WarPath1211

I think Fedko has done enough to at least deserves a cup of coffee in the big leagues. But with the 40-man so outfielder-heavy right now, I don't know if that chance will come with the Twins. The line is just really, really long to get young outfielders major league looks right now. Roden and Rodriguez deserve first crack once they are healthy due to performance and option clocks, and then you have Mendez already on the 40-man and doing well early in AAA. Then you have Wallner and Gonzalez, both struggling season-to-date in AAA but already on the 40-man so they can't be dismissed, and Walker Jenkins, who isn't on the 40-man yet but is the organization's top prospect, can't be dismissed. All of the above guys, other than Wallner, are younger than Fedko and were good in the minors at a much younger age than Fedko. So even if the team, say, trades Larnach, releases Outman, and maybe we even factor in a possible late-season Buxton "injury" if the team is out of it, it's a tough path to a 40-man add and MLB time for Fedko. It's worth mentioning also that Kreidler bats right-handed and can play outfield, so he'd be competition for Fedko as well.

This I think is the big unknown here, and makes me wary about saying definitively that any path is "best". Additionally I think Jeffers, assuming he comes back healthy and effective, is going to get a lot of interest this offseason simply because there are not really many proven position players who will be free agents. Jeffers looks like he will be a top 10, or maybe even a top 5, FA bat after the 2026 season. If teams have money to spend, either because of a new salary floor or because they are just looking to improve their offense by spending, there won't be many options. You could do a lot worse than Jeffers, a guy who can hit fairly well, can play a passable catcher, and won't be 30 until the middle of the 2027 season. So there might be enough of a market for Jeffers to the point where accepting the QO isn't a slam dunk for him.

Lewis is mashing in AAA, but the chase rate is actually worse than it was in MLB this year (32.8% MLB vs. 35.9% AAA), and while the contact rate has improved (65.6% MLB vs. 71.6% AAA), it's still not up to his 75-76% contact rate of the last couple of years. Additionally, his in-zone contact rate has barely improved (78.3% MLB vs. 80.4%), while his out-of-zone contact rate is up a lot (44.0% MLB vs. 57.1% AAA), which is not exactly ideal. He is hitting the ball very, very hard though, with his average exit velocity way up (87.9 mph MLB vs. 94.3 mph AAA), and he is hitting the ball in the air a ton (38.2% GB% in MLB vs. 32.1% GB% in AAA). There have been some better swings and hammering the ball for sure, but Royce still seems to be having some approach and contact issues down in AAA which might make the team wary that Royce is "fixed" this early into the demotion. I suspect what will happen is that Royce will be left down for a while until one of Gray, Kreidler, or Arcia really starts to struggle, and then Royce will be brought back up before the end of the year. Each of the above 3 have probably outperformed expectations so far in the majors this year, but odds are that at least one starts to falter pretty badly given their track records.

Nightmare start for Dasan Hill. He feels pretty far away right now, but he needs to be added to the 40-man at the end of the 2028 season to be protected from the Rule 5 draft, so he's got a couple of years to try to iron out the strike-throwing and make it work as a starter. He might just be a reliever though. Nice to see a good outing from Gallagher. He's not on the 40-man and doesn't need to be added until after the 2027 season, so I wouldn't expect him to be up in the big leagues anytime soon. The line for starters is still fairly long as some guys should be coming back from injury soon. Merphy Hernandez is a new guy for me, I'd never heard of him before and he hasn't appeared on any prospect lists I've seen. Seems promising as a baserunning and defense outfielder. We'll see if the bat can play at higher levels, the plate discipline looks pretty rough in a small sample at low-A - chasing 44.4% of pitches outside of the zone... And the contact rates have consistently been 70% or less at all levels, that's not really ideal for a player with no power to speak of this low in the minors.

Mendez is a great offensive prospect: great contact skill, good raw power, solid plate discipline. But he does have one crippling weakness: he hits way too many groundballs for a guy with his raw power and lack of foot speed. Before last year, Mendez routinely ran GB rates of around 60%, and this year, he's cut it to 54.5%. For reference, the major league leader last year, among qualified hitters, for GB rate was Christian Yelich at 56.7%, and nobody else was above 54%. Yelich has made a career out of GB rates in this mid-to-high 50s territory, and he's been productive, but his best, MVP-level years came when he cut the GB rate to about 50% or less. You can be a solid hitter with a GB rate in Mendez's neighborhood, but your power output is going to be depressed to the point where you probably won't ever be a great hitter. Mendez will need to improve in this area to be a truly great bat. He is still very young and has made some promising steps this year though, so he may be on the path to doing that.

In starts lasting over 3 innings so far, I'd say Jax has one excellent start (5 IP/1 H/1 BB/6 K/1 R), one okay start (4 IP/4 H/1 BB/3 K/2 R), and one bad start (5 IP/4 H/4 BB/1 K/0 R) that he was really lucky to not surrender a run in while giving up 4 hits and 4 walks with 1 strikeout in 5 innings. So while the ERA is shiny, the actual results have been mixed. I'm not surprised Tampa is trying this because the trade didn't really make sense for them otherwise from a value standpoint. Even 4.5 years of a mediocre starter is probably more valuable than 2.5 years of a great reliever. The way they've chosen to build Jax up is a little unorthodox, but I think it makes some sense. A lot of guys who move from the bullpen to the rotation fade late in the season as the inning count gets higher. But if they work up gradually so that they aren't expected to handle a starter's inning workload over a full season, maybe you can avoid that late fatigue. As for how Jax will do in the future, it's hard to say. He's a very, very different pitcher from his early starting days with the Twins, and he will probably evolve more as he transitions to a starting role again. Jax didn't throw a single cutter in his relief appearances before beginning to start this year, but he's now throwing a cutter about 10% of the time in the starts, and his slider usage has gone down. In Jax's most recent start, he only threw his 4-seam fastball 8% of the time, a far cry from the 20%+ rates of his other starts. So there seems to be a good deal of tinkering going on.

I know this is a really late reply, but I do figure I should cite my sources and open up more data possibilities for the curious. For the slash line, this is just freely available on the player pages on milb.com in the splits section: https://www.milb.com/player/gabriel-gonzalez-694224 For the batted ball metrics, I used Gabby's page on https://tjstats.ca/, which pulls data directly from the Statcast API: https://tjstats.ca/player/gabriel-gonzalez-694224/?id=694224 There is only pitch-tracking data for AAA and low-A though, there isn't publicly available Statcast data for other levels.

Gonzalez has been overall disappointing so far in AAA in 2026, no doubt, but he's actually been substantially better against lefties than righties, as the article notes. It's something I noticed a bit ago, particularly with regards to slugging. Against RHP, AAA 2026: 133 PAs, slashing .193/.278/.319, 85.5 avg. EV, 30.4% hard hit rate, Against LHP, AAA 2026: 64 PA, slashing .263/.328/.544, 90.6 avg. EV, 40.0% hard hit rate He just hits the ball way harder way more often against lefties. So I'd expect him to get the start tonight against the lefty Tolle, and then we go from there.

The two things I'll really be watching for Royce in AAA are the whiff rate, and the swing decisions. The whiff rate ballooned from an already below-average 26.7% in 2025 to an unconscionable 37.6% in the season-to-date in 2026. You can't swing and miss at that level in the big leagues unless you have absolute gargantuan power and outlier plate discipline, neither of which Lewis has. The swing decisions are little more nuanced because Royce bottom-line wasn't chasing pitches out of the zone at a substantially higher rate than he has in the past - he was always a bit of free swinger, but it wasn't debilitating. But the bottom line number doesn't tell the full story in my opinion. This year Royce was being pitched way, way out of the zone and swinging at those pitches with alarming frequency. Pitchers were giving him 13.7% of pitches in the "waste" zone according to Statcast, where league average is around 10%; Royce was swinging at these non-competitive pitches a whopping 15.6% of the time, while league average is around 6-7%. He simply cannot chase garbage this much. Consequently, Royce is only swinging at 70% of pitches in the heart of the zone, down from his typical high-70s rates of the past. IF you are a free swinger, you have to, HAVE TO, do damage on mistakes in the middle of the zone with high frequency, and Royce hasn't been doing that.

The two things I'll really be watching for Royce are the whiff rate, and the swing decisions. The whiff rate ballooned from an already below-average 26.7% in 2025 to an unconscionable 37.6% in the season-to-date in 2026. You can't swing and miss at that level in the big leagues unless you have absolute gargantuan power and outlier plate discipline, neither of which Lewis has. The swing decisions a little more nuanced because Royce bottom-line wasn't chasing pitches out of the zone at a substantially higher rate than he has in the past - he was always a bit of free swinger, but it wasn't debilitating. But the bottom line number doesn't tell the full story in my opinion. This year Royce was being pitched way, way out of the zone and swinging at those pitches with alarming frequency. Pitchers were giving him 13.7% of pitches in the "waste" zone according to Statcast, where league average is around 10%; Royce was swinging at these non-competitive pitches a whopping 15.6% of the time, while league average is around 6-7%. He simply cannot chase garbage this much. Consequently, Royce is only swinging at 70% of pitches in the heart of the zone, down from his typical high-70s rates of the past. IF you are a free swinger, you have to, HAVE TO, do damage on mistakes in the middle of the zone with high frequency, and Royce hasn't been doing that.

There are rules on how many pitchers can carry on the 26-man roster nowadays, they can only have 13 until September. The Twins right now are already at 13, and most teams carry that maximum all the time to be able to play bullpen matchups more aggressively. So it'll have the be position player to sub in for Gray and probably one on the 40-man unless a DFA/trade is made, and a move like that seems unlikely to accommodate such a short absence. That leaves Gonzalez, Mendez, Lewis, and Wallner as the only healthy options in AAA. Kind of an odd group to choose from. Wallner was sent down a bit ago and has been bad in AAA. Lewis was just sent down and hasn't even made an appearance yet. Gonzalez has been struggling badly this year in AAA, although he's perked up a little lately. Mendez was just promoted and has hit well in AAA, but it's only been 12 games. I think the question was posed because there's no obvious choice. As someone mentioned above, it may come down to the handedness of the pitchers faced during Gray's absence. So I think the safest bet is Mendez, who's been an ascending guy the last couple of years. If they were healthy, this would be Roden or Rodriguez for sure, but because they aren't, let's go with the other LHH outfielder who is hitting well.

I don't have high confidence in it either, at least that it's accurate with reasonable precision. It's just another data point, in addition to Fedko not being selecting in the Rule 5 and the Twins not adding him to the 40-man roster, that is essentially saying it doesn't believe in Fedko. The premise of the article was that the Twins organization doesn't believe in Fedko, so I was providing another example beyond the Twins. What a stats-based projection system like ZiPs does tell you is that guys like Fedko, who don't really hit in the upper minors until their mid to late 20s and don't have outlier physical characteristics, generally don't amount to much in the big leagues. Maybe Fedko proves the projections and perceptions wrong, that does happen with some late bloomers. But the odds of that happening aren't good in my opinion. And the Twins, with the logjam of major league-ready outfielders, aren't in much of a position to give Fedko a chance when there are higher probability prospects.

Yeah, this wasn't a post in defense of Outman. I even mentioned I expect Outman to get the boot in some way before the end of the year. But even when he does, there's a pretty long line of prospects before I think Fedko would get the call.

Worth noting that projection systems don't love Fedko either despite the nice surface stats in AA/AAA. ZiPs projects his 3-year WAR to be -1.3 with a .220/.300/.360ish slash line if you gave him 400-500 MLB PAs a year over that time. Guys like this who really don't start to hit in the upper minors until 25 or so, and aren't great defenders/atheletes, don't tend to work out. I do agree he has done enough to at least deserve a chance at a cup of coffee in spite of all that, but with the 40-man so outfielder-heavy right now, I don't know if that chance will come with the Twins. The line is just really, really long to get young outfielders major league looks right now. Roden and Rodriguez deserve first crack once they are healthy due to performance and option clocks, and then you have Mendez already on the 40-man and doing well early in AAA. Then you have Wallner and Gonzalez, both struggling in AAA but already on the 40-man so they can't be dismissed, and Walker Jenkins, who isn't on the 40-man yet but as the organization's top prospect, can't be dismissed. So even if the team, say, trades Larnach, trades or releases Outman, and maybe we even factor in a possible late-season Buxton "injury" if the team is out of it, it's hard to see a path to a 40-man add and MLB time for Fedko. Even in terms of older, fringier prospects in AAA right now you have Ben Ross who is having a breakout similar to what Fedko did last year. However, Ross is a bit younger and profiles as a better defender, and has utility to play both the infield and the outfield, which might make him a more attractive add to the 40-man roster in the offseason.

As a note, Brock Stewart actually just got put back on the IL after pitching only 2 innings for the Dodgers and is expected to be out for a least a few weeks with a completely separate foot injury, guy just can't catch a break. So I don't really view Outman for Stewart as a trade loss, more just damaged goods for damaged goods, and leave it at that. Both players exchanged were very high risk, with a small chance of high reward, but the reward hasn't played out for either team. Both guys are non-tender candidates this offseason, although the Dodgers may tender Stewart with their infinite money on the off chance he happens to be healthy and effective for one of their playoff runs.