{"id":96748,"date":"2025-06-11T21:29:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T21:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/96748\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T21:29:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T21:29:09","slug":"twins-claim-joey-wentz-mlb-trade-rumors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/96748\/","title":{"rendered":"Twins Claim Joey Wentz – MLB Trade Rumors"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Twins announced that they have claimed left-hander Joey Wentz<\/a> off waivers from the Pirates. The latter club designated him for assignment a few days ago. Wentz is out of options, so the Twins will need to make a corresponding active roster move when he reports to the team. To open a 40-man spot for Wentz, the Twins have transferred righty Pablo L\u00f3pez<\/a> to the 60-day injured list. It was reported last week that L\u00f3pez is expected to miss eight to twelve weeks due to a teres major strain.<\/p>\n

Wentz, 27, is in his fourth major league season. He was primarily a starting pitcher in 2022 and 2023 but didn\u2019t quite establish himself as a bonafide big league rotation member. At the end of the 2023 season, he had a 5.99 earned run average and had exhausted his final option season.<\/p>\n

That pushed him to the bullpen, a role in which he has shown some potential. He tossed 55 1\/3 innings out of Detroit\u2019s bullpen last year. The 5.37 ERA wasn\u2019t great, nor was his 10.6% walk rate, but his 23.6% strikeout rate and 42% ground ball rate were pretty close to average. That got him bumped off the roster at the end of August last year.<\/p>\n

The Pirates put in a claim and got some encouraging results from Wentz to end the season. He posted a 1.50 ERA in 12 frames after that claim. His walk rate ticked up to 12% but he also struck out 26% of batters faced.<\/p>\n

He stuck on Pittsburgh\u2019s roster through the winter and into 2025 with some mixed results so far. His 9.6% walk rate is still a bit high but an improvement for him. He\u2019s also tamped down his home runs, with only 6.5% of fly balls leaving the yard compared to 11.3% last year. His 41.8% ground ball rate is still close to league par but his strikeout rate has dipped to 19.1%.<\/p>\n

That got him bumped off Pittsburgh\u2019s roster but the Twins will take a shot on him. Minnesota currently has Danny Coulombe<\/a> as its only lefty reliever on the active roster, with Kody Funderburk<\/a> on optional assignment. Wentz will give manager Rocco Baldelli<\/a> a second southpaw in the relief corps alongside Coulombe, at least for the time being. Given his out-of-options status, Wentz will likely have a tenuous hold on a roster spot unless he takes a step forward.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Mark J. Rebilas, Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Twins announced that they have claimed left-hander Joey Wentz off waivers from the Pirates. The latter club…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2388],"tags":[5,1710,822,60,3190,4,1997,148],"class_list":{"0":"post-96748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-twins","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-joey-wentz","10":"tag-minnesota","11":"tag-minnesota-twins","12":"tag-minnesotatwins","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-pablo-lopez","15":"tag-twins"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/114666862974322067","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}