Breathtakingly unhinged baseball executive A.J. Preller wasted a lot of time this week calling every other dealmaker in Major League Baseball when all he really had to do was make one call to Minneapolis. Derek Falvey, the head of ball ops with the Minnesota Twins, was clearing out his entire showroom, and all Preller would have had to do in order to facilitate his annual restock of the San Diego Padres was say, "I'll be over in 15 minutes with a tour bus. Pack lunches for everyone you want to get rid of and we'll have them off the lot before drinks."
Sadly it didn't work that way, if only for efficiency's sake. Still, the deed was there to be done, and the gods know Falvey and Preller tried in their own separate ways to make Thursday’s MLB trade deadline one of the most ludicrous redeployment festivals in the history of human arbitrage. Both Preller and Falvey succeeded in their personal missions, but they got something like two-thirds of the league involved in the process.
First, let's cover Falvey, who apparently had been instructed that the Twins—currently for sale and going nowhere in the dispiriting AL Central—to bail salary like the locker room was a flooded basement. And bail he did, as the Twins:
- Traded antiquarian shortstop Carlos Correa and $33 million to Houston for a minor leaguer and the right not to have to pay the other $60-some-odd million of Correa's salary, plus the four option years after that..
- Traded closer Jhoan Duran to Philadelphia for two minor leaguers.
- Traded center fielder Harrison Bader, in the middle of a career year, to Philadelphia for two more minor leaguers, one of them literally 16 years old. You can never be too young to learn how to pack in a hurry.
- Traded pitchers Randy Dobnak and Chris Paddack to Detroit for a minor leaguer.
- Traded catch-all Willi Castro, also having one of the best seasons of his career, to the Cubs for two minor leaguers.
- Traded reliever Brock Stewart to the Dodgers for James Outman.
- Traded reliever Danny Coulombe to the Rangers for a minor leaguer.
- Traded set-up ace Griffin Jax to the Rays for starter Taj Bradley.
- Traded infielder Ty France and pitcher Louis Varland to Toronto for two minor leaguers.
- Somehow failed to trade starter Joe Ryan, who might have been the most coveted Twin of them all, despite the Red Sox pursuit of Ryan being, in the unsettling words of Boston GM Craig Breslow, “uncomfortably aggressive.”
That’s 11 players in all, which means the Twins traded 28 percent of their 40-man property this week. (Dobnak has spent most of the season in the minors, but we refuse to debate the semantics of his status as a big-leaguer as a matter of principle.) Some of the minor leaguers they got back are highly regarded; one of them, as we’ve established, was born three months before Barack Obama was elected president. In the long run, this will be whatever it will be. In the near term, even the Black Sox would call this giving up.
Preller, baseball’s most manic mammal mover since Frank Lane, who made more than 400 trades in his time as general manager with five different teams over 23 years, was elsewhere reloading his own twitchy reputation as the champion of churn. Preller lapped the field by obtaining seven Major Leaguers, most notably mega-nasty West Sacramento closer Mason Miller, in exchange for … most of his minor league system, including prospects rated 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 13, 17 and 26 by MLB Pipeline, as well as Major League pitcher Stephen Kolek. The prospects, headlined by the blue-chip teenage shortstop Leodalis De Vries, are red meat for your Baseball Prospectus sociopaths; one of them is named Boston Bateman, and if he doesn't have a handlebar mustache, a bowler hat and a stick pin, we weep for his lack of panache-sodden style. Bateman was among the six (6) minor leaguers dealt to the Orioles for Ryan O’Hearn and Ramon Laureano.
In other words, Preller did what he loves to do: post up in the lobby at Petco Park, strip down to his loincloth and a decorative fez, and declare himself open for business.
His history of cannonballing the market has sent an implausible bounty of prospects-turned-big leaguers into the wild, and don't forget that he has traded for Fernando Tatis Jr., Juan Soto, Josh Hader, Dylan Cease, Blake Snell, Yu Darvish, and uh Jake Cronenworth in the same frenetic decade. The fact is, the only time Preller isn't dealing is when a team doctor is trying to pry the melted phone from his ear, and his longterm view ends at that evening's dessert course. He is apparently leaning into winning something before the uproarious Seidler family suddenly realizes he's been on the job for 11 years and spent metric tons of money with nothing jewelry- or parade-based to show for it. Give him this much, though—if Preller is going down, he's going down with blazing middle fingers. The timetable between Going For It and Tearing It Down no longer exists; Preller, in his ongoing baroque period, does both simultaneously.
Surely one of the Seidler family, presumably Peter's son John, who has run the team since his father's passing, will at some point ask, "Are we getting anywhere with this?" And then John will see what they've just done in Minnesota, which is converting a big league team into a witness protection colony in something like 48 hours, and ask the most pertinent question of all: "You ever consider just annexing the Twins?"
And Preller will say, adjusting his eyepatch and repositioning his shoulder parrot, "Well, what's the fun in that?" Frankly, he'll be right. What need does he have for the Cobb Hightowers or Brandon Butterworths of the world? That's Derek Falvey's lookout, not his. At least for the moment.
