The Minnesota Twins made their third signing of the undrafted free agent period in catcher Allante Hall from Pensacola State (JUCO).
It’s important to remember when looking at the Minnesota Twins signings that the team can only sign players to $20,000 deals, so a lot of the players will choose to wait to get a better pay day next year.
This means that some of the players the Twins will sign aren’t going to be top-of-the-line talent. This helps to explain why the Twins brought in Allante Hall, a catcher from a junior college in Florida with just 32 college games to his name last season.
Hall, who was committed to the University of Missouri, doesn’t appear to have a strong suit outside of avoiding errors. He started his career at Howard College (a tiny community college in Texas), where he hit .273 with 1 homer and 8 RBI over 22 games.
His best stats were his very good on-base percentage (.431) and fielding percentage (.985), the latter of which helped make up for his ghastly runners caught stealing percentage (RCSP) of .118. In 2020, his offensive numbers got worse, but his defensive numbers shot up.
After moving to a different JUCO college, Pensacola State, Hall posted a fielding percentage of .991 and an RCSP of .400 over his 13 games there during the shortened season. That’s a huge jump, and probably helped the convince the Twins that there was something here worth looking at.
I think this signing is extremely similar to the Sweany deal, a deal where the Twins brought in a low level player (both very small schools) with decent upside (Sweany has elite command and four pitches, Hall has very good defensive and OBP numbers) and poor stats (both didn’t have all that grade of college numbers).
Finally, each player plays a position that the Twins’ farm system doesn’t have a lot of talent in: Catcher and Left-Handed Pitchers. These are both low risk, medium reward deals. If Hall (and Sweany) can hit their potential, this is a good signing.
Overly Optimistic MLB Comparison: Tyler Flowers, Atlanta Braves
Flowers is a sneaky good defensive catcher who had a decent arm when he was younger. Flowers will never hit .300 or 20 homers, but that’s not his game. With some coaching and a little luck, Hall could be a .240 hitter with 10 homers and good defense in a back-up role.