Luis Gil, the former Minnesota Twins prospect who was traded away back in 2018, won AL Rookie of the Year after his stellar season with the New York Yankees. Some might say it was a surprising victory, given how close the race was this year, but none of those people are from Minnesota.
There's a running joke among Twins fans that you could fill an All-Star team with former players who found success after leaving Minnesota. It's almost like a rite of passage at this point, and that lore that continued to grow on Monday night.
Gil was traded to the Yankees in exchange for Jake Cave, a trade that aged poorly with each passing day. It wasn't that Cave was a total bust, rather he didn't live up to the expectations of the trade as it was at the time, and certainly looks worse in hindsight now that Gil has turned into the exact thing Minnesota could use right now.
Luis Gil winning AL Rookie of the Year is one final sick twist in the Jake Cave trade
Cave was a rising prospect when Minnesota acquired him, and it wasn't long after the trade that he made his MLB debut. After that things were pretty uneven, as Cave hit .235/.297/.411 in 335 games for the Twins, but never really ascended to the level the team was hoping he might.
Never rising above being more than depth, and at best being a dissapointment in the outfield platoon, Cave's time with Minnesota came to an end when he fractured his back in 2021 and was waived a year later.
Fans already had a sour taste in their mouths about the trade, but all would have ben forgotten if not for the absolute heater that Gil went on in his rookie year. He actually debuted with the Yankees back in 2021 but underwent Tommy John surgery in 2022 that threw him off track.
He got back on track in a big way this past season, becoming one of the best starting pitchers in baseball and solidifying himself as top arm next to Gerrit Cole in the Yankees' rotation. As if the uneven nature of the trade wasn't bad enough, Gil's rise as Rookie of the Year comes at a time when the Twins' rotation is in shambles.
Pablo Lopez took a step back, Joe Ryan suffered a season-ending injury, and Bailey Ober did all he could to keep things together. All of the bad stuff aside, imagine a world where the top of the Twins' rotation is Pablo-Joe Ryan-Luis Gil; there's no conversation at all right now about the team needing to find frontline help.
Instead, and already bad trade continues to linger and serve as a reminder of just how badly the Twins tend to miss when they take a big swing.
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