2 players on the chopping block ahead of Twins' non-tender deadline

Friday is the deadline for teams to make final decisions on which arbitration-eligible players will get moved to the next phase of salary negotiations and who will get non-tendered and hit free agency. The Minnesota Twins have 11 players that they’ll need to make a call on, most of which seem to be no-brainer tenders.

Guys like Griffin Jax, Royce Lewis, Ryan Jeffers, and Bailey Ober are all going to get to tendered, as will Jhoan Duran, Brock Stewart, and Joe Ryan. Willi Castro is the biggest question mark but it seems unlikely that the Twins will non-tender him when he at least has some trade value this winter.

Castro is due to make $6.2 million, which puts the team in almost an identical situation to what happened with Kyle Farmer this time last year. Even with Alex Kirilloff retiring and Diego Castillo electing free agency, the Twins have a pretty big chunk of the payroll tied up in projected arbitration salary which means a few guys might get non-tendered to save some cash.

Justin Topa is a dark horse non-tender candidate for Twins

One of the easiest decisions will be non-tendering Michael Tonkin, who is due a projected $1.5 million and is out of minor league options. Another arm out of the bullpen could find himself packing up his bags as well. Justin Topa was acquired from the Seattle Mariners as part of the Jorge Polanco salary dump, and there was a fair amount of hype surrounding his arrival.

Unfortunately we had to wait until September to see him make his debut, at which point Minnesota’s season was already cooked. Topa only appeared in three games and pitched just 2.1 innings of work, which sadly might be the most production anyone got out of the pieces in that trade.

There’s an easy argument to make for Topa getting tendered and the Twins potentially using the small sample size they got out of him as a reason to settle at a lower arbitration figure. Topa is projected for $1.3 million, which is a fair price if nothing can be arranged otherwise.

However, the Twins are allergic to spending money which could be a reason the team non-tenders Topa and moves on. Saving that $1.3 million against an already anemic $130 million projected payroll is the type of move a team like Minnesota would absolutely make. Dumping Polanco’s salary was the main objective of that trade, there’s zero motivation to then retain salary that was acquired.

That’s not a good baseball decision, but there’s also not a ton of evidence to suggest keeping Topa would be either. He finished 2023 with a 2.61 ERA in 69 innings of relief work and is a hard throwing middle reliever the bullpen could use. He nearly missed all of last season with various injury setbacks which doesn’t bode well for his reliability next year.

At the risk of sounding like a Pohlad pocket protector, a $1.3 million price point might be a little steep for Topa.

Then again, a serious ballclub wouldn’t look at that figure as a potential back-breaking straw. A full season of Topa might be worth that price, especially with how much improvement the bullpen needs, but he seems like an easy non-tender candidate if the Twins are looking to slash some salary.

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