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In a final, head-spinning fling, the Minnesota Twins finished off one of baseball history's most unrepentant and unblinking fire sales by trading both Louis Varland and Ty France to the Toronto Blue Jays.
Varland was, for as much as 20 or 30 seconds, the apparent closer-in-waiting, after trades sent Jhoan Duran, Brock Stewart, Danny Coulombe and Griffin Jax to various corners of the MLB world over the final 24 hours before Thursday's trade deadline. France, signed to play first base and a hero of some early wins when the team got hot in May, got so cold by July that the team figured he'd be more comfortable in Canada.
For Varland (the Minnesota native who was under team control through 2030) and France, the Twins received outfielder Alan Roden and left-handed pitcher Kendrys Rojas, according to The Athletic's Mitch Bannon.
Roden has an interesting backstory—he's an astrophysicist moonlighting as a ballplayer, or the other way around—but has struggled to solve the ballistic equations required to consistently collide efficiently with the ball at the plate.
Rojas, 22, is a Cuban emigre and lefty who stands 6-foot-2. He's filling out well physically, but his velocity so far sits in the low 90s most of the time. His fastball shape checks the boxes the Twins look for, though, and he shows some feel for both a slider and a changeup. Ranked 11th on Baseball America's midseason update of the Blue Jays' top 30 prospects list, he looks like a promising addition to the Twins' organizational pitching depth.
The perplexing part of this trade (in contrast, say, with the Carlos Correa or Stewart or Coulombe trades) lies not in the question of why the team didn't get more back, but in why they did it at all. This move saves almost no money and gives up a local kid who made good and was under team control for the long term. Rojas is a really nice pickup, and Roden probably isn't any less valuable than France, but the push factors that prompted them to even consider the allure of the news players they acquired are harder to identify in this case. Nonetheless, it will be fun to follow the careers of these two new pieces; they're more compelling than the returns in some of the day's earlier moves.
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