Minnesota Twins miss out on Shoehi Ohtani but still show their genius in pair of trades
The Minnesota Twins aren’t going to get the big international fish this offseason, but they still managed to cash in on the process on Wednesday night.
Shoehi Ohtani has been predicted to be a very good baseball player. He’s been compared to Babe Ruth. Every MLB team imaginable wanted the pitcher/designated hitter/outfielder/poet (I am just guessing on the poet thing), but Ohtani obviously can only choose one team. There can only be one and we found out earlier this week that he would not be picking the Minnesota Twins. That didn’t stop the Twins from taking advantage of Ohtani’s coming, though.
To make a very complicated process kind of simple, the Twins went into this offseason with the most money of any MLB team to spend on international free agents. Once it was learned that the Twins wouldn’t land Ohtani, the Twins had too much so they looked to trade some of that international bonus pool cap space away.
That is exactly what the Twins did. Twice.
Breaking: We have acquired catcher David Banuelos from the Seattle Mariners in exchange for $1,000,000 in international bonus pool cap space.
— Minnesota Twins (@Twins) December 7, 2017
Breaking: We have acquired outfielder Jacob Pearson from the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in exchange for $1,000,000 in international bonus pool cap space money.
— Minnesota Twins (@Twins) December 7, 2017
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As seen in the tweets above, the Twins sent a million bucks to both the Los Angeles Angels and to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for a prospect from both teams. There was no way the Twins were going to use all their international bonus pool cap space this offseason and they took an asset that they no longer needed and turned it into actually usable assets.
Derek Falvey and Thad Levine are showing how forward thinking they are with these simple moves. David Banuelos and Jacob Pearson might both flop, but it’s still a no-brainer. It makes more sense to have multiple chips and see if you can cash in big on one of them.
It might not be the biggest move of the offseason for the Minnesota Twins, we might not even remember it in a month, but it does show us that Falvey and Levine are thinking outside the box.