LaTroy Hawkins displaced from home by Texas winter storm

FORT MYERS, Fla. — LaTroy Hawkins returned to camp on Saturday, ready to resume his work with Twins relievers that was interrupted by the severe winter storm that struck Texas in February. He'll stick around for about a week, broadcast a couple of games for Fox Sports North, and then go back home.

Well, not home, exactly.

"We had to move out," Hawkins said of his suburban Dallas residence. "We'll be in a rental home for six to nine months."

That's because when the storm cut off power to his neighborhood, he was in Twins camp, his wife was stranded in Houston and his daughter left to stay someplace with heat. The freezing cold caused a fire-sprinkler pipe to burst inside their home, and his wife returned a few days to find the house flooded. Worse, no workers were available to help drain the water for several days.

"The water ran and ran. We don't know how long, but there was a lot of water," said Hawkins, who cut short his stay with the Twins to deal with it. "It's a lot of damage."

He'll try to put that out of his mind this week as he resumes his role as mentor, instructor — and pupil, too.

"I love being here, I love helping guys get better, Most of the time it's them asking me questions, what I thought when I was in that situation, what I was trying to do with different pitches," Hawkins said. "And being around [pitching coaches] Wes [Johnson] and Pete [Maki] and [senior pitching analyst] Josh Kalk, I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the analytical process of development."

The regular season is less than two weeks away, and the Twins still aren't certain whether they have the right to option lefthander Lewis Thorpe to the minors. Thorpe's status, along with that of about a half-dozen other players, will be decided by an arbitrator, a ruling that teams had hoped and expected would be handed down by now.

At stake is whether Thorpe, who has been optioned to the minors three times, normally the maximum, can be optioned a fourth time because of a technicality hinging on whether players who spent most of last season at alternate training sites played a "full season."

If Thorpe doesn't have a fourth option, the Twins would have to waive him in order to send him to the minors, allowing the other 29 teams to claim him instead. If that's the case, the Twins might just keep him in the majors rather than risk losing him, a decision that obviously has ripple effects.

So how do the Twins finalize their roster without a decision? "We're proceeding with the last answer we were given [in January], which is that he has another option," said Derek Falvey, president of baseball operations. "He's still in camp, so it's not an issue yet. Hopefully we'll have clarity on it sooner rather than later, but it's not holding anything up yet."

The Twins make their lone trip of the spring to Sarasota on Sunday to face the Orioles, a one-day break from the "pod" schedule that MLB has used this spring to cut down on travel. Nearly 80% of their Grapefruit League games have come against just three nearby opponents: the Red Sox, Rays and Braves.

Doesn't seeing the same teams 23 times in 29 games grow tedious? Not to Rocco Baldelli, who hopes this narrow schedule, adapted as a pandemic measure, carries over to future years, too.

"I'm actually not sick of playing these teams, because we're not having to drive 2½ or three hours to go play the other teams," the Twins' manager said. "Over the course of a long spring, that means something. [It] helps everyone get a little bit more sleep and a little bit more time at home and not just sitting in the bus or car for extra hours a day."

The identity of those everyday opponents pleases him, too. The Twins are getting daily innings against the AL champions, the NL East champions and the 2018 World Series champions, though the Red Sox have only a handful of players remaining from that team. It helps explain their 6-10-1 record, and the fact that they had scored only 12 runs in their previous six games through Friday, but Baldelli figures it will pay off later.

"We're playing some good teams over and over again. That's good for us as we get ready for our season," he said. "Playing the best makes you better."