Twins on Deadline: 'We have what we need'

MINNEAPOLIS -- With the particularly loud exception of the San Diego Padres, this Trade Deadline proved a quiet one for many contenders. The thoroughly injured Twins were no exception, as Monday's 3 p.m. CT Deadline came and went without any trade to bolster the 2020 club. Instead, Minnesota will count on its plethora of sidelined contributors to serve as impact additions this September.

The Twins could surely have used a jolt in light of their recent five-game losing streak, slumbering offense and slide from first to third in the American League Central standings -- but they insist that jolt is still coming anyway.

"We believe we have the players here to win and to succeed and to get the job done," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "These five-game stretches, these periods of time, of course, they affect you and they're not easy to get through, but we have all of the talent, we have the players, we have what we need and our guys are going to be ready to go today when we step out there on the field."

This was an unusual Deadline like none other, with only 35 games to evaluate the club's needs before Monday's buzzer sounded with only a month remaining for rentals to contribute to the team. Also consider that prospect evaluation was severely hindered by the lack of a Minor League season and the valuation of future options and contracts was also skewed by the financial limitations of the pandemic-impacted '20 campaign.

"To say this was business as usual would be a complete misrepresentation of what it was to evaluate players with other teams and certainly to think about prospects," president of baseball operations Derek Falvey said.

Michael Pineda should be the first of the reinforcements to arrive when he returns from suspension to start Tuesday's game against the White Sox. Josh Donaldson (right calf strain) and Byron Buxton (left shoulder inflammation) shouldn't be too far behind, as they both played in an intrasquad game at the alternate training site in St. Paul as part of the final stage of their ramp-up before their anticipated return to the team sometime this week.

Relief pitchers Zack Littell and Cody Stashak also shouldn't be too far off, as Baldelli indicated last week that Littell wasn't too seriously hurt, and he said Monday that Stashak is expected to throw a bullpen session soon and return to the team not long after that.

Mitch Garver, Jake Odorizzi and Homer Bailey aren't as close to their returns for now, but Falvey said he expects all three to impact the team this season.

With all that in mind, the Twins felt comfortable holding off on any trades at this Deadline. There's no certainty that those players will all come back and perform at their talent level, to be sure, but there's enough talent there that Falvey and his staff didn't feel the need to trade a high-end prospect to make a splash.

"We've got a lot of really good prospects that we think are going to help us here in the short term, hopefully soon -- potentially even this year, but certainly in the next couple of seasons -- that we think will be a big part of our team, and we want to make sure we're building with that group, not necessarily depleting it," Falvey said.

Why not a bat? Weren't Garver and Donaldson not hitting before they got hurt, anyway?

The Twins aren't shying away from their season-long struggles against left-handed pitching (.657 team OPS against southpaws, 25th in MLB), but they've maintained that the return of Donaldson, Buxton and Garver should help close that gap. It's true that Garver (.154/.262/.212) and Donaldson (.182/.296/.318) weren't doing much at the plate before their injuries, but there's no chance that any trade acquisition would have displaced either from the lineup on the basis of such a small sample size, anyway.

Falvey and Baldelli will trust their evaluations of those players and their track records instead of overreacting to seven games (Donaldson) or 17 games (Garver).

"We can't predict any of the future perfectly, but I'm excited about looking at the group that we have right now that should join us sometime this week as being huge boosts for our club, more than probably what we could have acquired through the course of the Deadline, for sure," Falvey said.

How about an impact starting pitcher?

The starting rotation wasn't exactly an area of immediate need for this club, since it will have a full five starters upon Pineda's return, and six whenever Odorizzi is healthy. MLB.com's Jon Paul Morosi reported before the Deadline that the Twins checked in on controllable starters Dylan Bundy and Lance Lynn with an eye toward 2021, but those two also drew interest from several other teams and ultimately didn't move, indicating that the asking prices didn't line up in any case to cause a deal.

Mike Clevinger was the only front-end controllable starter on the move -- and he was shipped as part of a massive nine-player swap.

"Our hope was to focus on some longer-term controlled players when we checked in with other clubs that will help us not just in '20, but in subsequent seasons," Falvey said. "It just didn't really line up for us, and that's something we can probably revisit, in a few cases, in the offseason, going into '21 and beyond. For us, though, to answer the question directly, we didn't have any restrictions around the financial side of things."

The bullpen is gassed; couldn't the Twins have used another arm?

The Twins did run into a bullpen crunch during their recent road trip, but that should naturally alleviate when Pineda returns and lessens the need for bullpen games. In addition, the Twins recently had consecutive off-days in Detroit and now enter an extremely friendly part of the schedule that features five idle days in September, making it easier to keep an 11-man bullpen fresh.

It's not that the Twins really needed the help anyway; their 3.78 bullpen ERA is fifth in the American League, and even with Taylor Rogers as the only high-leverage lefty in the relief corps, Minnesota actually has one of the better bullpens in the league at dealing with left-handed hitters, ranking ninth with a .278 wOBA allowed.

"We felt that our starting rotation, our bullpen and some of those areas were pitching pretty well and we felt like we had some depth in that group that can carry us forward," Falvey said. "Our position players, when we get fully healthy and back, and they’re clicking the way we know they can, that will round out our team a little bit more."