In the days leading up to Major League Baseball’s last lockout in 2021, there was a free agent frenzy, with many of the biggest names on the market signing lucrative long-term deals.
As teams raced against the clock to get some of their offseason work done before the lockout began, the Twins joined in, signing starting pitcher Dylan Bundy to a one-year deal and locking up star center fielder Byron Buxton long term.
MLB is once again preparing for a potential lockout that would begin at 10:59 p.m. CT on Dec. 1 if players and ownership are unable to reach agreement on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.
With a lockout being an anticipated outcome — ownership wants a salary cap, the players union is vehemently opposed — there is all kinds of uncertainty hovering over this offseason. Last time around, the season started just a week late and teams played 162 games; this time there is fear a stoppage could cut deeper into the schedule.
The Twins are planning accordingly, on multiple fronts.
If there is a lockout, players and team employees will have to sever communication, that includes players rehabbing from injuries and offseason surgeries. To combat that, Twins manager Derek Shelton said they would “overcommunicate” with players in the weeks directly the CBA deadline.
“I think between our training and our strength-and-conditioning group, and the subsets of the groups, they’ve done a good job of planning: ‘OK, this is what your routine should look like,’ ” Shelton said. “And then part of it, a large part of it, is a responsibility to the players to be able to act on it and keep it going when there is no communication.”
A number of key players — Buxton, starting pitcher Pablo López and top prospect Walker Jenkins among them — are rehabbing from surgeries and while the Twins may not be able to communicate with them directly, it’s possible that they will be allowed to contact a trainer or physical therapist to stay up-to-date with their progress.
While the training and coaching staffs has been working on offseason plans, the front office is conducting “a post mortem, if you will,” on the baseball and business sides, team owner Tom Pohlad said.
“We’ll obviously be heavily focused on baseball for the next 30 days, and we’re excited to get going,” the Twins’ managing owner said.
As always, free agency will open five days after the conclusion of the World Series, and nobody is quite sure what the market might look like in the lead up to Dec. 1.
“We want to just make sure we’re prepared for any and all scenarios, whether that means the market is hot and there’s a lot of action or the market is cool and there’s not as much going on,” general manager Jeremy Zoll said. “Our job, and we’ve already had a lot of really productive conversations, these next few weeks is to make sure we’re aligned and fully ready to go on a plan so that as opportunities present themselves, we can act.”
While some teams did their big shopping before the lockout hit in 2021, there was a flurry of activity when it lifted in March 2022 as teams rushed to reshape their rosters and players hurried to sign deals to get to spring training.
The Twins traded catcher Mitch Garver to the Rangers for Isiah Kiner-Falefa, then turned around and flipped Kiner-Falefa to the New York Yankees, alongside their then-highest paid player, Josh Donaldson, and catcher Ben Rortvedt.
They also acquired starting pitcher Sonny Gray and, days later made an even bigger splash, using money saved on Donaldson’s deal to land Carlos Correa in a shocking middle-of-the-night deal reached after Correa’s previous agreements with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants collapsed over his team physicals.
“Every market has different circumstances,” Zoll said. “We just need to make the best decisions we can, not going for style points in either direction, doing things early or late.”
The Twins plan to be “aggressive when free agency starts,” Pohlad said, adding that it requires other teams ready to deal, as well.
“We can spend all the time in the world preparing potential scenarios, but we also know that there’s going to be a bunch of unexpected opportunities that come our way and we just want to be as prepared as possible for that,” Zoll said.