The bewilderment over the Twins dealing 10 players off the major league roster at the trade deadline did not reach an absurd peak until you looked at the totality of the moves and couldn’t help but notice:
Hey, they traded away their five best relief pitchers.
Not one or two, like maybe we reasonably thought, but five: Jhoan Duran to the Phillies, Griffin Jax to the Rays, Louie Varland to the Blue Jays, Brock Stewart to the Dodgers and Danny Coulombe to the Rangers.
If you took away the Vikings’ five best offensive linemen, J.J. McCarthy might file a grievance. If you took away the five best three-point shooters on the Wolves or Lynx, you might kiss the playoffs goodbye. If you took away the Wild’s five best penalty killers ... ah, well, they’d still be bad, but even worse than they were last season!
This is not to say the Twins were necessarily wrong in doing so. Aside from Duran (1.69 ERA with the Phillies), the other four pitchers have fallen flat with their new teams. Jax (7.20 ERA), Varland (7.56 ERA) and Coulombe (6.91) have been hit much harder than they were here, while Stewart has been shut down for three weeks with a shoulder injury after appearing in just four games (4.91 ERA).
Perhaps they would be imploding just as badly, and the Twins wouldn’t have a promising haul of prospects to show for them, had Minnesota done nothing at the trade deadline.
But we’ll never know because the Twins did in fact trade their five best relief pitchers. And they have suffered predicably when trying to hold leads ever since, as I talked about on Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast.
I went back and counted 10 games that the Twins could have won since the start of August (corresponding with the trade deadline) with better relief pitching, ones in which they had a lead in at least the middle innings or were tied at the end of nine but ended up losing.
