The Dylan Bundys of the World

Let’s be blunt. The Twins spent a few years giving contracts to bad starting pitchers. Since 2020, the Twins have signed six starting pitchers to MLB deals in free agency. Five were out of baseball the following year, and the other is 43-year-old Rich Hill, looking for his 14th MLB team this offseason.

These signings get lumped together regularly. You’ll probably hear the list rattled off by a cynical friend when the topic of the Twins going after starting pitching comes up. You might have it memorized yourself for just such an occasion. However, looking at it retrospectively, the only thing the names on the list share is that they didn’t work out.

Derek Falvey has preferred to trade for front-end starters and sign backend starters, so it makes sense that few free agent gambits have paid off. I ask you, though, is there a process that links the signings together?

Once in a while, Twins Daily lets me grind an axe, and it’s Christmas, so here I am. A company man, through, and through, I’m going to explain why each of those bargain bin pitchers was acquired via a different process, and it doesn’t do justice to lump them in as one coherent philosophical shortcoming.

First though, as an overarching idea—I want to stress that none of the names here were acquired to pitch Game 2 at Yankee Stadium, so they need to be analyzed as what they are—backend starter options. None were signed to deals north of $8 million, so expectations should have been low at the onset.

Dylan Bundy, 2022
Let’s start with the face of the list. Despite having a Number 4 overall draft pick pedigree, Bundy never lived up to his hype, but he was a fine pitcher in Baltimore. By fine, I mean that a team wouldn’t lose sleep over him living in the back of the rotation. He had a terrific 2020 abbreviated season with the Angels, placing ninth in the American League Cy Young voting, but then he bottomed out in 2021 while also dealing with injury.

Leading into the 2022 lockout, the Twins had a rotation that featured Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober, and—well—not much. Griffin Jax was penciled into a spot. The day before the lockout began, the Twins signed Bundy to a $5 million deal with an option for $10 million in 2023.

It’s a bit unreasonable to get too upset at the team facing an uncertainty like a lockout just trying to find someone to pencil in and start to fill in a nonexistent rotation. Bundy carried with him the potential to be something more, as well. It didn’t come to fruition, though.

Chris Archer, 2022
Archer signed a similar deal to Bundy, though only earning $2.75 in the first year before the option. Archer’s story was similar to Bundy's, though more extreme. Four years and several surgeries removed from his two All-Star nominations, Archer was recovering from yet another surgery going into the 2022 season. There were more questions about Archer than Bundy, but the ceiling would undoubtedly be higher if the Twins could assist him through a healthy recovery.

The rotation had one more empty spot after the additions of Bundy and Sonny Gray (via trade). Other options to fill the final spot included Johnny Cueto. In the past, the club had been criticized for setting the ceiling too low in their signings, and Archer had as high a ceiling as nearly anyone that offseason—he could reasonably have been a low playoff starter, given a return to form—but his risk was nearly as high. In the end, he was moderately effective but rarely had the juice to finish the fifth inning.

JA Happ, 2021
Happ was the polar inverse of Archer, and his struggles may have been some of the impetus for the Twins to opt for Archer over an innings eater like Cueto. Happ was 38 and at the end of a career that had seen him throw for a 3.98 ERA over 14 years. The one-time All-Star was a World Series winner in 2008 and the platonic ideal of a competent backend starter.

The Twins already had Kenta Maeda, Jose Berrios, and Michael Pineda penciled in as arms they were happy to roll with in 2021, and adding Happ was supposed to provide reliable, veteran stability at the back end, so he was paid a moderate $8 million to do so.

However, Father Time catches up to all of us, and Happ reached the end of his rope. Those types of things happen. But he wasn’t a reclamation project like Bundy or Archer, and no one was dreaming big on him. They just wanted some competent innings, and Happ failed to deliver.

Matt Shoemaker, 2021 (or The Shoe, if you please)
Shoemaker is the most puzzling signing on this list if you ignore all of the context. Randy Dobnak, coming off two promising partial seasons, was slated to fill the fifth spot, but to add a bit of depth, the team brought in Shoemaker to bump Dobnak down a peg.

Who was Shoemaker? A pitcher who had a few decent years in his late 20s but was 34 and working on coming back from several injuries. Call him the proto-Archer, if you will. The Twins didn’t break the bank on him, paying him just $2 million. The idea was simple: if it works, keep him, and if it doesn’t, cut him free.

It didn’t work. However, to make matters worse, the cavalry didn’t come. Although they did part with him, the Twins finished the year getting starts from Griffin Jax, Charlie Barnes, John Gant, and several other unfortunate names. Had Dobnak been healthy and taken his spot when it was clear he didn’t have it anymore, it would have been a failed experiment. No matter what, though, it’s not as if the Twins staked their season or drained their pockets on the Matt Shoemaker Experiment. He was essentially a minor league veteran who skipped a step and broke camp with the team.

Homer Bailey, 2020
If Shoemaker was the proto-Archer, Bailey was the proto-Happ. However, the signs were much more evident that his time was running out. From 2009 to 2014, his ERA started with a 3, and he was a competent innings eater, when healthy. However, it was 2020, and he had a 5.56 ERA since 2015, throwing fewer than 400 innings in five years.

The Twins were in a strange place, having swung and missed on frontline starters in free agency like Zack Wheeler, and although they would go on to trade for Kenta Maeda, they needed some depth to pair with Berrios and Jake Odorizzi. However, another factor was at play—both Pineda (serving a PED suspension) and Hill (recovering from Tommy John surgery) were slated to miss the first months of the season.

The Twins needed someone to throw innings in April, May, and June, keeping the seat warm for Pineda and Hill, so the Bailey signing, or something like it, was necessary, if only to reach the summer. It’s hard to knock them for not getting another frontline pitcher, but choosing Bailey specifically is a bit of a headscratcher. He would also only throw eight innings for the Twins, adding to his thief in the night legend.

Conclusion
So why have I been prattling on about a bunch of pitchers who didn’t work out in Minnesota? Maybe it’s because I’m a pedant. Something about me gets annoyed when I hear all of these pitchers lumped in together as if there was a connecting tissue among their signings. There were factors like suspensions, depth, and a lockout that played into each signing, and each pitcher was valued for different reasons, to different degrees.

Matt Shoemaker and JA Happ are in no way the same concept, nor were they expected to serve the same role. I just get annoyed when these mistakes are all made out to be one idea. Was this a waste of time to write and read? Sound off in the comments.

Also, before you ask, let’s speed run the rest (who may or may not be on your list, depending on how crotchety you are). Rich Hill: did exactly what was asked of him; stop complaining about a journeyman fifth starter. Martin Perez: almost had it, but also did what was expected of him. Lance Lynn (he hated it here, and he was grumpy, and it makes Minnesotans sad): weird situation; he was good for 11 years as long as he wasn’t in Minnesota. Michael Pineda: good signing; if you list him, I don’t know what to tell you.