On Thursday, the Milwaukee Brewers traded All-Star pitcher Freddy Peralta, the ace of their staff, to the New York Mets for standout prospects Jett Williams and Brandon Sproat.
It’s a move that further cements the big-spending Mets as perhaps the biggest threat to the juggernaut Dodgers in the National League. It’s also an on-brand move for the Brewers, who get younger and save some money by dealing one of their best players four months after winning their third straight NL Central title.
That’s not what we’re here to talk about, though. We’re here because of a detail reported by Ken Rosenthal and Will Sammon of The Athletic. According to their league sources, the Twins — along with the Giants, Padres, and Rangers — expressed some degree of late interest in Peralta before the Mets got the deal done to acquire him.
The Twins? Buyers?
It’s not actually impossible to fathom in this case, given Peralta’s reasonable contract. He’s making $8 million in 2026 on a club option in the final year of his deal. For the Mets, that’s nothing. For teams in the payroll range of the Brewers and Twins, it’s a significant figure, but not to the point where the Twins couldn’t have found a way to fit Peralta into their budget.
Freddy Peralta | Michael McLoone-Imagn Images
Adding Peralta to a rotation that already features Pablo Lopez and Joe Ryan might just have made the Twins the favorites in the AL Central. Peralta, 29, went 17-6 with a 2.70 ERA and 204 strikeouts in 176.2 innings last season. He finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting and made his first All-Star team since 2021.
To match the Mets’ offer and acquire Peralta, the Twins would’ve had to part with a package in the ballpark of Kaelen Culpepper and Zebby Matthews, if not more. That kind of deal makes more sense for a payroll-rich team like the Mets than it does for the Twins, whose best path to contention centers around developing young players into stars.
But if there’s anything we can take from this nugget of information, it might be that the Twins have at least some interest in continuing to add to their starting rotation — and that they could be exploring trade possibilities as buyers, not sellers.
So far this offseason, the Twins have made a few minor trades and signed three MLB free agents in Josh Bell, Victor Caratini, and Taylor Rogers. At least one further bullpen addition seems likely, but it won’t be Seranthony Dominguez, who signed a two-year, $20 million deal with the White Sox on Friday. That was never going to be in the budget for Minnesota.
The Twins’ 2026 payroll is expected to be in the $115 million range, which is $20 million below their 2025 figure and over $40 million below where they were in 2023.
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