A month and a half this season, the most popular team in Major League Baseball played in Minnesota.
When the classification closed on May 17, the twins had won 13 consecutive games to sit second in their division. It was the longest winning streak of the franchise in 34 years, and the longest in the entire MLB since 2022. Minnesota had one of the best baseball relief pitchers and a star gardener in Byron Buxton. Suddenly, a spring training statement of the best baseball executive of the team, Derek Falvey, to reach the World Series “has to be the mission from day one,” sounded more like a possibility.
For this week’s commercial deadline, that mission had changed dramatically.
No longer ascending in the classification, the twins had gone from a buyer who sought to reinforce their alignment before a playoff with a seller tried to extract some Value of a lost season: the exchange rate in the thought that happens to numerous teams in all professional sports.
However, the scope of the twins liquidated on Thursday, in the last hours before the deadline, was anything less typical. Many teams outside the Playoffs containment sell key parts; The twins, however, took him to the extreme. More than nine trades, treated 11 players from a list of 26 men.
When Falvey sent a message signed to fans on Thursday night, he wrote that “it was not mosaics or small adjustments.”
That was a euphemism.
“We had been floating around or less .500 for a period of time and we simply could not make things work in the right direction, and we have to find a new way of doing so,” Falvey told reporters.
Falvey framed the restarted list as a baseball decision for the future of a team that had passed from six games above .500 on May 17 to six low games. But in addition to bringing a collection of perspectives back, trade also managed to reduce its payroll and make it less expensive to operate. The best paid twin trade, the Carlos Correa campocorto, was effectively to ensure that another team, Houston, would pay the bill for more than $ 70 million of its remaining salary.
Historically, the twins have never been among the teams of greater expense, and their decrease since May had only discouraged the costs to a team whose property has been publicly looking for the baseball business since the end of last year, when the Pohlad family, which has owned the franchise since 1984, announced that I was looking to sell the team.
“The sales process remains a continuous reality for our organization and something that we will work at the right time,” said Falvey.
The intention of the sale was announced at a time when work peace between players and the league, and the appeal of owning a franchise in a smaller market, has been questioned. Six teams last season had a payroll of $ 102 million or less, according to Spotrac, less than the amount that Los Angeles dodgers paid only in taxes.
The average assessment of the MLB team at the beginning of the season was $ 2.62 billion, per CNBC. The valuation of $ 1.6 billion Minnesota held 22 of the 30 teams.
The remaining few delays include pitcher Joe Ryan and Buxton, who only two weeks before had noticed the security provided by their non -trade clause.
“I am a twin from Minnesota for the rest of my life,” Buxton said in the star game. “So, that is the best feeling in the world.”
The twins woke up with a different feeling on Friday. To complete their list for their first game after the deadline, the twins were forced to call eight players from the minor leagues. Gone are five reliefs of a bullpen that had shone during the team winning streak, including the best closer Jhoan Duran. The players in longer contracts, such as Correa, and others who expired at the end of the season were treated with equal measure.
In Reddit, a user said the list fight had turned the official Instagram account of the twins into a series of graphics announced by an “exchange alert” or a “thanks” to a deceased player.
The extreme dismantling took place less than two years after Minnesota won its division and made the postseason for the first time in three years.
“I had some conversations with the main office in Minnesota and we were not moving in the direction that I thought we were later [making] The playoffs [in 2023]And they agreed with me that it was time to move, ”Correa told MLB.com.
And another 10 too.
