Minnesota Twins: Mock trade talks with Giants expert from Around the Foghorn

With the Minnesota Twins and the San Francisco Giants becoming trade partners in the next couple weeks, we invited Joel Reuter to try and make a deal.

If you’re a contending team like the Minnesota Twins, the month of July is an exciting time to be a fan. Rumors are swirling as to what moves you could make to improve your roster and with the Twins still holding onto a lead in the American League Central, it’s likely that Minnesota will try to make a big push to not only make the postseason but win their first postseason series since 2002 and first game since 2004.

In order to do that, the Twins will have to try to make a deal with a team that’s looking to rebuild. Recent rumors have linked Minnesota to the San Francisco Giants as they try to pick up the pieces from their dynasty in the early part of the decade. Of the Twins biggest interest is closer Will Smith and starter Madison Bumgarner, both of whom should be the top trade targets on the market.

As one would expect, the Twins are looking into acquiring one (or perhaps both) of the hurlers as Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic (subscription required) named them as part of a group of teams looking to acquire Bumgarner and NBC Sports Bay Area reports that the Twins are more interested in Smith at this point.

With this much smoke, we here at Puckett’s Pond decided to bring in Joel Reuter from Around The Foghorn for a mock negotiation. This represents a good opportunity to not only see if the Twins can pull a deal off, but also how much it would take to acquire one or even both of the Giants hurlers.

What should the Twins be thinking coming in?

If I’m Thad Levine or Derek Falvey, I’m going all-in on this Twins team. Sure, they have their flaws and their recent play might have some gritting their teeth, but they have the offensive ability to hang with any team in Major League Baseball and enough pitching to give their lineup to come away with the win.

While the Twins could sit on their hands and hope for the best, the chance to land an elite reliever or another quality starter is one they can’t pass up. During the past couple of weeks, Twins starters haven’t been able to go deep into games, which has, in turn, exposed their bullpen. While upgrading the back end is important, the starting rotation shouldn’t be ignored.

In order to make a solid offer, the Twins need to look at previous deals to see what could be a precedent. The best one that I thought of was the deal that sent Justin Verlander to Houston in August 2017. In that deal, the Astros coughed up Franklin Perez (No. 3 prospect according to MLB Pipeline at the time), Daz Cameron (No. 9) and Jake Rogers (No. 11) to get their eventual ace.

On the flip side, the Giants are also going to be looking for a haul in exchange for Smith. The left-hander has had a dominant season and Reuter recently compared it to the season Aroldis Chapman had in 2016 for the New York Yankees. That year, Chapman was dealt at the deadline to the Chicago Cubs in exchange for Gleyber Torres, Billy McKinney, Adam Warren and Rashad Crawford.

Torres has developed into a two-time All-Star for the Yankees since the deal and McKinney has started to earn major league playing time in Toronto after being sent over in a deal that landed J.A. Happ. Warren and Crawford haven’t done much, but the acquisition of Torres (and the re-signing of Chapman the following offseason) was worth making the deal.

In other words, the Twins would need a lot to make either happen, but if we’re going all in, why not shoot for the moon and get both?

The opening proposal for a blockbuster

As you can see in the previous slide, the Giants aren’t going to give up any of their prized trade chips for peanuts. With that in mind, I went toward the top of the Twins prospect list on MLB Pipeline and asked myself what would be attractive in a package to acquire both Bumgarner and Smith. That way, it would at least tell me what the Giants would be interested in and I could work down from there if the price got too rich.

I also want to shy away from dealing Royce Lewis or Alex Kirilloff as future franchise pillars and even though Brusdar Graterol has a shoulder injury, I feel his upside is too much to just give up on at age 20.

Here, the Giants get Rooker, who has been on a tear at Triple-A Rochester with a .286 average to go with 14 HR and 47 RBI, but also will have a tough time cracking the outfield with Max Kepler, Byron Buxton and Eddie Rosario entrenched in Minnesota and C.J. Cron being another roadblock at first base.

Balazovic, who recently made a nice impression at the MLB Futures All-Star Game, seems like a nice second option to me as the fifth-best prospect in the organization. Nick Gordon and Stephen Gonsalves aren’t sexy pieces for the Giants, but they’re still ranked high enough that the Twins could part ways with them and not feel so bad about it.

When Reuter gets the offer, he mentions that he likes the package of Rooker and Balazovic as a starting point, but doesn’t believe that Gordon and Gonsalves is a valid third piece to make packaging the two trade chips worth it. He also believes that to maximize their value, it would make more sense to deal each separately, but for the sake of this article, we’re going to try to pull off the blockbuster anyway as he makes a counter offer.

Making a blockbuster: Part II

In order to make the deal worth it on his end, Reuter wants to get a lower trade chip that might have more upside in the coming years. To make that happen, he picks out the name of Misael Urbina, who the Twins signed as an international prospect last July. There hasn’t been too much in terms of reports on the 17-year old, but his performance in the Dominican League last summer was enough to draw interest here.

Reuter also invites me to throw in another prospect along with Gordon, making this a five prospect deal. In all likelihood, this is where the Twins probably bow out as there are enough other options elsewhere to not gut their entire farm system. For this article, I gave it a spin anyway and add another outfielder in Gilberto Celestino, who was ranked 16th by MLB Pipeline.

At this point, Reuter likes the deal enough to agree to it, but I have major cold feet giving San Francisco their outfield of the future, a former first-round pick and a pitcher on the rise. We both feel like this is the deal that would get the blockbuster done, but start exploring what it would take to acquire both pitchers individually.

A deal for Madison Bumgarner

Keeping the Verlander deal in the back of my mind, I realize that Rooker and Balazovic are going to have to be involved in any deal the Twins are in with the Giants. In this case, Reuter is willing to go a little lighter on the back end of the deal and would accept Gordon coming over instead of the two lesser-known outfield prospects.

With Gordon being blocked by Lewis and Jorge Polanco at the major league level, he also has a new prospect behind him in 2019 first-round pick Keoni Cavaco and Wander Javier. With the glut of shortstops in the Twins system, Gordon seems like a reasonable third piece that the Twins could do without and still gives the Giants three top 11 prospects, which falls into the same neighborhood as the Verlander deal.

The Twins could hope that Bumgarner would pay off in the same fashion as Verlander has revived his career thanks to the analytics the Astros use with their pitchers. While Bumgarner may only be a one-year rental, he provides elite playoff experience and if the Twins could revive him in the same fashion they have given Martin Perez, Michael Pineda and Kyle Gibson a bump this year, it could be worth giving up on the long-term upside.

Drawing a conclusion (and what the Twins should do)

Going into this exercise, I knew that the Twins were going to have to give up a lot to get either pitcher. As I left, I’m not sure if the Twins would be willing enough to part with what it takes to make a deal happen.

It’s easy as fans to be an armchair general manager and just toss the lower level prospects aside, but once you dive in and know what some of these prospects can do, it becomes more difficult. Rooker is a player that has shown a track record of power dating back to his days at Mississippi State and Balazovic is continuing to rise up the Twins organization with a combination of nasty stuff and terrific control.

Even when it comes to the case of Urbina and Celestino, they’re both prospects that the average fan wouldn’t know, but their upside makes you wonder if the Twins would be willing to part with them in order to make a rental player deal. It’s not what Twins fans want to hear, but it’s the truth.

If either of these trades were to come to fruition, I think the Smith trade would be the best-case scenario for the Twins. It would help bump Taylor Rogers down to a set-up role, but also lock down the back end of games, which late into the season is a huge advantage.

In any event, what do you think as readers? Should the Twins throw caution to the wind and make a deal or should Minnesota look elsewhere to bolster their roster? Either way, it should make for a couple of interesting months leading up to the deadline.

Special thanks to Joel Reuter of Around the Foghorn for taking the time to make this negotiation possible.