Matt Wallner stole the show Tuesday in a 5-3 Twins win over Detroit, as tends to happen when a Minnesota native hits a 450-foot grand slam to account for nearly all of the first-place hometown team's scoring.
Everyone wanted to dump Max Kepler and Emilio Pagán; now they're two of the Twins' best
Max Kepler and Emilio Pagán were going nowhere in mid-June, and Twins fans were wondering why they were still on the roster. Now it's hard to imagine the Twins succeeding without them.
August 16, 2023 at 5:11PM
If we might call attention to some of the secondary contributors in the game, though, we will find two Twins who have been in the middle of a lot of good things happening over the last two months.
And we'll find that those same two guys had so much go wrong in the preceding time that a lot of fans and media members wanted them run out of town.
Max Kepler? Get rid of him and bring up Wallner! Emilio Pagán? He's one of the worst relievers in baseball, one of us (me) wrote.
The consternation reached a fever pitch around the time those pieces were published in June. But the Twins stuck with both players, and right around that time their seasons started to turn around — as I talked about on Wednesday's Daily Delivery podcast.
Through June 18, Kepler was hitting a paltry .189 with a .625 OPS. That's bad production for slick-fielding utility infielder, let alone a corner outfielder like Kepler.
He's in the last year of his contract (the Twins do have a team option for 2024), and it seemed like a no-brainer: Kepler was cooked, and with a glut of left-handed hitters fitting a similar profile the Twins might as well just release him and move on.
But since June 18, Kepler has been a different player. He has a .285 average and .898 OPS, showing the power (12 homers in 158 at bats) that he did in 2019. On Tuesday, he had an important single that helped the Twins build the big inning that Wallner capped with his dramatic home run.
Pagán, meanwhile, had been decent in low-leverage situations for the first couple months of the season but seemed to self-destruct whenever given a bigger opportunity.
Those who watched him give up countless back-breaking homers in 2022 and couldn't understand why he was brought back in 2023 thought the Twins would surely see the light and finally move on.
Instead, perhaps motivated by both faith and necessity because of other bullpen injuries and shortcomings, the Twins stuck with Pagán.
And in 25 outings since June 15, he's allowed just 10 hits and four runs, including a scoreless seventh on Tuesday right after the Twins' big inning.
Two months ago, it was hard to imagine why the Twins would want to keep either player. Now it's hard to imagine how they would survive without them.
Here are four more things to know today:
*Chris Hine was my guest on Daily Delivery and we had an interesting discussion about all the Wolves players involved in international play this summer — including Anthony Edwards, Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns. Will it make them sharper coming into camp, or does the risk of overuse and/or injury outweigh the positives?
*ESPN did a list of the top 50 prospects in MLB, and three of the top 33 are on the Twins.
*The Michael Oher story has taken another turn. There figure to be several more twists along the way.
*Wild defenseman Brock Faber is my guest on Thursday's podcast. We'll talk about his whirlwind spring, the coming season and what he and roommate Sammy Walker like to make for dinner.
When he was hired after the disastrous 2016 season to reshape the Twins, Derek Falvey brought a reputation for identifying and developing pitching talent. It took a while, but the pipeline we were promised is now materializing.
