but I’m pedantic and will insist that that’s not nothing.
It speaks to an organizational philosophy: don’t let value die on the vine or fall to the ground ripe. Teams generally have a similar idea, exercised to one degree or another, but teams toward the bottom of spending need to be good at it. They lose value when players leave in free agency. Players traded allow the organization to retain at least some of it. The best organizations find a proper balance of retaining current value to remain competitive and flipping assets to keep the organization young and healthy.
Among the assets that weren’t traded, many of them had something approximating no value remaining when they left. I won’t bore you with all of the names, but here are some: Miguel Sanó, Marwin González, Logan Morrison, J.A. Happ, Kenta Maeda, and Jake Odorizzi. Some of these guys signed deals, but the writing was on the wall due to age, injury, or something else.
So who is Kepler’s competition for this title? I’ve done some research and have a few names. First, there’s Eddie Rosario, who was non-tendered in 2020 with a year remaining on his contract. The Twins held on too long to get anything in return for him, and no team claimed him on waivers. He’s been all over the board in terms of performance since leaving Minnesota, but I’m listing him because of the effect he had on the Braves’ 2021 World Series.
Fellow Bomba Squad teammates Jonathan Schoop and C.J. Cron were solid regulars for a few years after their one-off year in Minnesota (including an All-Star appearance for Cron). Both managed to play themselves out of the league in their early thirties, and both maxed out at $7.5 million in salary for any one year.
One name that caught Twins fans by surprise was Kyle Gibson, who has made $50 million in the years since he was in Minnesota, though he’s only had one season below a 4.70 ERA (albeit an All-Star year). The Twins let Martín Pérez walk the same year, and he had an electric 2022 with a sub-3.00 ERA that oddly earned him no Cy Young votes, but outside of that year, he hasn’t had an ERA under 4.50.
Zack Littell is a dark horse in this conversation. After being released by Minnesota, he’s bounced around a bit but has spent the last year and a half as a very solid and cheap starting pitcher for the Rays. This is an outcome few in Minnesota foresaw after three years as a long or middle reliever in Minnesota, though he was only 25 at the time he was released.
The Twins have also had scares in the Rule 5 Draft over the last couple of years in Akil Baddoo and Tyler Wells, but Baddoo has played his way out of Detroit, and Wells is already 30 and has struggled with health.
It really seems like Derek Falvey has tried to emulate the models of successful small-market clubs, selling whenever he can, whether that be on Taylor Rogers and José Berríos or Nelson Cruz and Brian Dozier. Extensions also play a part in this, such as with Sanó or Byron Buxton. The former stayed in the organization until he wasn’t worth anything in trade. The latter may do the same, but there were rumblings at the time that Buxton was actively being shopped as the contract was negotiated.
In truth, we’re working with a limited sample, as Falvey has only run the team for eight seasons, and only two of those seasons — 2018 and 2021 — saw the Twins in sell mode. Even so, they’ve made efforts to ensure the talent cycle continues. If Kepler turns in three or four more seasons as an average regular, he’s probably the best player the Twins have let walk since 2017.
But I guess the question is: should he have made it this far? That’s really the kicker here, isn’t it?
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