Twins Video
This month, a group of 30 Baseball Prospectus writers has wheeled through four rounds, drafting “franchise players” with whom to begin an imaginary organization. Contributor Kazuto Yamazaki proposed the exercise, an unusually expansive spin on a familiar idea. It’s still not complete, but the draft has been illuminating, not least in the way it’s helped me conceptualize the Twins’ current standing among MLB teams.
For the purposes of this draft, we imagined that all contracts were thrown out. Participants were instructed not to ponder a player’s current salary or service time; the only criteria were present and future performance. As one would imagine, there remained a strong bias in favor of younger players (who wants to start their franchise with a 35-year-old, even if they’re a surefire Hall of Famer?), but without the universe of current contracts as an overriding consideration, we were free to weigh players’ strengths and weaknesses with unusual clarity.
At present, BP has no plan to present this draft as a full-fledged public project, as other outlets have done with similar prompts in the past. However, the participants have taken it admirably seriously, and by going four rounds, we’ve pushed the concept further than most of those past efforts. It’s been eye-opening, because it’s forced us all to spend some time mulling the merits of a wide swath of candidates, and we’ve continued past the point at which obvious names ran out.
Here are the Twins who have been taken so far, with less than half of one round remaining in the draft:
- José Berríos, 41st
- Jorge Polanco, 79th
- Mitch Garver, 96th
- Royce Lewis, 100th
- Byron Buxton, 104th
Obviously, in addition to those five players, the team has a handful of clear candidates to go in the 15 picks which remain as of this writing: Max Kepler, Luis Arráez, Miguel Sanó, Alex Kirilloff, Trevor Larnach, and Jordan Balazovic. Even if none of them are selected, though, the Twins will have been more than proportionally represented in the draft, overall, at least from a quantity perspective.
Still, it’s interesting to note that no Twin cracked the top 30 (the threshold above which, ostensibly, a player is necessarily the envy of every team in the league to whom they don’t belong), and that only Berríos even fit into the top two rounds. Nor is that an especially controversial way for things to break down.
A big believer in Lewis could have pushed him up the draft board. He certainly has a chance, in a few years, to make the group’s collective valuation of him look too conservative. For now, however, his star is a bit dimmed by the struggles he experienced at the plate in 2019, and by scouting reports that suggest there are tangible, persistent reasons for those problems. I’m particularly bullish on Kepler, and would have taken him before Buxton, let alone prospects Cristian Pache and Dylan Carlson, all of whom have been selected in the fourth round. Given his years of experience and demonstrated limitations in terms of hitting for average, though, it’s easy to see why he’s slipped down the board.
Could Berríos have been taken higher? There’s a strong case to be made that he’s better (and of a sufficiently similar age and ceiling) to have gone above both Mike Soroka and Frankie Montas, the two hurlers taken just ahead of him in the second round. On the other hand, the two starters taken just after him (Shane Bieber and Jacob deGrom) are both much more accomplished than Berríos at this point, and seem to have plenty of miles left in their arms.
One theme that pervaded the draft was that, without existing contracts as anchors and tiebreakers, large differences emerged between participants in terms of valuing pitchers. That was true not only with regard to weighing hitters against pitchers, but with regard to what drafters were looking for in the pitchers they did take.
In general, the exercise made clear the extent to which the Twins’ chances in the foreseeable future hinge on depth, rather than star power. The Indians had two players drafted ahead of Berríos, and one (Bieber) immediately after him. The White Sox also clustered three draftees into the top 46 picks, and after them, had two additional players plucked before Polanco got the Twins back onto the board.
It was clear, even as last season unfolded, that the Twins’ success was designed to be considerably less sexy than that of their divisional rivals. Their model centers on a unified offensive approach, an overhauled player development system, and betting wisely on veterans, rather than on finding and building around individual superstars. That’s wise; baseball generally rewards that approach.
That doesn’t mean it’s an easy way to do things. The Dodgers had five players taken within the top 32 picks in this draft. The defending champion Nationals had four of the top 50, not counting Anthony Rendon, who just departed after the championship, nor Bryce Harper, who departed one year earlier. Superstars give teams with great processes and protocols in place a greater margin for error, and margin for error matters a great deal in baseball.
That’s why the Twins were smart to pony up for the star power of Josh Donaldson this winter. They exposed themselves to some risk—even without his fresh contract to consider, Donaldson hasn’t been taken in the franchise player draft, because of his age and injury history—but made themselves less reliant on continued good luck in developing homegrown players into stars. Now, as this draft underscores, they need to keep trusting those processes, and hope that one of those players (Lewis, of course, being the obvious candidate) can become the centerpiece they currently lack.
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