Over the weekend the Minnesota Twins made waves in the baseball community by announcing that they were not bringing Byron Buxton up when the Triple-A season ends on Monday. The decision effectively ended Buxton’s 2018 season before it really got a chance to get going, and created a take-storm for one big reason.
By not bringing Buxton up for the last month of the season, they’ll retain his rights through the 2022 season. If he’d been with the team something like a dozen games this month, he’d eat up enough service time to reach free agency following the 2021 season; or in other words, the same winter he’d turn 28.
Let’s just try to talk through all the potential reasons — good, bad, otherwise — and at least get into the thought process behind it.
Buxton’s season was an absolute disaster. There’s no sugarcoating it. He came down with migraines in Puerto Rico in April, was put on the disabled list to allow the Twins to not operate with a short bench in Tampa and broke his big toe on his first rehab game at Fort Myers.
He came back too quickly — just under a month — and hit just .122/.140/.163 before the Twins again shut him down in Kansas City. They put him back on the disabled list to let the toe fully heal, and when he returned he was sent to Rochester — where he spent the rest of the season.
If that wasn’t enough, Buxton dealt with wrist issues in late July that again put him on the shelf.
The upshot was that Buxton spent three months with the Red Wings, and still got into just 35 games. Buxton hit .272/.331/.456 with the Red Wings — well below his career marks of .310/.364/.537 at the level — and even that doesn’t tell the entire story.
While a .787 OPS at Triple-A is certainly respectable — in Buxton’s case, doing that for a season in the big leagues with his defense and speed would make him a star — doing it in such a small sample size makes it easy for those numbers to be distorted.
Take a look at how Buxton’s numbers break down:
- First 29 games with Rochester – .234/.298/.405
- Final six games – .458/.500/.708
So can the case be made that he didn’t exactly play at a high enough level for long enough to merit a call-up? I mean, maybe? There isn’t really a strong enough case on either side to make this the rallying cry of torch-and-pitchfork nation.
In Mike Berardino’s column on the subject, he mentions that general manager Thad Levine suggested Buxton has been playing through a nagging left wrist injury, and that it — along with on-field performance beyond raw stats in the minors and a lack of playing time in the majors — were factors that led to the non-promotion.
Let’s look at each of those individually.
Well, we already looked at the numbers part of it. If the statistic is “games played,” it’s a valid argument, and a sub-.800 OPS and four strikeouts for every walk doesn’t really scream promotion either. Strikeouts aren’t the be-all, end-all argument for a lot of players, but that’s more the case in the major leagues for guys who hit the ball out of the ballpark. Buxton, a career .230/.285/.387 hitter, has struck out 31.7 percent of the time in the big leagues, and fanned 28.4 percent of the time with Rochester this season.
That’s at least somewhat problematic.
The playing time argument seems perhaps the flimsiest. While Max Kepler, Eddie Rosario and Jake Cave are all capable of playing a passable center field defensively — I’d rate Kepler the best, but probably no better than a B/B+ out there — they aren’t on the same planet as Buxton. And while those three all deserve the bulk of the playing time based on how they’ve played this season, Rosario is currently battling a quad injury and hasn’t played since last Thursday.
Rosario was also bothered by a shoulder injury earlier in the season, and has seen his numbers slide as a result. Rosario was scratched from a June 21 game against the Red Sox due to the shoulder issue, and in the 60 games since has hit just .261/.295/.378 as his season OPS has dropped from .938 to .813 over that time frame.
In the short-term, it’d be easy to find Buxton playing time. Hell, even in the medium-term — there isn’t really a long-term with just a month left — mixing and matching based on matchups would make some sense.
Anyway, the health thing is a bit strange, too. Is Buxton any less likely to get hurt in minor-league games — of which he’s played 12 over the last two weeks since his return from the wrist issue — than in the big leagues? My inclination would be no, and Buxton’s numbers over that 12-game stretch — .365/.400/.596 — again probably suggest he should be up here.
Now, had the Twins opted to shut Buxton down in late July with the wrist thing, they could have probably avoided this dust-up, right?
“Get the wrist healthy and come back ready to go in 2019.”
There are some dynamics at play there that probably don’t allow that to work either — like Buxton’s work ethic, for one — but again, it’d pass the public sniff test much more easily.
The other thing Levine said was that the team hoped to “make amends” down the line. What could he mean by that?
Well, the obvious guess is money, and that’s where most people are pounding the table with this controversy.
Just another case of the Twins being cheap, right?
You may or may not be surprised, but even in a year where the Twins signed more free agents than ever before and had the highest payroll in club history, that narrative is still living large like a Twinkie after a nuclear holocaust.
Are the Twins being cheap here? Eh, sort of. But honestly, this is more along the lines of ethically questionable than being cheap. Like going to the movies and sneaking into a second movie once you’re finished with the first. Or perhaps better yet, sneaking an expired coupon past the 15-year-old cashier at Cub Foods.
The Twins aren’t going to get out of paying Buxton as a Super-2 this offseason. It’s the first year he’s eligible for arbitration, and he’s part of a select class that doesn’t have three years of time, but is close enough to that mark to jump into that bracket at the head of the class.
Even with Buxton’s lost 2018, he still stands to roughly quadruple his salary from $580,000 this year to about $2 million. That estimation comes from Jon Becker of Roster Resource, one of the brightest young minds in the community.
And maybe this is where the “make amends” comment comes into play. If the Twins offer him a sweetener — perhaps even $2.5-$3 million — they can attempt to smooth things over while trying to battle the “cheap” narrative and still not hurt the bottom line of a team with ample money to spend this offseason.
In that case, it’s not as much about being cheap — though it’ll still be called that, and honestly it’s not an inexcusable label for the average fan — but rather believing he’ll continue to develop on a path that’ll make his age-28 season extremely valuable to have in the club’s back pocket.
No two players are the same, but it’d be great to undo the Aaron Hicks trade, right? He’s in the midst of his age-28 season, and has blossomed into a star under the game’s brightest lights. He’s hitting .252/.370/.478 while hitting in the middle of a Yankees lineup that has battled injuries to key players all season long.
Through four MLB seasons, Hicks was hitting .223/.299/.346 — a 77 OPS+. Through four MLB seasons, Buxton is hitting .230/.285/.387 — a 79 OPS+. Buxton is also just 24 as of this writing, while Hicks was 26 at that time.
Baseball is a long, slow burn, and development can be difficult. Remember Hicks when considering this with Buxton.
And back to the topic at hand — the best way to look at this positively is that the Twins believe Buxton is going to be expensive when he’s 28, and they’d like to maintain that control before he’s eligible to declare free agency. The bookkeeping part of it is questionable at best — see the amateur labor-lawyer sect of baseball Twitter for proof — but it’s not impossible to see that beneath the surface, it strangely shows that the Twins still believe in Buxton the player.
This is just a really, really, really strange way to show it. Maybe this will all be forgotten in two years when Buxton signs a mega-deal for eight years and $200 million? Or maybe Buxton will be wishing he took the reported “lowball” multi-year offer from last offseason as reported by KSTP’s Darren Wolfson?
Only time will tell. It could get ugly.
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