Bargain Shopping: Twins Should Pursue a Former AL Central Foil

Let’s begin up top with a quick disclaimer: the offseason is young, and there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding this team. Will fans be able to watch the team’s games next season? Will the Ishbia brothers buy the team from the Pohlads, possibly rescuing the franchise from its own self-imposed financial limitations? It’s hard to operate a team under circumstances in which the answer to those questions is a giant “maybe”.

Still, the only thing the Twins have done this offseason to reshape their major-league roster is selecting Eiberson Castellano in the Rule 5 Draft. Seriously, that’s it. As a team that completely collapsed down the stretch in 2024 and is playing in one of baseball’s most loaded divisions (so long as you ignore the White Sox), Minnesota has to do something if it even wants to pretend like it’s going to compete with the upstarts in Kansas City, Detroit, and Cleveland. Having lost Max Kepler, Alex Kirilloff, and Carlos Santana (among others) already, there’s work to be done.

Barring a sale to the Ishbias that gets processed in record time, the Twins aren’t going to be shopping in the upper echelon of free agency this winter. Most truly elite players are already off the board, and players like Pete Alonso and Alex Bregman figure to have suitors with much larger piggy banks vying for their services. Thus, this team will have to do some thrift shopping, though that doesn’t mean they have to resort to dumpster diving.

Let’s hone our sights on a former top prospect who never quite panned out on the South Side of Chicago. Eloy Jiménez was with the White Sox for five-and-a-half seasons before getting dumped at the 2024 trade deadline in a trade with the Baltimore Orioles. He had a strong first month in his new home (.724 OPS in August), though he went 1-for-24 in 10 games in September and was optioned to Baltimore’s Triple-A affiliate at the end of the season. He didn’t make their Wild Card round roster, and the Orioles naturally declined his $16.5-million team option ahead of free agency.

At this point in his career, Jiménez is a designated hitter. He’s been worth a comically bad -18 Outs Above Average (OAA) in his career, earning distinctly negative marks for both his arm and range in the outfield. He played all of eight innings in the field in 2024, and none after being traded to the Orioles. Luckily, the Twins need a full-time DH after giving 10 different players a start at the position in 2024. That rotating cast of characters contributed to a middling 18th-place finish in fWAR at the position. While WAR doesn’t tell the full story, it does a pretty good job of adjudicating how productive designated hitters are, since the position is generally void of speed (unless you’re Shohei Ohtani) and defensive contributions are literally nonexistent.

Of course, being a full-time DH means that you better be productive at the plate, and that’s where Jiménez’s profile presents some intriguing upside. This was a down year all around for the 28-year-old—career-worst totals in wRC+ (78), ISO (.099), and BABIP (.285)—though he maintained a 90th-percentile exit velocity and hard-hit rate. His bat speed remains well above average, and that figures to remain true for the foreseeable future as he plays out the rest of his athletic prime. Before last season, Jiménez had always produced above-average offensive numbers by wRC+ (the same being true for OPS+, excluding the 2021 season when he finished one percent below the average hitter).

The biggest question surrounding the Dominican slugger is his durability. He’s only played in 100 games in a season twice in his career, and has yet to exceed the 122 games he starred in as a rookie back in 2019. His injury history is a never-ending laundry list of lower body maladies. If a team fully dedicates itself to keeping him at DH permanently, he should prove to be sturdier than he’s shown in the past, but that’s a dangerous bet to make on a guy who might as well be the poster child for the “injury-prone” label.

Those factors—coming off a career-worst season and a lengthy injury history—have pushed Jiménez to the discount bin of free agency. Make no mistake, though: this guy can still hit. He’s never fluctuated much from his solid career strikeout (22.7%) and walk rates (6.5%). His batted-ball data also portends a positive future, as his 2024 ground-ball rate (48.6%), fly-ball rate (20.8%), and line-drive rate (25.0%) were all better than his career norms. Likewise, he began to use the whole field better than ever in 2024, posting a career-best opposite-field hit rate (23.6%). A team could encourage him to expand on that all-fields approach, or they could retool his swing to focus more on pulling the ball to help him generate more power again (before last year, he hit home runs in 5.4% of his at-bats). And, for what it’s worth, he’s also got a .262 batting average with 13 home runs in just 59 games against the Twins, with much of that production coming at Target Field.

He’s far from the sexiest option on the market—Alex Bregman isn’t coming to Minnesota, unless Carlos Correa has some blackmail on his former teammate—but in an offseason where the Twins are going to have to get a lot of bang for their buck, Jiménez presents an intriguing option with potential for production beyond just 2025.